What advanced stats say about Sounders

Hi, I'm Will Bruin, and I was just recognized as a Seattle Sounders legend. Now I get to do voice reads for the Sounder at Heart podcast network.

And now they truly can start the celebrations It's the Sounders MLS Cup! This is a tiny dog. Nice work on your little yacht thing. You know, what was the thought process in terms of who you decided to use and who you didn't? Ever since it sounded horrible to... commentary that we didn't take the outcome seriously.

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Welcome back to another episode of Nos Adietes on the Sounder at Heart podcast network. I am Jeremiah O'Shan and today we're doing something a little different. We oftentimes do a segment called How the West Will Be Won on Mondays. And I'm kind of looking at broadening this out and sort of having just a bigger discussion. about soccer in general on Mondays. And to help me with that is Jamin Moore from American Soccer Analysis. He is currently... He used to be involved in the...

earthquakes coverage. He is now doing more sort of broad analytics coverage. Welcome to the show, Jamin. And I'm fascinated to get into this. Yeah, glad to be back and wearing a completely different hat than normally talking about the Heritage Cup or whatever it is we come up with with the Sounders. quake stuff but yeah i um i decided to take a step back this year from team coverage really kind of focusing on analytics coverage you might have read that american soccer analysis

now has a partnership with an MLS club, Minnesota United. And of course, that's the reason that they won yesterday. Of course. Yeah, of course. Did someone tell them that they don't need the ball at all and that's how they can... They can win games. I am not feeding any tactical things to them, I will say. But I was engaged on that. And I'm excited to talk to clubs. My favorite thing these days.

I started to realize like, what is it that I'm really passionate about? And really it's not, you know, covering a club per se. I think you guys do a fantastic job. You're at the top echelon of that. I think we try to keep up as best as we can. with that over the past few years. There's still some great people at Quake's Epicenter as well. But I do feel that my passion comes out when I get to talk to people about analytics.

And really, particularly when I get to talk to coaches, front office people, like that's just super exciting to me. And there are always things where I think. They learn something and I learn something and it's a mutual beneficial conversation every time I've done it. And I want to do more of that. So that's what I'm about these days. And yeah, looking forward to talking about the Sounders data profile with you.

Yeah, well, let's. So the thing that piqued my interest specifically was you did. You've been doing these Friday stat dumps and. The thing you did this week I thought was really interesting because it sort of got to an area of interest that I've been...

watching around the Sounders. And essentially what you're talking about is the defensive profile of teams, but specifically... how duels and recoveries and tackles and whatever else how those are all classified and they aren't necessarily what we might think of so in the broadest terms this is you know i'll just read your your introductory

tweet or a skeet is, I guess, uh, to the, to the discussion. And he says, what the heck is a duel? A lot of emphasis is made by coaches, players, fans, technical analysts. about the importance of winning duels, 50 balls, second balls. But if you ask people what a duel is, you're likely to get different answers. So that's a great introduction to this. What do we make of this stat? Yeah, so...

Uh, I mean, as you know, like I did cover the earthquakes for, for a while and, and probably talked to, well, they've changed coaches so many times. I think I've talked to probably. five or six different coaches over there. And I bet you, and I've had a lot of private conversations with some of, some of these coaches. Um, I bet if I asked them what a dual is, they would give me different answers. Literally what I said in the ski. Right. And, um,

But one of the things that's interesting is coaches are always about like, you know, go hard into tackles, you know, win the second balls, win those 50-50s. But at the same time, like I'm not sure that the data providers. classify things in the way that coaches think. So one of the struggles of data analysis has always been, okay, we do all this analysis. Is it useful? Is it actionable?

by the coaching staffs is it actionable by a general manager to be able to do something with it it's good to know these things you can say your team is good your team is bad somewhere in between but like how do i turn that into action so I think it's sometimes when we're not connecting with people, we have to take a step back and go like, what's the language that we're using and what is it telling them? And I think like if you try to go and.

