Akshay Easwaran

2024 NWSL analytics survey: A Retrospective look at the state of data in women's soccer — 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

You saw the NWSL analytics tiers yesterday, here’s what the analysts had to say when we actually spoke to them a few months back:

www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/8/...

Exciting times: Our first ever NWSL analytics tiers are here. Shoutout @washingtonspirit.com and James Hocken as our first nerd boss. www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/8/...

As always clubs/employees, if we're wrong about your role/title or missed someone, let us know.

Check out our latest, as promised: www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/8/...

Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this for the NWSL👀

🔜🔜🔜🔜

Want to present at ASI? There are two ways to participate: {arrow pointing right to scroll}

Call for Proposals. Deadline: September 1, 2025. Brought to you by SkillCorner.

Call for abstracts. Apply to present a contributed talk. Deadline: October 1 2025.

Interested in presenting?

There are two ways to showcase your work at the 2026 ASI Summit. For more information on submitting proposals and abstracts, visit:

americansoccerinsights.com

🚨 Drops tomorrow: The Model Training Pack

✅ Prebuilt CFB training data (week 5+; opponent-adjusted)
✅ ML-ready targets: win prob, score margin, team points
✅ 7 notebooks: XGBoost, fastai, SHAP, stacking + more

Starter Pack buyers: discount codes hit inboxes tomorrow 👀

#CFB #SportsAnalytics

Final VAEP per 97 standings for the Euros (above positional average, minimum 150 minutes)

Full data can be found here: catabush.shinyapps.io/vaep_tables/

2025 MLS Analytics Survey — 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 a...

We had our say on the state of analytics in MLS. Now the staffers get theirs'.

Here's the 2025 MLS analytics survey: www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/7/21/2025-mls-analytics-survey

For the first time, we have two entries to Tier 0. The State of Analytics in MLS is here: www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/7/20/state-of-mls-analytics-july-2025

5 takeaways from the Women's Euro group stages The Women’s Euros kicked off at the start of July and Catalina Bush and I launched an online app using the Value Actions by Estimating Probabilities (VAEP) framework. The app is being updated after ev...

@chloesainsbury.bsky.social and I used our VAEP data to analyze the Euro group stages and came up with 5 main takeaways. We covered standout players, underperforming teams, and some youngsters making their mark, plus plenty of fun graphics.

Link: open.substack.com/pub/beyondth...

📦 The CFBD Starter Pack is officially live!

Whether you're building models, dashboards, or just exploring data, this is your launchpad.

What’s inside + how to get it 👇
#cfb #cfbd #sportsanalytics

Another exciting job on our Data Analytics team at US Soccer!

This data scientist role will be working mostly with player tracking data and previous experience using tracking data (any sport) is a must-have for this job.

recruiting.paylocity.com/recruiting/j...

Now that the 2nd round of Euro games is done, there's finally enough to data to analyze. I built a shiny app that lets you view Atomic VAEP for Euro games + players. (All modeling/data processing credit goes to @chloesainsbury.bsky.social)

Lmk what you think: catabush.shinyapps.io/vaep_tables/

The most aggressive set-piece team in the world plays in Minnesota Under the guidance of a former Manchester United assistant, Minnesota United are finding MLS success with a surprising tactic

Minnesota United became the most aggressive set-piece team on the planet with old-fashioned tactics backed by new analytics — and now they can’t stop scoring from it.

My first for The Guardian:

📦 Behind the Pack

This all started with a spreadsheet I posted to a Google Drive in 2017. (Wow, it's really been 8 years?!)
No paywall. No API. Just a community of nerds on Reddit who loved college football.
I never imagined where it would go…

🧠 Open Office Hours on Discord this Thursday for Tier 2+ Patrons!

Come hang out, ask questions, debug code, talk modeling, or just listen in.

