MEANINGLESS UNFRIENDLIES

So I hesitate to throw my hat into the ring in Week 1 with some power rankings since they're totally unrelated to the Week 0 ones from a bit ago, but I decided, for consitencies sake, I'd try to get in the habbit of doing this every week.

The reason I hesitate is that these ratings really don't get off the ground every team has played five game (they use a five game running average in the formula), so the numbers start off really meaningless and get better as the season goes on. But hell, even if the math is silly, let's just go for it.



Actually nothing too terrible there just yet... But like I said, this is all but meaningless, just based on one game and has no relation to what happened last season or evaluating overall team strength. Give me a few weeks and we might be able to hammer out something a bit better.

Until then?

Courage.

SKC-Union Player Ratings

So soon? So soon.

I'd say I'd add some major thoughts to this post, but I only really have three. The first is, for the first 20 minutes, SKC looked awful, unorganized, and uncommunicative. Coming out of preseason maybe I shouldn't be that worried, but Philadelphia should have had at least one or two more goals in the first thirty minutes, and that would have put the game out of reach. We came out looking like Toronto. We can't look like Toronto.

The second thought was that I was glad to see the response, especially the second half adjustments.

The third was, I thought Nagamura had a helluva game, even if it didn't show up in the stats.

That said, these are stats based player ratings, and given that, there's one clear Man of the Match. Here's how the numbers worked out. Same system as last year.

No surprise there. Man of the match to Zusi, who notched a goal and assist. Rosell also with a great game, and hard to say anything bad about LeToux. Philly fans will be thrilled to have him back.

So hats off to Mr. Zusi, who has probably sealed a spot on the USMNT roster if he can keep up putting up games like that.

Week 0 Power Rankings

We're baaaaaaack.

Technically, we were never gone. But still.

So, to do the most meaningless of meaningless things, I opted to do one final spreadshet iteration before retiring the 2012 version and starting up a new 2013 one. I ran the power ranking system through the playoffs to determine a final final set of power rankings to use as the starting point for this season. Well, that's not entirely true, this season will actually start with everyone at 0, since I think there's enough parity in MLS to dictate that past season results are no indicator of next season performance. I've even posted about it! But that's under the bridge.

Here's how the numbers worked out :

San Jose	1
Kansas City	2
DC	3
New York	4
LA	5
Houston	6
Seattle	7
Chicago	8
Salt Lake City	9
Columbus	10
Colorado	11
Vancouver	12
Dallas	13
Montreal	14
New England	15
Philadelphia	16
Chivas	17
Portland	18
Toronto	19

Maybe it's blasphemy to not put LA at #1 and Houston at #2 due to their postseason performance, but I simply weighted each post season game as another match. Perhaps I should have given more weighting to each round, but this seemed like the best way to do it. I think I'll be making a few tweeks to the system this year, but otherwise, it should be more or less the same. Stay tuned!

MLS : More like Germany, less like England?

So awhile ago I did a look at the season over season correlation in MLS and the PRemiership and found that there's much less correlation in MLS than there is in England. i.e. Good teams in the Premiership tend to stay good, and bad teams tend to stay bad, and there's not much surprise in where teams are going to end up. Conversely, in MLS, each season tends to be a new season and it's much harder to predict where a team will finish based on how they performed last season. I thought maybe that I should take a look at some of the other leagues and ee how they stood up and the first one I looked at was the Bundesliga. I was a little surprised to see that there's actually less correlation in the Bundesliga than there is in MLS. The highest correlation there was in the 2008-2009 season, with an R value of 0.65, but the last two seasons have been highly variable, with correlation values of 0.08. The average correlation over 5 seasons was 0.30 while the R^2 value was 0.087, lower than even MLS.

In looking at the numbers, this actually seems to have been an artifact of typically dominant teams like Schalke, Stuttgary, Weder Bremen and Wolfsburg all doing poorly in 2010-2011 and then doing well again in 2011-2012. I'm not sure there's that much to read out of it and sort of wonder if looking at a wider set of data would come to a different result, but I do think now that the German system seems to foster more pairty than the English system and seems to be comparable to MLS, while still able to create competetive teams that do well in European competition.

Here's the chart.

Some day I'll do a good side by side comparison of each of the worlds major leagues, but for now, it seems like MLS is trending more like the Bundesliga than the Premiership in terms of team parity, and I think that's a good thing.

So you're gonna play in MLS (Part 2 : The bloodening)

So we figured out (very very very very very roughly) how much you're gonna get paid after you get drafted. But maybe you don't care about money. You're a soccer player, dammit, you wanna know how much time you're actually gonna play.

Well I've got news for you buddy, we can math that up quick too. Unfortunatly, though, the picture is even less clear for a playimg time relation as it is for salary.

Of course its a little intuitive. Generally speaking, the higher you were drafted, the more you'll play, but oddly, playing time seems to peak around pick #10 instead of pick #1. Could that be because the first picks get taken for future potential rather than immediate impact? Could be, could be. Teams may be looking for the GA guys who they can sign without concern for roster space in hopes of getting a god developmental project.

