This is the first article in a series of articles and videos from the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter. Regardless of philosophy, style, principles, and game model, a club’s on-field strategy should focus on maximizing goals scored and minimizing goals conceded. Go| American Soccer Analysis
MLS is no stranger to star goalkeepers turning the fortune of a team, carrying a bedraggled defense to respectability off the virtue of their shot stopping. From Tony Meola and Joe Cannon to Nick Rimando and Stefan Frei, that is MLS heritage. In recent years, the goalkeeping landscape has been domin| American Soccer Analysis
We here at ASA are lucky enough to be given a ballot from MLS to vote on all the major awards. We take such an honour very seriously, as a chance to vote for the best players analytically . By the numbers. This is that ballot.| American Soccer Analysis
By Drew Olsen (@drewjolsen)| American Soccer Analysis
August 06, 2025| American Soccer Analysis
It wasn’t until I reached college that I began to really care about not just watching a game of soccer, but also trying to analyze it at the same time. This time, I found myself trying to focus on particular players and describe what I was seeing to better understand the match. It was in that search, spurred by my newfound interest in the game that I had loved and watched for my entire life, that I came across the passing network. The extent of my soccer stats knowledge until then was mlsso...| American Soccer Analysis
June 18, 2024| American Soccer Analysis
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 te| American Soccer Analysis
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 te| American Soccer Analysis
By Harrison Crow I’m not gonna lie, I wrote the Western Conference and I liked it. I liked it so damn much that I didn’t want to write about the Eastern Conference and you know why, because there is so much more going on. It’s twice as deep and a mile wide. But what the hell, Kieran wants both| American Soccer Analysis
By Harrison Crow This year has been … wild. I’m not even just talking about the MLS season. Just within ASA itself it’s been wild and once or twice it’s been exactly that meme between Liz lemon and Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock where Liz looks at Jack and sighs exasperated saying “what a week, huh” and Jack casually strolls away while saying “Lemon, it’s Wednesday”.| American Soccer Analysis
What to know about the newest ASA platform Catalina Bush Have you ever wished that you could picture the game in front of you? Not as a broadcast, or a highlight video, but on a sheet of paper? All of a midfielder’s passes, your striker’s shots, an opponent’s tendencies, visualized? Previously, that required access to data, coding knowledge, and hours spent reinventing the wheel, just to see the most fundamental aspects of our game in graphic form. Not anymore. Introducing American Socc...| American Soccer Analysis
Our friends in the extended ASA Universe over at Expected Own Goals have dropped a new series, talking to players about key moments in their matches and how they see the game. Check it out.| American Soccer Analysis
This week, we published extracts of Major League Soccer’s roster profile releases to our GitHub. In addition to parsing the information the league provides about each club’s roster construction and each player’s contract status, we’ve also matched the teams and players to their respective Am| American Soccer Analysis
Originally conducted during the 2024 season and only slightly interrupted by Hurricane Helene, these insights provide a valuable snapshot of how analytics have been evolving in the NWSL| American Soccer Analysis
Over the last several years, the team here at American Soccer Analysis has been assessing the State of MLS Analytics by combing through team websites, scouring LinkedIn, and asking those who would know about how many people each team employs. This year, we’ve taken our talents to the women’s gam| American Soccer Analysis
July 22, 2025| American Soccer Analysis
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 int| American Soccer Analysis
Ten years ago, if an MLS club had one person “doing analytics” it was a big deal. Now a majority of clubs now have multiple full time employees in actual analytics departments and a team is seen as backwards if it don’t have at least one staff member primarily focused on game analytics. Every year,| American Soccer Analysis
By Paul Harvey, Mike Imburgio, Ben Bellman Since it was introduced, Goals Added has been superior to most of the publicly available algorithmic rating systems, such as those provided by WhoScored, SofaScore, or Fotmob. The additional context of just how much each action is contributing to the likelihood of scoring provides more information than simply evaluating a player based on the number of certain actions (the value of those actions also weighted by a human being, introducing bias). Simil...| American Soccer Analysis
By Paul Harvey When Goals Added first entered the public sphere, it marked a major shift in how soccer could be interpreted using data. Although similar models had been developed, it was hard to get data and turn that data into insights. In terms of a unit of account, there are few expected value models as accessible and understandable as g+. Despite the initial success, though, g+ is still an opaque measure in many ways. Much like it’s spiritual father figure, WAR, you lose some of the how...| American Soccer Analysis
By Chloe Sainsbury, Catalina Bush, and Jamon Moore We did Where Goals Come From for MLS, and we’ve reached the roughly one third mark of the NWSL season where we can actually have some takes! Enjoy.| American Soccer Analysis
If Where Goals Come From is new to you or you want a quick refresher of the key concepts, we put a quick overview into the Eastern Conference article. …and that’s enough of an introduction for today. Let’s talk about the teams!| American Soccer Analysis
During the pandemic, when Carlon Carpenter and I researched the impact of certain types of soccer passes, we were blown away by how important they were to goal scoring. We wrote 10 articles about them throughout 2021, called the “Where Goals Come From” series. There was so much material, we could have written 25 articles -- many ideas have never emerged and hopefully will still come out at some point (or we’ll work with clubs to implement as their own competitive advantage). Even from t...| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! We got a preview of this exact match up already, with the Spirit defeating Orla| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Po| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Po| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Po| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Po| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Podcast (available wherever you get your p| American Soccer Analysis
Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here ! If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Po| American Soccer Analysis
American Soccer Analysis has announced a deal to provide its advanced data and analytics expertise to Minnesota United FC, after aiding them in their progression to the Western Conference Semifinals in 2024.| American Soccer Analysis
In a recent-ish podcast by The Transfer Flow podcast, host Ravi Ramineni made an off hand comment that while working for the Seattle Sounders, the team had noticed that they could switch out up to three of their regular starters for bench players in a given game without causing too much of a probl| American Soccer Analysis
