May 4, 2024 – Rodrigues heads out a corner kick from the penalty box in the San Jose Earthquakes 3-1 win over southern California rivals, Los Angeles FC, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Photo credit: Sara Nicole Mindful Photography for Quakes Epicenter.
As I write this, the San Jose Earthquakes have won two straight MLS league games and three straight in all competitions as they head into a place where they have never won in MLS league play, Providence Park in Portland. I am naturally a counter-culture analyst when it comes to soccer teams. Very few teams are actually as good as advertised, or as bad as dreaded, even one-third of the way into a season. If sentiment is one way on a team, I’m almost always going to lean the other way.
The main reason for this is usually the underlying numbers and the way the sport works over a full season, particularly in the enigma that is Major League Soccer. The season can be divided into five typical parts:
- The early season where teams have not yet fully figured out their cohesion, and opponents either take advantage or luck into results
- Some teams will be good but haven’t yet figured it out
- Some teams appear to be good but have gotten lucky their opponents are making mistakes — they will be middling to bad
- Some teams start bad and make mistakes but the underlying numbers say they will get better
- The early-mid season where teams begin to mature into their mid-season form
- Early lucky teams start to get exposed and trend down
- Teams that are actually good start to look even better
- Teams that had good underlying numbers start to come out of the basement
- Truly bad teams are proven to be bad
- The mid season where it starts to get hot outside and teams start to press less and the coaching changes begin
- Teams now know who they are and take on more of those characteristics. They believe their own hype or believe they aren’t good. This belief feeds the team behavior.
- Teams that had success with pressing are now forced to find other ways to win — some will and some won’t.
- Teams see more patterns in their opponents and work hard to shut them down — better teams will adjust and find alternatives to the early and early-mid season patterns they displayed
- Teams that haven’t found their way or are legitimately bad start to fire their coaches to “save the season”
- The late-mid season where teams are trying to add in the secondary transfer window
- The secondary transfer window opens and some teams can make themselves better (or ruin good chemistry) with more changes
- Deeper teams are faring better because of international call-ins, injuries, and yellow-card suspensions
- Shallow teams can’t add depth fast enough and begin to fade
- More teams are firing their coach after some false positives in the mid season
- The late season where teams are trying to make the playoffs
- Top teams are preparing for the playoffs and rotating smartly
- Middle teams are fighting for a spot and are probably not rotating which will hurt them in the playoffs
- Bottom teams have checked out and are just trying not to get hurt before their winter vacations
I mean, that’s a whole article right there. We could just stop and absorb all that for a while. But let’s follow the 2023 Quakes through this cycle:
- 1.2 (early luck) →
- 2.1 (get exposed) →
- 3.3 (didn’t adjust) →
- 4.3 (too shallow) →
- 5.2 (not rotating)
The 2023 team rode a hot-enough start all the way to the ninth spot in the Western Conference. Early season success with meh-to-bad underlying numbers is a powerful drug (hello, 2022 Austin and 2023 STL City).
Let’s look at the 2024 Quakes so far:
- 1.3 (start bad with mistakes) →
- 2.3 (good underlying numbers and improving)
Unfortunately, the bad start was a really bad start. But the underlying numbers have consistently said this team should be better (we’ll examine them in a bit).
Now, the important part of the season will happen following the next three games, (assuming the Quakes can get at least three points in that stretch and not fall further back off the playoff pace): can the Quakes find new ways to get points as the league adjusts to them with Hernán López?
Should the 2024 Quakes be good?
At the moment, it’s tough to say seven points in the last three games means they are “good” or even “should be good”. But let’s say they should not be only-10-points-bad.
As the ESPN Power Rankings said this week:
This has now become a pretty good attack. With the addition of Hernán López, this might be the most talented and deepest Quakes attacking unit since 2012, and that particular attack was usually only good after the 80th minute. Even this team’s defenders like Rodrigues and Costa can score.