showed the data as it comes out of the data providers to a coach, they'd be like, I don't know what this means. I know what a tackle is. I know what an interception is. I think like we can all kind of agree on certain basics like that. But what's a recovery, right? I'm not sure anyone really knows what a recovery is. I think one of our people at American Soccer Analysis a few years back actually looked at recoveries a bit deeper and said, like, I think there's four different types in here.

of situations that lead to our recovery um and i'm not even sure that how useful this is at the end of the day because if you if you look at how any of these these defensive stats correlate to team success it's hard to find any correlation, you know, almost at all. So it does, you know, if you're decide like, wait, we're going to win the ball through tackles versus interceptions, like, you know, does that make you a better defensive team? And there's no evidence one way or the other.

maybe clearances probably says we're a bit more under pressure than we ought to be but sometimes you're winning games and you're clearing the ball because the other team is lumping in crosses and you know you're just getting a lot of clearances because you're protecting your lead and There's no danger and that's okay. So a lot of these things require context. And I think that's where sometimes maybe the data stuff and coaches.

you know, can kind of get crossed from each other. But also this terminology of a dual, that's not like a singular event. It's like a conglomeration of these different events that are captured in event data. you know you have to like look at all of them to go like are we winning our duels well what are we talking about here right and some of the things we call 50 50s

are not 50-50. They're 75-25s or 80-20s or they're 65-35s. They're not 50-50s. It's a little bit weird how the data is classified, but also the way we talk about it. And the terminology even we use doesn't really mean what we say. So like trying to sort through all that and come up with a way of kind of cutting through the clutter into something that actually means something and is actionable.

I think is one of the things that makes data analysis interesting to me. Yeah, that is super interesting. And I guess without getting, we could probably have a whole conversation just about that stuff. Yeah. But from pulling out.

What's your perception? How would you classify the Sounders as a defensive team? I've been sort of convincing myself that maybe they're actually like a pressing team right now, but I don't know. What do you think the data is telling us? The data is saying that, yeah, the sounders are a bit more pressy than I think people think they are, which is maybe good because that means you probably can...

you know, kind of sneak up in a, in different situations and maybe catch people who don't necessarily think you're doing that. But in terms of like high turnover type attacks and what we mean by that is take the attacking 40% of the pitcher show. How many balls are you winning higher up the pitch as compared to in the midfield or deep in your defensive end? Because those are the ones that are most valuable to be able to turn into.

something before the other defense gets settled, right? So if you can win the ball high, everyone knows it's a shorter distance to the goal. This is an easy thing to understand, right? And not only that, but the other team is probably scrambling. I mean...

You know, when keepers kick the ball straight out to Messi and he can just kick the ball right back over your head and score like he did, you know, on Saturday. There you go. That's a high turnover and it had immediate value and don't kick the ball to Messi. But most teams would say, yeah, we want to win the ball high. We want to win the ball high and we want to try to penetrate before that. And I think, you know, the Sounders, while not necessarily in the top of the top part of the.

part of the league are higher than most teams. And that probably speaks to a little bit of the success that you've been able to have in the possession of the table that you're in right now is largely because you are able to win the ball a bit higher than other teams are. Yeah, you know, the Sounders, you know, one of the other stats that I've started to notice, and I don't know how widespread this is, but Sebastian Bush, who is one of your colleagues, does a week or a game by game.

start a stat dump. And he, one of the areas, two of the areas that he, he tracks that I'm fascinated by are both field tilt and line of confrontation. And specifically about the line of confrontation. by best I can tell the sounds are like fourth or fifth highest line of confrontation. Uh, does that, what is that really telling us? Do you think? Yeah, what it tells us is that first off, I think like a lot of teams, right, you're going to try to compress your block.

a bit more so your line your back line is going to be a bit higher your front line is going to be a bit higher you are probably looking to get out into pressing trigger situations that uh you know schmetzer thinks are going to work in a particular game against a particular opponent maybe looking at a particular player too that they think they can take advantage of that might uh might give up the ball in a different in different situations

