Yazmeen Ryan: Moneyball in Action
Yazmeen Ryan: Moneyball in Action
This is Issue #6 of Seeing the Present, a newsletter about my thoughts on current global trends in soccer, with an eye toward what they might tell us about the future of the beautiful game.
This post was co-authored with Juan Coste Delvecchio, who has been an analyst at Gotham FC since 2022.
The U.S. Women’s National Team roster for this week’s friendlies includes several newcomers. Among them is Yazmeen Ryan, who has been in blistering form for Gotham FC across the NWSL regular season, the NWSL x Liga MX Femenil Summer Cup, and the Concacaf Champions Cup. But while this is Ryan’s first call-up to the senior national team, we had an inkling at Gotham that she could perform at a USWNT level since 2022. How we figured that out is a real-world glimpse into the application of Moneyball principles in roster-building decisions.
When retooling our roster after a dreadful 2022 season, we were very interested in players who were good at creating chances.1 So we plotted the number of Chances Created (per 100 Touches) against the number of Passes in the Attacking Third (per 100 Touches)2 for every player in the league to see which players were most efficient at creating chances when they were high up the field.
What we found was a cluster in the upper right corner of the chart (red rectangle) made up by some of the best chance creators in the league: Megan Rapinoe, Ashley Sanchez, Mallory Swanson, and Morgan Weaver. These players’ quality was already baked into their contracts and/or their positions on the USWNT, meaning bringing any of them to Gotham would likely prove impossible. But right in that same cluster was a young player at the Portland Thorns who was mostly getting her minutes off the bench, yet when she was on the field she was generating chances at the same rate as the best of the best. That player was Yazmeen Ryan.
As a relative unknown compared to the big names in that cluster, Ryan offered us an avenue to get franchise-player levels of chance creation at a role-player market value. Finding those opportunities for arbitrage is what Moneyball is all about, and it doesn’t always require advanced analytics or heavy number-crunching. In this case, one chart told us all we needed to know to keep tabs on her. We then complemented our quantitative analysis with ongoing qualitative scouting and video analysis to confirm that she had the characteristics we wanted on our roster, including her flexibility to play either as an attacking midfielder or as a winger.
Of course, as we continued to monitor her, Ryan began to get more minutes and starts for the Thorns toward the end of the season. When she started in the 2022 NWSL Championship, she generated both goal-scoring chances in the Thorns’ 2-1 win over Kansas City, which ultimately made the trade negotiations more difficult. We did manage to bring her to Gotham, though, and she was absolutely instrumental in helping the club win the 2023 Championship, starting more than 75% of our games last season. She has continued to improve since then, finally earning herself a well-deserved first USWNT call-up—a development that no one who’s been at Gotham since 2022 is surprised to see.
Why that was such a priority is a story for a longer post.
Normalizing these stats per 100 Touches allowed us to assess how good players are at creating chances when they get the ball. Normalizing them instead per 90 Minutes would have penalized individual players on worse teams that generally don’t get the ball up the field as many times each game (i.e. per 90 Minutes).