MLS early over/under performers
Major League Soccer returned after 120+ days of hiatus with the “MLS is Back Tournament” on July 8th, 2020 and we’re coming back as well. We will be continuing our campaigns in Minneapolis and Chicago. We want to help fans raise money for charity while supporting their teams as always. But, beyond driving donations, we’re just happy to see some soccer again.
Fifty-six matches in about a month. We can’t wait. But, as much fun as it is to watch the Beautiful Game, we also love the chance to mess around with new stats and metrics.
Last year we ran our first Major League Soccer pilot with our good friends over at True North Elite and their community impact arm, Keepers of the North, and we gave their members a chance to back their favorite team and drive donations to a great charity, Mile in My Shoes. We ran several different campaigns driven by different stats: shots saved, corners taken, and of course, goals scored. The results were fantastic.
Fortunately for all of us, the United took off on the first playoff run of their MLS history and gave a great finish to an amazing season.
This season, we were off to the races expanding our campaigns across new markets and engaging new fans looking to have fun supporting the team they love by supporting great causes. Alas, two games into the season, the hiatus began.
Those two games (26 matches across the league in total) did give us some fun data to play with. We love stats. We love comparing them, tweaking them, over-analyzing them. I mean, come on, we’re sports nerds and, frankly, nerd nerds.
As we mentioned above, we have three campaign types available for MLS data right now: Saves, Corners, and Goals. As soon as you have a metric or metrics and some performance data you get the chance to rank something!
We looked at the first two MLS games this year in terms of which teams over-performed or under-performed not by wins or losses, but by statistical expectations on our three key donation-driving metrics.
The question we’re answering in this ranking is, overall, if a user joined three campaigns for their favorite team, did they end up giving more, less, or just about what they would have expected to donate given statistical averages.
If the MLS average for corners per game is a little over 5 and a user decides to donate 50 cents per corner, their expected donation for the first two games amounts to a little over $5.00 (.50 x 5 x 2). If the user’s supported team ended up with 14 corners, that $7.00 donation represents the team over-performing expectations by about 40%.
How did your favorite team compare to expectations over the first two games of the MLS 2020 season?
With almost 20 corners over two games, LAFC spent as much time at the corner flag as the bottom 5 teams combined.
On the other side of the field, we see some familiar names when looking at how the teams performed in relation to shots saved vs statistical expectations.
LAFC is still an over-performer, but not nearly by as much as half-a-dozen other teams. NYC beat statistical expectations on the saves front by over 125% (with 14 over two games despite losing both matches). Newcomer Nashville SC still got on the board with 1 save, but quite an underperformance by league standards.
Take a look at our final donation trigger stat, the big one: goals scored.
MNUFC’s eight goals over two games leads the way followed by fellow “MLS is Back” Group D competitor, SKC. LAFC again finds its way to the top five.
In terms of overall stats driving MLS ScoreSide campaigns, we look at our definition of which team is off to the hottest start.
With MIN, COL, and SKC all in the top five, “MLS is Back” Group D might just be the group that made the hottest start in 2020. Let’s hope they can keep that going! Down at the bottom in the “Late Bloomer” state might be Group F with 3 of the 4 members (LA Galaxy, Portland Timbers, and Houston Dynamo) all ranking in the bottom ten.
We’ll see if two games represent a streak or if there’s any reversion to the mean or if we just like looking at bar graphs in color.