And whatever you set those pressing triggers at, right, you're going to try to get out to that. But let's say that a press doesn't get triggered. So where are you kind of starting that line of confrontation? Well, if you're a little bit higher. then, of course, your back line is going to also be a bit higher. But what that leaves you susceptible to, as you probably saw in the second half yesterday with Minnesota United, is when you face that pace.

like it's going to put you in a situation of having to scramble and get back so um you know i think like you know there's the pluses and the minuses to that the the more you can you can kind of compress and and stay compact the harder you are to play through

But if you face a team that has the ability to play one, two, or get out over the top quickly and get the ball into space, you know, you're probably going to scramble a bit. And I think like yesterday was a good example of a game that showed. a bit of both the positive and the negative of that kind of line. Thank you for listening to the Sounder at Heart Podcast Network, which now includes Nos Anietes, Lobbing Scorchers, and The Cooler Guild.

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Yeah, or the data around them. And this is a team who's on pace to have not just historically low possession, but historically low by a wide margin compared to anyone else in the databases, right? And but and it seems like they they don't quite sit in a so, you know, it's unfair to say they're just a bunker encounter team because I don't think that really does. what they're doing justice. But how would you describe their defensive approach and how they're making this?

system work where they have you know yesterday had 200 fewer completed passes than the sounders they didn't it's not like they had a whole bunch of progressive passes Yeah. Why is it working so well for them to do this, to play this? And how would you describe their style? Yeah, so it's a great question. I think what's interesting about the way that they're doing it is usually with a back five as well.

um and you know that gives a situation by which they can kind of decide like how they move players you know in and out of different zones from a defensive side what was really interesting to watch yesterday because i set up in the crow's nest for this game um i wanted to kind of analyze both teams a bit And what was really interesting to see was how they move together on a set piece. So I think it was, you know, rolled on or somebody was taking a set piece from about maybe 35 yards out.

I don't know if you caught it, but they like all move together in almost like a hop kind of way where they're all like almost hopping together. As soon as that first movement happens. on uh on the back line they're all moving in synchronicity and i think uh where i when i've gone to sounders games um and i usually go to about maybe three or four a year What I see a lot of against the teams that do well against the Sounders is they are able to kind of move together in blocks.

and shut down passing lanes and really make it difficult for those progressive passes to get through and that's something that they they did well and i think they defend really well on set pieces and then they just honestly they they kind of find the way to put the ball into space and let you know people like tani and and bongi get out and you know onto those kinds of balls and then they they get they get going

And they don't do it that often. I mean, it's not like they're just always trying to counterattack. You take a look at their numbers. They're not that high numbers on the counterattacking side as well. They're kind of in the mid area. But what they do when they do it.

is effective they switch the point of attack and move it out wide quickly um it gets the defense having to think about where they want to put their coverage getting going side to side Like the more you can get defenders going side to side and particularly even goalkeepers moving side to side to have to account for those kinds of things.

the better off that attack is going to be. And so I think that's where they're effective is really kind of understanding like how teams like to progress the ball, shutting down those lanes. And then really at the point it makes sense, they get out into the attack with the pace that they've got. And it's, yeah, it's super, it's super effective. Like if you possession adjust, I think you know what I'm talking about, but let me give a little bit more to your audience.

based upon the number of possessions that a team has, you can possession adjust different stats. And, you know, you can say like, how many times do they do this per possession that they've got or per a hundred possessions or something along those lines. And so.

um minnesota united you know might look like their average to above average if you don't possession adjust but when you do possession adjust their stats they're top in the league in almost any category, both defensively and offensively in terms of the way that they press, win the ball, and the way that they get out and attack.

That's what they do. Very efficient. That's another way of just saying very efficient, right? They're ruthlessly efficient in a completely opposite way as I would say Vancouver from a season perspective, obviously not last night. in ccc final but um from a season perspective they are ruthlessly efficient but in a very opposite almost kind of way as minnesota united and those are two teams at the top of the west right that

They're both very efficient. San Diego, very progressive. They're very efficient as well in terms of like when they utilize progressing the ball forward. That's what it takes to win, to be at the top of. of a conference in 2025 MLS, it takes being the most efficient team in some category that matters. And I think those are examples of teams that do that.