The Quakes are tied for 7th in goals in MLS. The 1.5 goals per game clip is the best since Matias Almeyda’s free-wheeling 2019 season that finished at 1.44 goals per game. After that, it’s a ways down to 2022’s play-from-behind team under Almeyda and Alex Covelo that scored a heckuva a lot of their goals while losing.
The 2024 team is just behind the 2019 team in xG per game as well and may catch that if López can really help the attack sizzle. Another three shots per game would likely put them in the upper echelon of attacking units in MLS behind Inter Miami.
In a 10,000 season simulation (not including current results), the most likely full-season points for this team should be 50-ish points even with the shots the defense is surrendering.
But that’s not what’s happened.
The Quakes are 12th most in MLS in total shots against — not terrible. Their xG against is middle-of-the-pack. They even block a not-bottom-tier 27% of shots, indicating they may be getting out to the ball as well as other MLS teams who are giving up far fewer goals, however opponents are getting 40% of their shots on frame, second most in the league, resulting in a third most shots on target against San Jose keepers. Is that unlucky or is that a defensive problem? We can’t be certain just by this data.
San Jose kept getting points when the attack faltered last season due to Daniel, who was saving shots at an MLS top-tier 78% rate. This year? The goalkeepers are a combined fifth from the bottom with 65%, about 5% lower than the MLS average.
Here’s the kicker: opponents are scoring at a 15.5% non-penalty conversion rate this season while xG says they should be scoring around 10%. If this pace continued for all 34 games, it would be the second-worst MLS rate in the TAM Era to the 17% of Almeyda’s 2020 team (that played only 23 official league games). That team also had a league-worst xG per shot against (0.13) and Daniel Vega goalkeeping. This team’s xG per shot against is a pretty-respectable 0.09.
Some of the blame falls to a league-high three deflected goals given up (there’s your unlucky part), but that only drops the conversion rate to 14.7%. Add in four penalties against (unlucky or dumb? you decide), and you have a team that has given up the most goals in MLS.
The glass is half full
I say this can’t continue. I mean it is theoretically possible it can continue, but it has never happened with these metrics before, and I’m 99.9% sure it’s not going to happen now. In any season where a team has started like this, things have course corrected. It’s particularly egregious that it’s happened at home as well as on the road, and it’s going to get better at home. Even Almeyda’s 2020 team was much better than that at home — heck, they even made those bastardized playoffs.
Either the defense will tighten up and allow fewer shots on frame (it’s already starting to happen) or the goalkeeping will improve at least 3% with Yarbrough finding his form and a late-season returning Daniel. If either happens, the Quakes will have an outside shot at 43+ points and a play-in game or better.
If San Jose’s defense can move opponents closer to their expected conversion rate of 10%, while playing somewhere between their current own scoring rate and own xG per shot, these are their chances the rest of way:
The gold bar is the simulated Western Conference place finish based on median points for each team across the simulations.
This says the Quakes have a 42% chance at 9th or better still, so it’s not over until it’s over. A win at Portland would really help, and a loss can be still be overcome.
Why are the 2024 Quakes a better team than 2023?
Simple: take out the goalkeeping anomaly, and the defense should be performing at least as well as last season, even including the late-game capitulation that has happed in both seasons (I’ll argue this is much more normal in MLS than people think it is). The shots per game against and the xG of the shots against are on par with each other. If the defense can only allow the same rate of shots to reach the keeper as almost every other team in MLS, between 30% to 35% shots on target, and getting near-average goalkeeping, then the defense should be about the same the rest of 2024 as they were in 2023. Good enough.
The attack, however, is much improved and should get better with López as we’ve seen already. They won’t keep scoring three goals a game, but even 1.4 to 1.5 the rest of the way should be good enough with a closer-to-average defense to have a good shot at sneaking into the playoffs. Anything better on either end could push them higher.
Add in a reinforcement or two in the summer window, and this could be a 50th anniversary that we’ll look on with some fondness as an exciting team that climbed from the basement to make the playoffs. Here’s to the coming summer months.
