June 06, 2023

Does Passing Matter?

June 06, 2023/ Jared Young

I really want passing to matter. I watch, on average, 968 passes in a soccer game, and I’d like to think that completing them actually means something more than launching the ball into the first row.

Watching a beautiful through ball unhinge a defense is like watching a sun set on the bay. But that beauty doesn’t mean it matters, at least not to the data. Not if you care about winning.

Let me show you the correlation between a team’s pass completion rate and their expected goal difference over the last three years in Major League Soccer:

June 28, 2022

What does the new Apple TV deal mean for MLS?

June 28, 2022/ Jared Young

If you’re reading this, you’ve seen the headlines. $2.5 BILLION dollars for Major League Soccer. A relationship with APPLE. NO Blackouts!

The last domestic TV deal signed in 2015 totaled roughly $720 million, so this seems like a pretty big step up. Perhaps MLS will finally be a league of choice. It is 2022 after all.

As usual, to get at something closer to the truth we must go beneath the headlines. There are a few drivers of the headline value that need to be unwound to determine just where we might expect MLS to go from here and how this might transform the quality on the pitch.

April 25, 2022

Can the Philadelphia Union really be good when their passing is so bad?

April 25, 2022/ Jared Young

The Philadelphia Union are off to their best start in team history. They sit among the league leaders with 17 points in the first eight games and have looked in control in doing so, amassing +6 xGD in the process. But a funny thing happened on the way to the top of the league table. The Union’s pass completion percentage has dropped to 66%, the worst rate in the league in the last 10 years.

September 22, 2021

How much would it cost to buy the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup?

September 22, 2021/ Jared Young

Let’s pretend that we could buy the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup from the US Soccer Federation. It would not cost all that much, and in a sports universe where owners usually play the villains, we could be the heroes. A new owner would give life to a neglected tournament and return open soccer to the American consciousness.

July 14, 2020

Ranking the Top 10 Defenses in MLS History

July 14, 2020/ Jared Young

The accuracy of Paul Bryant’s mantra “defense wins championships” has long been debated. A more defendable line would have been “defense improves your chance of winning championships,” but no one was ever quoted for being overly precise. However the phrasing, a dig through the archives of Major League Soccer history reveals the old adage still has merit. There have been 41 teams in the league’s 24 regular seasons that allowed 1.1 goals per game or fewer. All 41 of those teams made the playoffs.

41 of 41.

100 percent.

Seven of those teams lifted the MLS Cup, a pretty darn good return of one every six times. Defense might not win championships, but it certainly appears to improve the odds.

March 05, 2020

Single Game xG is here to stay - is it useful?

March 05, 2020/ Jared Young

It’s been documented for a while that Expected Goals is the best single metric for understanding performance of a soccer team and predicting it’s future. It outperforms possession, total shots ratio, goal difference, points scored, and other fun but inferior statistics. The word on expected goals has been slowly on the rise since ASA’s first model was released in 2013. For kicks, below is an indexed view of times the metric has been searched for in the United States since that grand moment in time. Searches reached an all-time high this past February.

February 10, 2020

CBA Talk: Players miss opportunity to take a fair share of league revenues

February 10, 2020/ Jared Young

Major League Soccer and the MLSPA engineered one of the quietest Collective Bargaining Agreements in the history of American sports last week. There was no public discourse. No mudslinging. No use of public opinion for leverage. The players obediently showed up to preseason without so much as a whisper. Both sides were obviously close and had an agreement to be amicable this time arounde.

New CBAs result in players getting more of what they want, and this one was no different. The players successfully negotiated for more money, greater freedom of movement, and amenities like more charter flights. Public opinion, colored by the excitement of a new season, reflected that the players did well. Opinions were also colored by seemingly impressive claims that the players could be making 36% more money by the end of the agreement. Very few of us could imagine 36% more in income five years from now. The numbers sound impressive, but as usual lack context. Let’s add some, shall we?

November 06, 2019

CBA Talk: Why it's so good to own a sports team

November 06, 2019/ Jared Young

In September a portion of the Chicago Fire was sold, valuing the team at $400 million. In a sports world where large numbers float by with regularity, another big dollar sign went largely undigested. In 2007, Forbes began to publish valuations of MLS franchises, including the Fire. The first valuation estimated the team was worth $41 million, and so the investors appear to have returned almost ten times their money since then. That’s a 21% annual rate of return, which is a remarkable number for a twelve-year period, especially one that included the great recession of our lifetime. Over that same period, the Average Pat might have seen returns in the 6% range. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) had an annual growth rate of 6.1% from the end of 2007 to September of this year, while the S&P 500 trailed slightly at 6.0% over the same time period.

April 29, 2019

CBA Talk: Comparing MLS Player Salaries to Leagues Around the World

April 29, 2019/ Jared Young

Before the 2020 Major League Soccer season begins the owners and players will need to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. Metaphorically speaking, we could compare this negotiation to a pie eating contest, with the wrinkle being there is only one pie, and the goal is to eat the biggest piece. The fans offer the ingredients for this pie in the form of revenue, but it’s the league, the owners and the players who get to eat it. This contest won’t happen on the Coney Island Boardwalk or be streamed on ESPN+, but from time to time someone will emerge with public declarations intended to meddle with our opinions, and therefore put pressure on the other sides of the negotiation. Because we make the pie, you see, we ultimately decide how big it gets, so our opinions matter.

February 19, 2019

Philadelphia Union 2019 Season Preview

February 19, 2019/ Jared Young

The Union faithful have been donning their Sherlock Holmes deerstalkers this offseason. They been dealt a small handful of clues to answer some pretty big offseason questions. Was their 2018 season really their best ever? What became of Borek Dockal? What new tactics will new GM Ernst Tanner ask Jim Curtin to employ? How did they actually land their biggest signing ever in Marco Fabian, and what does this all mean for 2019?

So let’s begin our tour to unravel these not-so-elementary mysteries, my dear Dr. Watson….

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