Another COVID-donation request fulfilled today. We’re almost to the end, and apologies to those of you who are still waiting on yours. There were a ton, and actual soccer came back a lot faster than I expected. Today, we’re writing about the 2019 New England Revolution because Christian, a beloved reader, asked me to write about the 2019 New England Revolution, a team that finished with a minus-seven goal differential and the 14th-best point total in MLS.

I’m not familiar with the 2019 New England Revolution, and I assume: neither are you. The most notable thing about this iteration of the club is that they hired Bruce Arena. This was Arena’s first job after overseeing the late stages of the USMNT’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, and this was also MLS’s equivalent of Tottenham hiring someone like Jose Mourinho in, say, 2016. You know, before “hiring Jose Mourinho” turned into a shorthand signal for “Yes, we are extremely desperate and don’t actually understand what wins soccer games”. Despite the embarrassing flameout with the US, Arena is the most successful coach in MLS history -- by far. He’s got five MLS Cups; no one else has more than two.

Put another way: Arena has as many MLS Cup wins as the Revs have losses. Some devious little cyber-scoundrel even added a section to the “MLS Cup” Wikipedia page with the heading: “Buffalo Bills of MLS”. From 2005 through 2007, the Revolution made three straight MLS Cups ... and lost all three. They also finished second in 2002 and 2014. No other team can “boast” as many MLS Cup losses; hell, only the Los Angeles Galaxy -- one of Arena’s former clubs -- have made more MLS Cups than the Revolution. It’s just that ... they’re 0-5.

So, as someone who doesn’t follow MLS super-closely -- and especially didn’t back in 2019 -- I feel safe explaining the move as such: Team with most MLS Cup losses hires coach with most MLS Cup wins. Pretty simple equation. Given that I didn’t watch any games played by the 2019 New England Revolution -- or at least I don’t think I did; listen, 2019 was like 15 years ago, man -- I figured I’d try to use Arena’s first season with the Revs to explain some things I think I know about soccer. Let’s give it a shot.

It’s way easier to get better at stopping goals than scoring goals.

Thomas Tuchel is a fantastic soccer coach. He thinks as deeply -- sometimes maybe too deeply -- about the sport as any coach out there. His PSG and Borussia Dortmund teams produced some profoundly complex attacking play that frequently turned settled possession into what suddenly looked like a counter-attack. Space outta nowhere! And now he’s got Chelsea in the Champions League final by ... putting another center back on the field.

Sure, it’s maybe a bit more complex than that, but allow me to quote Massimiliano Allegri, winner of six Serie A titles -- one with Milan, five with Juventus:

In Italy, the tactics, schemes, they're all bullshit. Football is art and the artists are the world-class players. You don't have to teach them anything, you just admire them. All you need to do is put them in the best condition to do well.

Allegri, who proudly admits to not owning a computer (#goals), gave this interview while he was unemployed in late 2019. It’s mid-2021 ... and he’s still unemployed. Two more things that might not be unrelated! But in general, I think he’s right. Games are won by the execution and talent of the players; managers can help put them in better positions to execute and better positions to use their specific talents. In terms of explaining the results of individual matches, I’m with my man Max: a lot of it is bullshit.

To improve Chelsea, Tuchel, who was hired midseason, tightened up Chelsea’s defense, and the obvious way he did that was by switching to a five-defender instead of a four-defender system. Brilliant stuff. But seriously, it was the right move. How do you make a team better at scoring goals? To start, you can train set-pieces more aggressively, but that still doesn’t seem like a huge point of emphasis for most coaches. Next, you can select different players -- but that wasn’t really an issue with Chelsea, given all the attacking talent they have. And after that, you can try to constantly practice complex and dynamic attacking movements that become so ingrained in your players’ minds and bodies that they start to form, ad hoc, on the field during matches. Given that Tuchel took the Chelsea job halfway through the season, that last one was not an option, either.

However, defensive performance is more about organization. It doesn’t require as much on-the-fly creative thinking and skill from the individuals; it just requires your players to maintain a certain shape in front of the goal and then to prevent the ball from passing through it. If you don’t have a full offseason of practice, organizing the defense and literally just adding an extra defender to your formation is going to have a way bigger immediate payoff than trying to boost the team’s attack.

