MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
By: The Fantasy Physician
Week 7 Big Question – How do I assess matchups to pick players?
Contextualize! Yes, on Kickbase or any fantasy platform you can look at player averages and just pick the players with the best averages if you can afford them. But that’s not that fun and misses a lot. Soccer players do what they do in matches, playing on a team with weaknesses and strengths against opponents with weaknesses and strengths. You want to assess matchups first and then pick strong players from those favorable matchups.
Last year the Fantasy Therapist wrote a great article on assessing matchups to pick players in FMLS . It holds up great, so I recommend it still, and highlights the many ways managers assess matchups. This week we will look at how one method of assessing matchups mentioned in that article (full disclosure: he was quoting me) – summing one team’s expected goals (xG) with opponent’s expected goals against (xGA) – to find context for strong attacking prospects and strong defensive prospects when you put your fantasy squad together.
How does home field advantage benefit players on your Kickbase squad?
Expected goals (xG) analysis has permeated the world of professional soccer media coverage and discussions. American Soccer Analysis provides a detailed description of what xG is, but roughly speaking it’s the chance – rendered as a decimal between 0 and 1 – that a given shot results in an actual goal based on some set of historical data about shots from that spot taken in that way (eg with a foot or by heading the ball). A team’s xG for a given game sums the xG from all individual shots taken and starts to measure the overall quality of that team’s attack in that game, whether balls went into the goal or not. Intuitively, xG suits the Kickbase system as a candidate predictor of player points because Kickbase rewards players’ involvement in scoring goals and in nearly scoring goals. Similarly, good defenses generally limit opponents’ chances and so allow a low number of expected goals, measured by the metric of expected goals allowed (xGA). However one measures it, we are looking for attackers on teams that score a lot by creating good chances playing against defenses that concede a lot. For defenders – especially insofar as we are hunting for clean sheets or avoiding blowout losses – we want the opposite: a good defense playing against an anemic attack.
Here I constructed two tables, oriented to home teams (remember, we generally prefer home teams). The data are the average xG or xGA per match after the first 6 weeks of the 2026 season, which I have taken from the Footy Stats website. Not all statisticians calculate xG the same way or use the same data inputs for that metric. My “novel” metric is just summing the home team’s average xG with the opposing team’s average xGA. Those sums live in the third data column, and then I have sorted the table to rank the matchups by that sum from greatest to least. Arbitrarily, I have divided the matches into thirds, with the top third in green, the middle third in yellow, and the lowest third in red. We will focus on taking attackers from the home teams in green. I also use a red font to identify teams playing in the Concacaf Champions Cup, because those teams may have either tired players from midweek match play or may rotate players to keep them fresh for next week’s second leg matches.
Attacking Table:
Now let’s hunt for good defensive prospects. For this next table, we invert the analysis. I list the home teams’ expected goals allowed (xGA) and the away teams’ expected goals (xG). Once again, the third column shows the sum of these, but now we are looking for low numbers to identify strong defensive prospects.
Defending Table:
One more observation from these tables. For managers looking for good choices from teams playing away, the deepest red highlighted matches are the place to hunt. For example, we know we don’t want to take Sporting Kansas City attackers against the stout San Jose defense with the xG (home) + xGA (away) summing to 1.86, but that implies that San Jose defenders may be attractive. Similarly, the dismal defensive prospects for Kansas City, Portland, and Austin (at least based on this analysis) may suggest taking attackers from San Jose, LAFC, and LA Galaxy, though again, the Los Angeles teams prospects may be lower than expected by virtue of current participation in CCC and playing on the road.
Turning xG analysis into Kickbase fantasy points in Week 7
Let’s pick some good players out of those favorable matchups
Attackers:
- Columbus vs Orlando: Diego Rossi and Wessam Abou Ali
- Vancouver vs NYCFC: Sebastian Berhalter, Brian White, AZ Jackson,
- Miami vs Red Bull NY: Lionel Messi, Rodrigo De Paul
- Toronto vs Cincinnati: Josh Sargent, Alonso Coello (if Mihailovic still out), Jose Cifuentes, Daniel Salloi
- Colorado vs Houston: Paxton Aaronson, Rafael Navarro
- Kansas City vs San Jose: Niko Tsakiris, Preston Judd
Defense is more complicated because Kickbase also rewards defenders well for participating in the attack. So our very best choices would come from teams green on both tables or maybe green on one and yellow on the other.
Defenders:
- Chicago vs Atlanta: Andrew Gutman, Mbekezeli Mbokazi
- Columbus vs Orlando: Max Arfsten, Stephen Moreira
- Vancouver vs NYCFC: Matias Laborda, Edier Ocampo, Tristan Blackmon
- San Diego vs Minnesota: Chris McVey
As we discussed before Week 2, there is more than one way to do well with goalkeepers, but clean sheets emanating from favorable defensive prospects are among them.
Goalkeepers:
- Takaoka, Ferree, Schulte, Brady, Daniel
There are a lot of questions to ask about this system or any system that looks at something as complex as matchups quantitatively: Is expected goals (xG) analysis better than actual goals? Is six weeks of data enough? Deeper into the season, should more recent games weigh more heavily? Does weighing attacking teams xG evenly with opponents xGA make sense or does one matter more than the other? Is any of this better than the eye test or other metrics? All good questions, and the answers for any manager may go beyond just what works best to include “what interests you?” Thinking about matchups and then seeing how your thoughts pan out on matchday is very much part of the fun of all this.
The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
The “Fantasy Meteorologist” is Asher Malaschak, @Storminator on Discord
The “Fantasy Gastroenterologist” is Christian Ward, @xward on Discord