Philadelphia, I would put in the same situation over in the East. They are super efficient at very specific things, and that efficiency leads to success in most situations for them.

What do you think, if anything, do the Sounders actually do well? Or is part of their problem, or I guess it's a blessing and a curse, that maybe they don't do anything super well, but they do a lot of things pretty well? That's exactly the way I would describe them. If you look at almost any meaningful number in the data, you would see that the sounders are almost always in the top 10.

sometimes right around four, five, six, seven, but they're not number one in anything, right? And so to your point, it's like, yeah, you're right on that border of a... kind of a home field advantage team in the conference because that's who you are you are the fourth best at a lot of stuff or the fifth best at a lot of stuff and so i think that kind of describes the sounders in a nutshell

And is that a, I don't know. Is there one of these things that you feel like is more sustainable? Like the Sounders have been, you know, this is their 17th season, I believe in MLS. They have won the Western Conference one time. They have finished second like eight times. Is this sort of like the Sounders organization in a nutshell, which is to say they're always competitive, they're always right there at the top, but in any given year, they're probably not going to be the...

The top team, like their, their, their peaks and valleys are just not very different. I think what's really been good about the Sounders is, um, I think Schmetzer has gotten. a lot out of the talent that he's been given um with a little bit of like unluckiness at times that players are not at their full potential on a particular season or something like that. So, you know, if we look back more recently into Raul Rudiaz and the way things have kind of ended with the Sounders, like...

You know what's in that. You know what Raul is capable of. He's getting high XG chances, but they're just not going in the back of the net. Um, or, you know, you know, you guys are Apollo who, you know, elite six in this league, but like, you know, kind of not what he maybe has been in the past at the moment. And so it just feels like. It's been difficult outside of when you won CCL, where I felt like that team at that moment had everything going right for maybe...

Maybe since outside of an MLS Cup situation, maybe for the first time that I've been to Sounders games personally. I moved up here about four years ago and everything looked right at that time. Then different things kind of happened in terms of injuries and things like that. I remember someone got injured in that game. Was it Morse World Honor? Somebody got injured?

And like that kind of changed the season. That's what it was. And that kind of changed the season right there. Right. And, you know, those kinds of things seem to have a bigger effect on the Sounders maybe than other teams.

My son and I, like I said, we're sitting in the crow's nest yesterday. And one of the things we were talking about is how it feels like it takes every player that comes into the organization like a year to acclimate and really kind of like ramp up. Whereas in San Jose. Famously successful San Jose. What's that? Famously successful San Jose. Famously successful San Jose. Let's take this year's San Jose.

He's pulling players from the revolution who were doing nothing for the revolution, sticking them in, and suddenly they're making the earthquakes better. I don't feel like that almost ever happens with the Sounders. I feel like it takes like a year for players to get going and then like they get two or three good years and then they kind of decline out from there. Yeah. I mean, Albert Rusnak was an example of this, of a player who took a little while to acclimate.

jesus ferreira sort of in that same boat uh yeah i mean it's not I would say that's a broadly fair statement. Are there any players with the Sounders that you feel like are maybe analytic darlings? Or is it the same story with... when you drill down into the players, that it's a lot of players who are pretty good, but not elite? I would say the latter. More pretty good, not elite, or at least not showing it in terms of results at this time.

So if you take a look, you know, like your highest shooting player, for instance, is Albert Rusnak. You know, he's got 43 shots. And how many goals does he have? Six? Seven. Seven goals. Seven goals. But his XG is 5.14. So yeah, a little bit above, right? He's 5.63 on the post-shot expected goal side, so he's shooting a little bit better than expected there. And that's kind of led to seven goals. But he's also, last year, I think he was under.

