xOG At The Olympics, Vol. I, no. VI

The sixth and final edition of the xOG Olympics newsletter is chockablock with goodies summarizing the U.S. women’s national team’s gold medal triumph in Paris over the weekend! Tons of great data is now at our fingertips, and will help paint the picture of the U.S.’s victory.

1.2

This was the team’s final non-penalty xG differential per game at the Olympics, best among the tournament’s 12 squads. In other words, they created 1.2 more expected goals than they allowed in each match, on average. They were excellent at getting good looks at goal, and even better at preventing the opposition from getting the same. Maybe the USWNT isn’t quite the undisputed best national team in the world, but they were unquestionably the best in France this summer.

0.38

The fact of doing something positive on the field isn’t quite enough for it to be valuable to your team. Where on the field did you do this thing? What happened right before it? What happened right after it? Where is the ball relative to each goal after you did whatever it was you did? The stats you find on FBRef don’t capture that level of nuance. Indeed, even xG only really tells you how good your attackers are. What about all the things that midfielders do to get the ball to those attackers? That’s where possession value comes in.

American Soccer Analysis developed a metric called Goals Added, or g+. It looks at every action on the field in the context of the actions that come just before and just after it, and determines how much that action increased or decreased your likelihood of scoring or preventing your opponent from scoring. It’s a stat that tries to put value on everything every player does throughout the course of a game, and then measures that production against the average production of a player at the same position.

Lo and behold, Sophia Smith produced 0.38 net g+ per 96 minutes above the average forward. No player who logged at least 200 minutes at the Olympics generated more value than Smith did. Her dribbling, her ability to receive tough passes, her own passing skill, and of course her scoring gifts meant that she dominated all other players in the tournament. She was one of the best defensive forwards this summer, too. Smith is an NWSL MVP, an NWSL champion, and one of the best forwards alive. Now, she’s also a gold medalist.

688

Our final Girma Corner of the tournament points out a less glittering moment of her summer. She struggled against Brazil’s aggressive pressure in the first half of the gold medal game, and by the second half, she was grabbing at her back in discomfort, a clear sign of how much the previous 17 days had worn her down.

And why shouldn’t she feel worn down? No outfield player accrued more minutes at the Olympics. To play for 688 minutes in 17 days—which includes inhuman levels of stoppage time, plus the extra 30 minutes in both the quarterfinal and semifinal—is an achievement unto itself. Naomi Girma is one of one now. Woe be unto any striker who thinks they can get by her.

6

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Best,

Evan & Eric