🎁 I’ll also be previewing the new Starter Pack before it drops on Saturday 👀

📅 July 10
🔐 Tier 2+ only
👉 buff.ly/HVpwU4x

#cfb #sportsanalytics

This has been a culmination of a lot of work - h/t to @mimburgio.bsky.social for the coding and nitty gritty detail work and @beninquiring.bsky.social for reviewing, editing, and questioning the data.

I'm really pleased with the tableau dashboard in particular - spend time exploring it if you can

Using Goals Added Subcategories for Player Evaluation — 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 WhoScor...

We dropped g+ sub categories last week, and here is how we use them from @paulharvey.theoutfield.nyc @mimburgio.bsky.social and @beninquiring.bsky.social

www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/7/... Using Goals Added Subcategories for Player Evaluation — American Soccer Analysis

Get more from Expected Own Goals on Patreon A women's soccer podcast focusing on tactics and analytics!

Join our Patreon today to enjoy all of our exclusive bonus content, including our livestream during France-England at the Euros tomorrow! Subscribe for as little as $6/month! #WEuro2025

www.patreon.com/c/xOwnGoals

Breaking it down: g+ Sub-categories — 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...

Sometimes you just need to get a little more granular.

@paulharvey.theoutfield.nyc broke g+ down into its component parts and then broke it down some more

www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/7/... Breaking it down: g+ Sub-categories — American Soccer Analysis

After a successful first edition the American Soccer Insights Summit is back for Round 2.

Last year was a great mix of industry professionals, club staff, students, public analysts and academics. We really strive to foster an environment which is welcoming to everyone - register today!

UNITED STATES SOCCER FEDERATION 1 - Performance Data Analyst U.S. Soccer Overview We are U.S. Soccer and we are the future of sport in the United States.  Our mission is to make soccer the preeminent sport in the United States.  We embrace divers...

We have an opening on our Data Analytics team at US Soccer for a Performance Data Analyst. This person should have strong foundational skills in data analysis (python preferred) as well as experience in the Sport Science/human performance space (any sport)
recruiting.paylocity.com/Recruiting/J...

@americansocceranalysis.com has provided advanced data for the #ClubWorldCup, so I decided to throw together a dashboard with a whole bunch of data.

Check it out here: public.tableau.com/app/profile/...

Where did all these goals come from? @sekbush.bsky.social @chloesainsbury.bsky.social and @jamonm.bsky.social break down NWSL through 10 games

www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/6/...

The Belgian lab shaping modern soccer’s data revolution A small corner of one of the world’s oldest universities has moved the sport forward, and made the argument for research institutions writ large

I wrote about @jessejdavis.bsky.social, an American computer science professor running an influential soccer analytics research team at an ancient university in Belgium.

Much of the leading data analysis is still being done outside soccer. Why?

@theguardian.com

www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Also as @paultenorio.bsky.social reported: LA Galaxy are hiring Ravi Ramineni to the front office.

Ramineni previously worked for the Seattle Sounders. Highly-respected analytical mind in MLS circles.

A screenshot of the tableau dashboard showing a shotmap, percentage breakdowns for shot quality categories, and various filters.

A bar chart showing quantity of goals broken down by buildup categories for the 2025 MLS season.

🚨 As promised, the NWSL xG dashboard is finally here! 🚨

Inspired by the Where Goals Come From Project by @jamonm.bsky.social and @carloncarpenter.bsky.social, the dashboard allows you to break down shots from 2016-Present by xG tier, outcome, buildup, and more:

tinyurl.com/5brk3pj3

I thought it was high time to create some pizza/wheel visualizations to go along with the bar charts that we've used for the earlier Where Goals Come From articles.

Here are some examples featured in today's article. Let me know what you think.

www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/4/...

What “Where Goals Come From” Says about Your Team after MLS 2025 Week 10: Eastern Conference Edition — 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 ...

When a mommy goal and a daddy goal love each other very much....

@jamonm.bsky.social @armankafai.bsky.social and @sekbush.bsky.social talk about where the goals are coming from for the Eastern Conference through 10 MLS matchweeks: www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2025/4/...