Sunday, October 31, 2010

On the MLS Draft Part Two

I decided to take a look at how last year's draft class was doing. Specifically, I was wondering if I would see the same patterns in year two or if last year's class was behaving differently. More or less the same patterns appear for the universities producing the draftees. Overall, the same exponential decay seems to happen with playing minutes as the selection number increases. However, we don't see the same pattern of defenders taken late in the draft out performing their expected minutes. Instead we see defenders outperforming for middle picks instead of just in the tail. For the class of 2009, the tail is almost completely filled with players who were cut from their team before ever making their MLS debut. In fact, 13 out of the 30 players taken in 2009 had little to no minutes in their first 2 seasons. The fact that they are no longer with their MLS clubs rules out the theory that they will provide future value to the club. Basically, MLS teams are really bad at figuring out who is good enough to play in the league. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change with the reintroduction of the reserve league and larger rosters. Teams might be more patient with developing young players and have the roster space to do so.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

On MLS Attendance


Two things happened recently that got me thinking about the growth of MLS. For the first time in its history, Major League Soccer passed the 4 million person mark in its regular season attendance. Teams also started preparing for season ticket renewals and the announced price hikes didn't go over well with some fans. Toronto FC issued an open letter to its fans, while Sounders FC General Manager Adrian Hanauer admitted that the communication between the club and fans could have been better and that they are working hard to ensure that season ticket holders are happy.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

On International Breaks

This weekend I found the Interlull exceptionally boring. Usually I don't mind international breaks too much because I love watching the CONMEBOL qualifiers and of course supporting the US through their qualifiers, but with the cycle being months away from its start I found myself with a complete lack of interest in all of the matches.

With the weekend over I resumed my daily consumption of footy news in preparation for the weekend's matches. Already the injury list is piling up. Inter will be without Milito and Cambiasso after they both picked up injuries on their trip to Japan. 100% completely unnecessary. It also brought back memories of Stuart Holden's broken leg that almost cost him the World Cup.

It got me thinking. How many of these useless friendlies are being played? I looked at the top 25 teams and the answer is quite a few. Over the last 4 year cycle, 44% of the matches played were friendlies and teams averaged 5 friendlies a year. Rooney wants a winter break? Maybe he should ask the FA to cut back on some of these meaningless matches.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

On the MLS Draft Part One

I've been playing around with Tableau Public a little more and I have to say I'm impressed. I decided to revisit some work I had done on the MLS draft. Mid-season I decided to look at the correlation between a player's selection spot and the amount of impact they are having with their new team. Currently there is no good metric to estimate impact, so I used minutes played. Yes, it is a very imperfect metric, but it does provide an easy way to compare players of any position. The logic behind using minutes played is that it shows a baseline ability that player X is good enough to make it onto the playing field. If they perform well, they will be selected again, if not, then they won't see much playing time. It tells us nothing about potential or future performance nor about the quality of those minutes played. Certainly there are unique circumstances in each team that could affect a players minutes, but as a stake in the ground to get started I think it's a decent metric.

When I first looked at the data, I noticed that minutes played seemed to decay exponentially as the selection number increased, with a handful of outliers. The drop off was a little surprising. It shows that there are only a handful of players in the draft class that are able to come in and make an impact straight away. Looking at the data again, but this time with the ability to filter by position, I noticed that defenders taken later in the draft outperformed their expected minutes. Something to keep in mind if you're looking for cover in the back and need someone to step up immediately.