With the final weekend of the season coming up – dramatically branded Decision Day by the league office – this seems an appropriate time to update the Playing Time Evolution plots that I first published about a month ago.
Tag: lineups
Taking it seriously: MLS and the US Open Cup
The US Open Cup Final will be played tonight in Philadelphia. The game, between the hosting Union and Sporting Kansas City, will hopefully be an exciting finale to the 102nd edition of the tournament. This year’s event was the biggest in recent history, with 91 teams entering – including every American team from the three professional divisions.
For devotees of the tournament, the Open Cup is one of the uniquely attractive elements of soccer. In theory, any group of players could enter and see how they match up all comers. The cinderella runs of underdogs like the San Francisco Bay Seals, Cal FC, and the Rochester Rhinos (champions in 1999) are the sorts of plots that Hollywood screenwriters long for.
For all this magic, however, there is a frequent undertone from the top of the soccer pyramid that also gets dragged out every year. Search for the phrase “take the Open Cup seriously” and you will find a litany of articles from recent years, about almost every team in Major League Soccer.
Doth the writers protest too much? Continue reading Taking it seriously: MLS and the US Open Cup
Plotting the evolution of playing time
In my last post, I introduced a visualization that illustrates how playing time evolves as a season progresses. The feedback for that post was compelling enough that I decided to produce similar plots for every team in Major League Soccer.
Lineup Continuity and Points Per Game
Several years ago, I wrote about the importance of continuity in a team’s lineup over the course of the season. The piece has since been taken down (it will soon be republished on this site), but the thrust of the argument was that the most successful teams in Major League Soccer were able to identify a core group of players who played a significant amount of a given season together. Teams that couldn’t, or didn’t, coalesce around such a core were less likely to be successful.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been re-visiting that thesis using some alternate strategies to see if they continue to hold true.