MLS Attacking Effectiveness: Rounds 1-15

A while back I came across an absolutely fantastic site for those of you who like Soccer charts. It’s called MatchStory and it’s a site that focuses on interpreting soccer data and “using [that] data to tell a story.” In other words, they make a lot of sweet graphs about some of the best soccer leagues in the world.

One that immediately jumped out to me was the Attacking and Defending Effectiveness graph. They used it to plot the teams from the top 4 soccer leagues in the world which, unfortunately, does not include MLS… YET! So I decided that I would replicate their chart with MLS data. The World Cup break seemed like the best opportunity. I’ve also included the data since I can’t make something cool with popup info. 🙁

Here’s how it works (using the MatchStory description):

This graph allow you to compare MLS teams based on the average number of shots per game (on the horizontal axis) and the average number of shots it takes to produce a goal (on the vertical). The axes (red lines) are centered on the average values for all of the teams on the graph, which divides it into the four labelled quadrants. The further away a team is from where the axes cross, the more unusual their performance has been, for better or worse. The colored stripes act like ‘goal contours’ – if two teams are in the same stripe, then they’ve scored goals at a similar overall rate.

And here’s the data

If you have any questions, you can also reach me on Twitter at @MLSFantasyBoss or in the Live Chat to the right of this page.