And, uh, so like, I want to call him an analytics darling. He might be, but if you look at like Rothrock behind him, you look at Masofsky behind him, you look at Delavega behind them. They're all a little bit under where they should be. And so I feel like you don't really have that player who is at this point just going to.

pushing you into that next level of like, hey, Sounders, were you sitting in fourth today? Like, what's it going to take to get Sounders from fourth into second or even be able to catch the Vancouver Whitecaps? And if you... pressed me, I'm not sure who I would say it's going to make that happen right now, other than, you know, somebody gets hot at the right time. But like, I'm not sure that there's that one player that you have that's going to be like, yeah, they're going to lead this team.

and get this team to first place in the West. Not to undercut your argument, I will point out that Rusnek had 10 goals on 7.4 XG. And he had seven non-penalty goals on 4.3 non-penalty XG last year. Got it. Okay, so he just doesn't do well when I go to games. I think that's the problem. Right, exactly. I think that's probably the problem. Yeah, I wasn't digging deep there, but it just didn't feel to me.

like he had like a strongest season as i think he's capable of and maybe he had at times and and real salt lake so yeah i mean i would say i would i mean i would argue last year was probably his best professional season um but we don't have to we don't have to debate that uh what um

Where do you see this? I mean, I don't know. Who do you like this year? Where do you think this is going? Actually, let me just – I'm going to scratch that entire thing. What do you make of the Sounders analytics department? They have been one of the pioneers in the space. They tend to do well in the ASA.

grades at the end of the year in terms of the effort or the resources that they're putting into it and the trust that they put into their analytics department. Is that your perception that they still are one of the... top analytics teams. I think, yes. I don't know Tyler. I did know Ravi a little. Tyler Cox is who you're speaking about. Tyler Cox, yeah. I have not met Tyler. Would love to. Tyler, if you're listening to this, love to meet you sometime. I'm up in the area.

hopefully we could work that out um i will say that i do think that being at the forefront like it's like a first mover advantage Because you've been doing it longer than anyone, maybe with the exception of Toronto or maybe about the same time as Toronto, the Sounders and Toronto were the pioneers here. um from that perspective it gave you kind of a first mover advantage that i think you still enjoyed to some level i also do feel that robbie had that had that um connection with Brian Schmetzer.

Where you could tell that Schmetzer valued what he was getting from Ravi. I remember hearing in different press conferences Schmetzer talk about utilizing the size of the box, the assist zones, if you will. Manchester City valued those. also and and ravi valued those and he's right like that that is a very valuable piece of real estate from which to score goals. And also, you know, things like set pieces. I remember hearing specifically about how

Ravi gave them some insight about how to take advantage of the Timbers in a particular game and be able to take advantage of the set piece. I think he had seven shots off of set pieces in that game. You know, like there's three great saves that prevented any of them from going in. But, you know, Brian was kind of effusive about how much the data had kind of helped them figure out a way to be able to create those set piece situations.

So, yeah, that kind of first mover advantage, I think, continues with the club under Tyler. I know he's a very accomplished person. I think where I would be concerned... is that other teams have now really upped that investment and they have big staffs um I happen to know Chicago's got a large team now. And in San Jose, for instance, there's three people there. I know Philadelphia's got three people. There's a lot of clubs that have three, four.

five people now. That's not unusual anymore. It was unusual even two, three years ago, but it's no longer unusual. So I do think that there's a risk if you don't continue to invest in that particular space that you go from being a leader to being a... an also-ran or a laggard if that investment doesn't continue at the pace that the league requires. And so when you talk about analytics personnel,

What do they do? So Tyler, for instance, is the head of analytics for the Sounders. I know they have some people on their video team that are doing a lot of sort of analytical work. What are the jobs of like when you have three, five different analysts, what are they all like? How are they classified usually? Yeah, great question. So almost every staff is going to have, you know, like a real data science expert.

That's where historically the money has been made is by people who can really take the data and mine it for insights that might be unique. Something that the club can value that gives them an advantage, whether that's in the department of preparation for an opponent or whether that's more. related to finding the best players available in the market.

