During tonight’s MLS Playoff match between the New York Red Bulls and FC Dallas, the “Curse of CONCACAF Champions League” was brought up. FC Dallas has had to play more matches than NYRB this season and came into the match looking a bit fatigued. Since the CONCACAF version isn’t as lucrative as the European version, it is getting the reputation as being a drain on teams. This begs the question, are teams that participate in the Concachampions at a disadvantage when it comes to the MLS playoffs? A Beautiful Numbers Game has a post on the correlation between factors that contribute to winning play-off series. Not surprisingly, number of matches played is important. What hasn’t been discussed is how manager’s deal with squad rotations and what effect does that play on success. Major League Soccer is a parity league, so unlike in Europe where more successful teams can go out and buy new players if they qualify for additional tournaments, MLS teams have similar resources. There is some unknown quantity of allocation money that teams get when they qualify for CCL, but the number of roster spots is fixed. Are teams using their resources differently?
Box Plot of Minutes Played in MLS regular season for the 10 teams that qualified for the playoffs. Teams participating in CONCACAF Champions League are in red.
One way to limit fatigue in the squad is to rotate players and spread out the playing time more evenly. A more sophisticated model would weight recent minutes played more heavily, but to start we can look at the minutes played in the MLS Regular season. This will under represent minutes played for players on teams like Dallas and Seattle because it ignores the US Open Cup and CCL but it gives us a level playing field to compare teams. We know FC Dallas and Sounders players have logged a lot of minutes. What we want to find out, is how they are being rotated. Above is a box plot of minutes played for all the teams that qualified for the playoffs, with CCL teams in red. Teams that have done a good job at distributing minutes will have a low median value and a low interquartile range (IQR). I’ve chosen to use these metrics instead of mean and standard deviation because median and IQR are less affected by outliers. Keepers or a players that made only one or two sub appearances are examples of outliers.
LA, Seattle and RSL look to have done the best job of rotating their squads. RSL did not participate in CCL this year. However, because of the way the schedule is set up, last year’s tournament was still running during the first part of the MLS season, so they had to deal with a few extra matches and some fixture congestion because of that. FC Dallas and Colorado are the other two teams that were involved in CCL and their squad management was the other end of the spectrum from Seattle, LA and RSL. DAL/COL had the two highest median minutes played and only NYRB had a higher IQR than these two.
It will be interesting to see how these 5 teams progress through the playoffs. If I were a betting woman, I’d put money on either Seattle or LA to win it all. They’ve been the most consistent teams all season, especially towards the end of the season when others were struggling. Sure, they’ve played more matches than most teams, but the data indicates they’ve dealt with that in a manner different from FC Dallas and Colorado and hopefully they’ve been successful in limiting the fatigue in their players. LA and Seattle look most likely to “break” the curse of the CONCACAF Champions League. Yes, there is a negative correlation with number of matches played and the probability of winning a playoff series, but also keep in mind that this season the roster sizes were expanded. Perhaps historically teams haven’t had enough healthy, experienced players to rotate successfully?
Sarah -
I definitely think this year may be different than others when it comes to matches played. The player allocation per squad is higher in years past, and the clubs you highlighted (RSL, Sounders, Galaxy) have definitely done a better job at squad rotation. I suspect the curse may be broken this year.
Interestingly enough, the trend I observed on a purely games played basis included USOC matches as well. That matters, because even though both RSL and Sounders competed in some sort of CCL competition this year, the Sounders deeper run in USOC plus their two play in matches for CCL group stage puts them at the magical four match disadvantage threshold. So, RSL could win and that would further confirm the match played differential theory! Certainly, we all hope that doesn’t happen.
The better metric would be looking at minutes played over a season by player, especially for projected starting lineups a day or two ahead of a playoff match. Theoretically, Climbing the Ladder’s Lineup data base has all of that information. The challenge is that its not presented in database form – it’s distributed in Excel. Yet again my programming/database creation skills are not up to the task to convert the Excel files into something much easier to query. Finding a good partner to work with this offseason, when the 2011 update comes out, will be a priority of mine. Interested?
By the way, I forgot to mention. Interestingly enough, the game differential theory is not statistically significant when it comes to single match playoff series. It only applies to two match series. I have my theories why, but I’ll save that for readers of my blog. No need to bore people here!
No doubt USOC games (and even friendlies) have an effect. It would definitely be interesting to include those as well. I suspect that teams that play mostly reserves in USOC (and therefore play fewer matches because they lose) will see their median minutes played drop but their IQR will increase since the additional minutes will go to players that don’t see much time in the regular season. Sounds like a fun project to look at.
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