Arena knows this, and well, he wasn’t left with much of a choice when he took over for Brad Friedel in June of 2019:

Arena’s first match in charge was on June 1, and as you can see, the defense steadily improved from there -- so much so that from about mid-July through mid-August the team was actually out-creating its opponents. The performance dropped off from there, but on the whole, it did improve. In the 15 games before Arena took over, the Revolution lost eight times. In Arena’s 20 games in charge, they lost just four, the last of which was a playoff game against Atlanta United. Funnily enough, you can find stories that attribute New England’s improvement to a better “locker-room culture” and all that good stuff. But beyond the variance inherent within the sport, the main reason they recovered from their early-season struggles to ultimately make the playoffs is that Arena oversaw a significant improvement to one of the worst defenses in the history of the league.

Regression comes for us all.

Even a team coached by Bruce Arena. Back in 2016, after a 2-1 win over the Portland Timbers in which his team was outshot 18-9, the then-Galaxy coach offered up his thoughts on using data to analyze the Beautiful Game:

We won the game. That’s what you do in soccer games. We were on the road in a venue where the team does pretty well at home. What are we complaining about? Then some moron will write that they had more shots than us thinking that’s important. Actually, analytics in soccer, if no one here has figured it out, doesn’t mean a whole lot. Analytics and statistics are used for people who don’t know how to analyze the game. I’ll be very honest with you, this isn’t baseball or football or basketball. We have a very important analytic, and that’s the score. That distorts all the other statistics.

I could launch an anonymous blog just based on Arena’s words that would lead me to become one of mid-brow culture’s most celebrated showrunners, but that’s not what we’re here for today. “We have a very important analytic, and that’s the score” is one of the greatest sports quotes of all time. And it reminds me of one of my best ideas: I want to launch a website called Ultimate Sports Analytics, and the only thing on the site will be scores from games. Nothing else, just the only stat that matters. Whenever I decide to do this, I’ll be dressing up as Wario on Saturday Night Live and just generally showing my ass every time I speak in no time.

Anyway, in January of 2019, the Revolution signed Spanish attacking midfielder Carles Gil for a club-record $2 million from Deportivo La Coruna. In his first season in MLS, Gil led the team in goals (10) and assists (12). The only other player who hit double digits in both attacking stats in 2019 was Carlos Vela, who had maybe the greatest individual season in MLS history. Gil was named MLS “Newcomer of the Year” and also made the league’s team of the year. 

However, four of his goals came on penalties and those six non-penalty goals came on just 4.1 xG. And although he was second in MLS in assists, he was eighth in expected assists (8.5). In terms of contributing directly to goals, Gil’s impressive season was built on two things: red-hot goal conversion both by himself and his teammates, and a ton of minutes played. Gil played the third-most minutes (3,051) of any outfield player in 2019, which helped him put up those gaudy goals+assists numbers. In 2020, he got hurt and only played 366 minutes in the league. His per-90 performance (by xG+xA) remained basically the same as the year before, but this time he ended up with no goals and one assist.

On the European soccer calendar, we’re reaching that time of year where teams and players solidify their standings in their respective league hierarchies. Every year, there are teams and players who massively underperform or over-perform their expected-goal production. And every year now, analysts and fans and journalists try to come up with reasons why this specific team or that specific player is special, why they’re the ones who are doing something different that the powerful model can’t pick up. And every year, these people are mostly dead wrong.

Goalkeepers are still a blind sport.

Here are two players:

-Player A: In his two most-recent seasons in MLS, he’s conceded 53 goals on shots that were worth about 50.1 xG, according to Statsbomb’s post-shot xG model.

-Player B: In his four most-recent seasons in MLS, he’s conceded 98 goals on shots that were worth about 107.1 xG, according to Statsbomb’s post-shot xG model.

In the summer of 2018, Chelsea paid a world-record fee of £71 million for a goalkeeper who had no statistical track record of being anything other than average at doing the main thing goalkeepers get paid to do: save shots. Meanwhile, Player A was recently signed by Manchester City and is the starter for the USMNT; Player B has one cap and still plays for the New England Revolution.