So usually you've got at least one real data science wizard. The other types of people, though, that you're going to get are you're going to be looking for people who can produce sometimes the reports that are going to be useful for the staff. visualization type experts, people who can really kind of explain, take complex things and explain it easy for coaching staffs to understand or front office people making player acquisitions to understand.

You're also going to have people who are specialists in data structures and being able to take the data from a provider, whether that's a Stats Perform slash Opta or Stats Bomb.

or yscout or you know whomever skill corner these days um where whatever your data providers are and being able to like take that and get it into a format that everyone else can utilize and take advantage of so if i had three people like i'd have one data person i'd have one visualization visualization person i have one you know top-notch data scientist type i think like if i was gonna start a club today and

They gave me a staff of three. That's how I would staff it. And are we at the point where the bottleneck is more about... coaches applying the information that they're getting from the analysts, or are we still at a point where we need more people gathering the information? It's a good question. And I think a lot of that comes down to club culture. So if your culture is one that your coaching staff, they see the value of.

data, then great. Even in some clubs where the coaching staff doesn't, like the general manager front office area does, and they're going to use that for player acquisition, decision-making type things. um in some cultures it's it's more of one or the other in some cultures you know sometimes it's just they're checking a box and no one's listening to them um

And so it just it kind of depends on a number of factors. But I think like where the real opportunity is going to be for the future is that everything is moving much faster now with AI. And maybe it's not the AI that people listening necessarily see on a day-to-day basis when people talk about copyright stealing and creating these weird fake images and things like that.

and such, we're talking about like the ability to kind of like improve business processes or improve the speed at which you can take ideas and put them into action. So I, you know, me as a data analyst. who has some coding ability, my abilities are magnified quite a bit by utilizing AI to help me be able to create code faster. So for instance, I wanted to analyze counterattacks. Where do I start? I know there's data here. I don't know necessarily.

you know what i'm going to need in order to be able to do that well i can utilize ai to help me kind of figure out what the right data is excuse me what the right data is and how to utilize that in order to be able to to analyze that faster

Well, if I'd done it on my own, could I have gotten there? Absolutely. I have the skills and ability to be able to figure it out and come up with some pretty good analysis, but it might've taken me a week. With AI, I can probably get there in a day to two days. And, you know, I think like in the future, like clubs that really kind of understand like how to be able to take that and turn that into a competitive advantage, there'll be a new first mover. It'll be whomever really kind of.

gets it from a perspective of how ai is going to be able to help that club be able to get to the next level and um that kind of visionary person i think will emerge in the league just like we saw you know, people like Ravi and Devin emerge, you know, in terms of the Sounders in Toronto back in the day. I think the next is going to be someone who really understands like how to take AI and make it into a competitive advantage for clubs.

Well, Jamin, that's probably a good place to put a cork in this. I'm sure we will have more to talk about. later dates, but thank you for doing this and giving us a little bit more education on sort of the state of, of data analytics in, in soccer and some insight into the Sounders and how they're.

Sort of where they're where they're ranking in these various areas. Where where should people be following you at this point if they want to they want to get more of this on their own? Well, like you, I have really kind of made the move over to Blue Sky. So, yeah, they can follow me at jamonm, J-A-M-O-N-M, .bsky.social. And, yeah, I put out some stuff throughout the week.

here or there on MLS analytics. But on Fridays, what caught your eye this time around is the Friday stat dump. I try to do that every week where I just take some stat that maybe you know what it is, maybe you don't. Um, but I tried to kind of explain the reasoning of why it might be valuable and, uh, put it out there and let people noodle over it and, uh, let me know what they think in terms of, uh, whether it was something that was interesting to them or not.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this, Jamin. We're going to get out of here. You're listening to No Saurietes on the Sounder Heart Podcast Network. I'm Jeremiah Oshan, and we'll catch you next time. I expect an LAFC who is motivated to prove themselves at home, to prove to their fans that they're capable of winning in this league. And it's up to us to really brew in the party.