Hey Kitty, time to eat your profits. Good kitty, look how fat you've gotten. That's the sound of some

workplace pension providers paying their shareholders instead of you. At people's pension,

we don't have shareholders to pamper. That's why over the last five years, we've given

£100 million back to our members instead.

Oh, you've broken the cat flap again.

People's pension. Now that's a pension with purpose.

Visit peoplespension.com.uk forward slash pays you. You. Hello, everyone, and welcome to MLS assist, a podcast created to give insight into the tactical side of major league soccer.

I'm your host, Joe Lowry, and this week's show is going to be just a little bit different than our normal episodes.

Jordan and I are not going to be digging into tactics. Instead, I had the chance to talk with Elliot McKinley of American Soccer Analysis.

Why has soccer been slow to buy into analytics?

What are some advanced metrics that can help analyze the game? How is MLS doing on the data

collection and analysis front? Elliot and I, well, 99% Elliot, answer those questions and much, much

more on this week's episode of MLS Assist. I'm here with Elliot McKinley, who is a contributor to

American Soccer Analysis, the premier American Soccer Analytics website, and was a member of the 2018 U.S. Soccer hackathon winning team. He's analyzed throwins like no other, popularized new data visualization methods, and most importantly, investigated Major League Soccer's goal of the week voting that always seems to go Atlanta United's way. Elliot, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm super excited to get the chance to sit down and talk with you. Finally, you and I have gone back and forth over the years, really the last couple of years, and more recently trying to plan this episode. But I'm really interested and excited to dig into the analytical portion of

soccer that really doesn't get as much coverage in the media or by the American

soccer landscape that I think both of us believe that it deserves. That's right. Hopefully

we can go for some interesting things and let some people know what's going on in MLS.

All right. Let's get into it. Elliot, analytics and data analysis are largely underutilized by American soccer.

We just talked about it, right?

The American soccer media and public don't really rely on a lot of these statistics and information to influence their decisions, at least not across the board.

Why do you think that is?

Well, soccer analytics is still pretty new.

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