I actually opted to go for a 4th order polynomial here, largely to get the shape looking about right. The big throw off were keeper Ryan Meara and defender Ray Gaddis. I think the hump can account for at least Meara. Keepers getting picked late is no surprise. Gaddis was probably the "steal" of the draft as far as salary and playing time go. Who knows what he'll develope into though.

Anyway, here's the chart.

So there you have it. Again, you're probably gonna see minutes if you wind up in the top 15 picks or so, but beyound that, while all hope is not lost, there are definitely outliers, it looks like you may need to wait a year before breaking into the starting XI.

So you're gonna play in MLS.

Congratulations and I'm sorry.

Mostly just congratulations though. You've just been drafted. Awesome news! Time to start apartment hunting in your brand new town. So what's your budget? How much is your contract worth? Is it related to your draft position?

Why yes. Of course it is. That's why this post exists in the first place.

To help you out I took at look back at the last 3 years of the MLS SuperDraft (it's SuperDrafty in here) and plotted players selection order against their salary for that year, and boy is it a pretty graph. Take a look!

Not surprisingly, looks like the salary drops off in relation to draft order. Perhaps slightly upsetting is just how fast it drops off. Even before you've gotten below #10 we're already below six figures. The good news is it does look like it flattens out to a guarenteed salary pretty quickly! The bad news is, it bottoms out at the minimum wage.....

If you wanted to crank out your predicted salary by hand, you can! The formula would be this

Salary = -38,501 * ln(Draft Position) + $177,075

So let's just say you are, perhaps, SKCs new addition, Mikey Lopez. At #14, you're predicted starting salary would be $70,039.45. Not bad!

In actuality, if you've got a Generation Adidas contract you'll probably do a bit better than average. Without, perhaps a bit worse.

For reference, the average salary of an MLS draftee is $68,668.68. Lot's of sixes and eights. Nice. Average is a bit misleading though. The median salary paints perhaps a grimmer picture... Only $44,000 per year.

Still though, there's some players who manage to skirt the trend! At #8 in 2010, Dilly Duka pulled in $213,000, beating his predicted salary by $115,985.58.

Of course, on the flip side there's Zach Lloyd, who landed $57,985.03 below his predicted salary after being taken 5th in 2010. So, there's that.

Probably worth mentioning this is three years worth of draft data only and doesn't really try to correct for anything. The two interesting blurbs at the end of the curve are goalies, by the way. Sean Johnson and Brian Perk. Goalies tend to go late though, so that's not entirely news...

MLS Wants a Cracker

It's a parity - "parroty" joke. Get it?!?!!?1

Lord.

Anyway, not been updating this much since there's not been much action, but I thought I'd revisit the season by season correlation between MLS and the Premier League with a few free minutes.

I should note that this is all based on final standings, since MLS crowns our Champions sort of  weird (not better or worse, just differently) when compared to the rest of the world.

One thing I do enjoy about the way we do it here is that in any given year you may just have yourself a good home team to watch. Unless you live in Toronto. Or anywhere in Canada, really.

Conversely, Premier League teams tend to generally find a way to stay in the same position as before. You could certainly argue that that sort of league structure makes upsets that much more compelling, and watching "super clubs" a la the Big4/5/6/whatever makes for the most exciting matches, but there's really something to me about the whole "any one can win any game on any given day".

So the question is, can we quanity that?

The answer is, of course, "Yup." With pages and pages of "buts..."

But we're not gonna get into buts here. Unless that's your thing.....

I digress.

I looked at the 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 MLS seasons for MLS season-to-season correlation. That is, how well did your performance last year predict your performance for the following year. In a word? Not good. Interestingly though, the 2011 season had a very strong correlation to the 2010 season, with an R value of 0.70. The next highest was 2009 to 2008 at 0.54. The average correlation was 0.38, but average isn't a great way to do it. Instead, I lumped all the seasons together into one data set to come up with a total correlation value. That value was 0.41. That's not very good correlation. I'd note I did throw out inaguarl years for expansion teams, but that should be a given.

In contrast, the Premier League has excellent correlation. Teams generally may move up or down two or three places over the course of a year, but, in general, where you finished last season is a pretty good indicator of how you'll finish this season.

For the Premier League I looked at 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011, and 2011-2012, throwing out single data points for promoted/relegated teams. Interestingly, correlation seems to be increasing since 2006-2007. The lowest R value of 0.65 occured that year, and has increased in every season since, up to a value of 0.86 for 2011-2012. Could more money be "locking in" teams as player wage wars serve to stratify the league into the Haves and Have-Nots?

Anyway, these numbers might not make much sense, so here's the plotted data sets for both leagues. It's pretty obvious that in MLS, the results are all over the place, whereas in the Premier League, things look very linear.

 MLS Correlation

Premiership Correlation



And... that's all I have to say about that...