Hello everyone and welcome to Soccer 101.

My name is Joe Lowry, and on this episode, we're diving headfirst into soccer analytics.

We're going to look at questions like, what on earth is expected goals,

and why are advanced stats useful in soccer? And before you ask, if we can leave all of the

advanced metrics over in Major League Baseball and let the baseball fans deal with them, I'm going to go

right ahead and tell you that the answer is no. We can't. Like it or not, and ready or not,

advanced stats are infiltrating soccer,

just like they've already infiltrated baseball and basketball and a handful of other sports.

Data and statistics is becoming a bigger and more influential field of study every day,

and soccer is definitely not excluded from the effects of its growth.

There are entire wings of companies whose sole purpose is to collect data from live soccer games,

store that information, and then distribute it to customers.

Those customers could be individual people, or they could be a specific club,

or an entire league or national soccer federation.

For example, in January of 2020, Major League Soccer and U.S. Soccer announced an exclusive

data partnership with one of those big companies called Stats Perform.

They're one of the biggest, actually.

They own Opta, which is generally thought of as the industry's leading generator of event data.

There are plenty of other data companies like Y Scout, Instat, and Statsbaum that log, distribute, and even help analyze data. There are plenty of other data companies like Y-Scout, Instat, and Statsbaum

that log, distribute, and even help analyze data and statistics.

By rattling off all these companies, I'm not trying to show off my knowledge of random

soccer-adjacent businesses, although if you would be so kind as to be impressed, that would

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