I’m a stats nerd, in case you couldn’t tell. I barely remember anything from my stats courses in college about regressions and R-squared and using quadratic formulae to best fit a set of data points. “I’m in school to learn BUSINESS, not MATH,” said a 21-year old Taylor to a girl he was trying and failing to impress during STA 291. BUT I very much appreciate people who use that in-depth form of mathematics to explain sports to me. I’ve linked to sportsclubstats.com here before for their playoff projections, which are fun to dive into.

Now, FiveThirtyEight.com, known for their political polling predictive analysis and sports analytics, has taken an interest in the good ol’ US and L, and it’s fascinating. I haven’t taken the time to read their methodology yet, just the results, because I’m lazy. But it’s pretty cool. They started with the major European leagues, and have gone back and dropped in match data as far back as 1888. They use xG (expected goals) and xGA (expected goals allowed) to come up with their SPI figure (kind of like BPI or KenPom ratings in college basketball and F+/S&P+ in college football). They’ve even put together a comprehensive global soccer club rating from one (Manchester City, believe it or not) to 576, presently English League Two side Morecambe.

Louisville City currently ranks fourth in the USL in terms of probability for winning the USL Cup, and third in SPI. We’re second in the league in xG at 1.4 and 14th in xGA at 1.8 (gotta get that fixed). In case you were wondering, City’s presently the 361st best team in the whole world, better than Sunderland and New England Revolution, and just behind Bielefeld Arminia and Sporting Gijon in the 2. Bundesliga and La Liga 2, respectively. Like I said, pretty cool.