NWSL Season Preview Week is here! For the next eight days, we'll be dropping episodes covering all 16 clubs for the 2026 season. For the Boston Legacy, Emma Healy of @bostonglobe.com chatted with the guys about the biggest mystery team in the league this season.
Itโs preview tiiiiiime
@catabush.com tells us not to ignore the elephant in the room in Denver and @kierdoyle.bsky.social talks about Boston Internationals. Our friends at @xowngoals.com dropped audio previews for both teams today as well!
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2026/3/...
MLS released its latest GAM numbers again today, and weโre really seeing some interesting situations. Some teams are all in and thereโs a new leader at the top of the GAM leaderboard.
NWSL previews are starting tomorrow, and we're doing things a little differently this year.
Every single team is going to get their regular preview, on the ASA site, 2 teams at a time. On the same day, our friends @xowngoals.com are going to drop the audio previews with experts on each team!
I pulled some data via @americansocceranalysis.com's {itscalledsoccer} and while home advantage has never started out so high in an MLS season since 2013, it is not quite the highest ever (only 98.41 percentile).
I suspect this is an aberration and it will bounce around just like it always has.
Now live: presentation videos. Find all recorded talks on our Youtube. Link below.
Recorded presentations from the 2026 ASI Summit are now live on YouTube. To see all of the incredible talks from this year's Summit, visit the link below:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
NEW EXTRA POINTS:
We got the operating budgets for over 180 D1 women's soccer programs.
Here's who spent the most in FY25 (Utah State?!?), how much you need to have a top 25ish RPI, and what kind of spending matters the most:
(what sport should we do next?)
www.extrapointsmb.com/p/here-s-wha...
MLS Daily is now pulling from 126 newspapers, newsletters, blogs, podcasts and Youtube channels: johnspacemuller.github.io/mls-daily/
Thanks to everyone who's helped build out the list. Is there any high-quality coverage of your club not on here yet?
A graph showing what percent of 2025 minutes are returning in 2026 for each team in the NWSL. Seattle Reign has the most, with 90.5%, and North Carolina Courage has the least, with only 58.8% of 2025 minutes returning. The league average is around 75%.
With only two weeks left before the 2026 NWSL season kicks off, check out which teams will look most similar to and which teams will look most different from their 2025 counterparts!
Returning minutes graph for @americansocceranalysis.com.
If you are a current student 18 years or older and will be enrolled through November 2026, sign up at datachallenge.smt.com
Teams of up to 4 are allowed and if you want us to help you find teammates we can do that!
Let me know if you have any questions!
Registration for the 2026 #SMTDataChallenge is OPEN! We want to see what you would put โOn the Big Screen!โ We want to see how you can tell stories like SMT through a metric, visualization, or interactive fan experience that could be displayed on a MiLB scoreboard!
me and Joe sat down to grind some tape
please look at our new thing we do
www.fivestripefinal.com/p/film-room-...
Expected goals are everywhere now, but there's so much more we can do with them. Here's how futi turns basic xG into team-level metrics including deserved results, projected points and projected finish.
The Sunday night column is back!
Matchday 1 saw LAFC make a statement, Cincy dive into The Discourse & plenty more around MLS.
Including a performance for the ages by the wrong guy late on Sunday night.
tacticsfreezone.ghost.io/lafc-send-a-...
Following MLS is harder than it should be, so I made an automated daily newsletter that rounds up high-quality coverage from around the league.
I'll tell you all about it tomorrow but you can sign up in advance here: tally.so/r/eq6DQx
If you want to catch up, you can find all the previews here
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/categor...
โก ๐
๐๐๐๐ญ๐ถ๐น๐พ๐จ๐น๐ซ \\ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ-๐ฉ๐จ๐ฐ๐๐ซ๐๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐๐ค๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ญ๐ ๐๐จ๐๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐ฒ๐ญ๐ก๐จ๐ง
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐-๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐-๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
Today I'm ๐๐๐ญ๐-releasing ๐
๐๐๐๐ญ๐ถ๐น๐พ๐จ๐น๐ซ. My new Rust-powered football tracking data loader wrapped in a Python package.
2+4. 3+3.
What do these mean when it comes to MLS roster building? Is there a clear benefit choosing one or the other? Is one model a โcheapโ way in building a roster?
For FAM, today weโre analyzing MLS Roster Construction Models.
@akeaswaran.me made this neat graph of a quick strength of schedule model. Really interesting to see how relative difficulty between the front and back parts of the season may drive narratives. Neville might find his seat pretty hot, while Varas is my pick for COTY winner w/ a likely hot start.
Every year the MLS punditerati are asked to pick their MLS standings, every year they get smoked. @paulharvey.theoutfield.nyc decided to look into who is the best prognosticator, and who deserves the hatemail.
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2026/2/14/the-prognostication-power-rankings
Fifteen years ago, I got my dream job writing for MLSsoccer. Last week, that came to an end.
I'm off on my own, and it's time to build something new โ with a little help from all of you.
tacticsfreezone.ghost.io/an-end-to-my...
A brief preview interregnum: we talked to the guys over @futi.live about what theyโre building and some of the cool models theyโve got going on over there
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2026/2/...
Our 2026 MLS previews are here and they start at the bottom: @mattbarger.bsky.social tells us about DCU trying to be the Union, and @paulharvey.theoutfield.nyc argues regression for Atlanta and the expansion of a Cheese empire in Montreal
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2026/2/...
A lot of the ASA-erati attended the @americansoccerinsights.com summit at Rice University last week, and people wanted to talk about their experience.
So we convened the ASA roundtable for highlights.
www.americansocceranalysis.com/home/2026/2/7/asa-roundtable-american-soccer-insights-summit
We had so much fun at the @americansoccerinsights.com Summit last year, we had to come back for another live pod! We were joined by @catabush.com and Houston Dash analyst Chloe Dhillon for a great talk about the state of data in the women's game, for the public and for teams. Enjoy!
For The IX Soccer, @catabush.com wrote about the importance of access to analytics and why FBref losing Opta data is a huge blow for women's soccer coverage.
Sam's the best. Read his stuff and subscribe to Five Stripe Final if you're an Atlanta United fan (or if you want to get smarter about soccer and/or derive more enjoyment from reading about it.)
It's really hard to understate how grateful I am for an event like @americansoccerinsights.com. This past weekend was extraordinary and it wouldn't have been possible without the Summit. The content was exceptional and now I have to comb through 5+ pages of notes lol.
Can't even begin to say thank you to all that came out to ASI. This is maybe the first if not the biggest showing of @americansocceranalysis.com present cast and alums we've ever had in a room.
The ASI Summit kicks off tomorrow! To get a peek at this weekend's content, visit our website. In addition to abstracts, you'll find the papers and code repos from the participants of this year's research breakaway competition, sponsored by SkillCorner.
americansoccerinsights.com/program/abst...
