May 02, 2023

2023 MLS Analytics Survey

May 02, 2023/ Eliot McKinley

Every year, we update the State of MLS Analytics by putting teams into tiers based upon how many analytics staff they have. However, the number of analytics staff members doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of work that a club is producing or if analytics is being incorporated into team decision making. And unfortunately, we can never really know what is going on inside a club’s analytics department. This year, though, we decided to do the best we could to get behind the scenes and asked club analytics staff for their input.

May 02, 2023

State of MLS Analytics: May 2023

May 02, 2023/ Eliot McKinley

Over the last few years, analytics in MLS has been turned on its head. Five years ago, if a team had one person “doing analytics,” it was a big deal. Now, questions are asked if a club doesn’t - and it is not uncommon for clubs to have multiple people on staff. The Tiers of MLS Analytics are now based upon the number of full time analytics staff members a club employs.

April 04, 2023

Replication Project: Are shots from free kicks useless or good?

April 04, 2023/ Eliot McKinley

Way back in 2011 a somewhat remarkable thing occurred in the nascent soccer analytics blogosphere. On May 20, Chris Anderson posted the provocatively titled “The Uselessness of Free Kicks in the Premier League,” which argued that since free kicks are rare and not often converted they are “not particularly effective devices for scoring in the Premier League”. A few weeks later, Anderson lent space on his own blog, Soccer by the Numbers, to Ian Graham, now the outgoing Director of Research at Liverpool but then at Decision Technology, to argue the opposite. “Why Shots From Free Kicks Are A Good Idea, Or At Least Not A Bad One” showed that while free kick shots rarely result in a goal, the correct comparison is to other shots outside of the box. In that comparison, free kick shots are about twice as valuable as open play shots from outside the box. So with an additional decade of data, have things changed since then using MLS data and who was right?

July 20, 2022

The Replication Project: Is xG The Best Predictor of Future Results?

July 20, 2022/ Eliot McKinley

This is the first article of what we are terming The Replication Project where we take an important soccer analytics finding from yesteryear and see if it still holds up with modern data. While this can be just a straightforward replication, it can also lead down some rabbit holes as you will find in this first installment where we look at whether the claim that xG is the best predictor of future performance still holds up.

June 06, 2022

BOTHALTEROUT: Training an AI to hate the USMNT

June 06, 2022/ Eliot McKinley

The United States Men’s National Team Twitter community is an interesting place. While there is lots of good stuff there, like detailed tactical analysis and extensive coverage of every bounce pass, there is also a large contingent of people that seem to hate everything about soccer in this country. Win or lose, you’ll see them in the replies of many tweets from US Soccer or journalists confidently expressing why whatever just happened is bad for the current and future state of American soccer and they have the solution.

April 12, 2022

State of MLS Analytics: April 2022

April 12, 2022/ Eliot McKinley

Over the last few years, analytics in MLS has been turned on its head. Whereas five years ago if a team had one person “doing analytics” it was a big deal. Now, questions are asked if a club doesn’t and it is not uncommon for clubs to have multiple people on staff. With the hiring of the league’s first general manager that came up through analytics, DC United’s Lucy Rushton, a new system was needed to grade MLS teams. This system is not based on how well teams utilize analytics like previous editions, in part because that can be very hard to know from the outside, but on the number of people, a team employs to do it.

November 19, 2021

Priors and Penalties: Finding the best penalty takers with Bayes

November 19, 2021/ Eliot McKinley

It’s MLS playoff time, and that means the possibility of penalties and shootouts. Rodrigo Schlegel led Orlando to victory after Pedro Gallese was sent off. Zack Steffen earned a move to Manchester City, in large part, due to leading Columbus to two penalty shootout victories. Portland named a bar in Providence Park after the famous double post shot in the marathon 2015 shootout against Sporting KC. Seattle won their first MLS Cup without registering a shot on goal by winning a shootout. Landon Donovan blasted his penalty over the bar to hand RSL the 2009 MLS Cup. Penalties and shootouts are remembered in ways that few other plays are.

August 17, 2021

We're Gonna Celebrate and Have a Good Time

August 17, 2021/ Eliot McKinley

Tracking data is the next frontier in soccer analytics. Now that we have access to the location of every player on the field updated 25 times per second, we can measure things like off-ball runs and defensive positioning that were mostly invisible when using only event data. Tracking data holds the potential to unlock the game’s secrets. This article is not going to solve soccer. It is going to solve something arguably even more important: who the best teammates are based on their goal celebrations.

When Metrica released their first few games of anonymized tracking data over a year ago, I first dreamed of using tracking data to revolutionize how we look at goal celebrations. However, with just a handful of games available, and unknown players and teams, this dream would have to wait. But now, thanks to Major League Soccer and Second Spectrum, American Soccer Analysis has access to tracking data from the last couple of years of MLS play and the dream of measuring player celebrations can now be realized.

March 23, 2021

State of MLS Analytics: March 2021

March 23, 2021/ Eliot McKinley

This is an update to last Summer’s article on the state of analytics at MLS clubs. The last few months have been a big one for MLS analytics signings. Harvard’s Laurie Shaw was hired by City Football Group, former Opta and SportLogiq employee Sam Gregory took his talents to Ft. Lauderdale, Cory Jez transferred from the Utah Jazz to Austin FC, Nikos Overheul moved to Vancouver after working for StatsBomb and Smartodds, and American Soccer Analysis’ own Sam Goldberg and Kevin Minkus were hired by New York Red Bulls and the Chicago Fire, respectively. Given this, teams are polarizing into the haves and have nots. In this update I’ve dropped the Tier 1.5 “Definitely Know What xG Is“ as teams in that tier moved up.

Last year, Kevin Minkus wrote Soccer Analytics 101 over at MLSsoccer.com where he defined analytics as “using data and statistics to better understand something.” For the purposes of deciding what MLS teams have an analytics staff member the “something” is player recruitment and tactical analysis. I’m talking about using numbers and mathematical models (e.g. xG, xA, g+) to help evaluate transfer targets and team and player performance.

August 10, 2020

The State of MLS Analytics

August 10, 2020/ Eliot McKinley

A couple weeks back, I tweeted a list of MLS teams that employed someone on staff focused on analytics. Unexpectedly, the tweet got a lot of feedback, mostly people urging their favorite team to hire someone, some saying that their club had one that I didn’t include (hello, RBNY twitter), and some critical feedback or concerns. This is great! People caring about analytics in soccer is an unquestioned good from my perspective. However, I did want to be a bit more nuanced about what I mean by analytics and what staff may be considered primarily focused on analytics.