Minnesota United takes analytics much more seriously than the numbers would have you believe

Every year since 2020, the venerable American soccer statistics website American Soccer Analytics has ranked the analytics departments of MLS teams.

And for the first four years, Minnesota United always landed in the bottom tier — as did Saturday afternoon’s opponent, the LA Galaxy. And what’s the original title of that tier, referring to the apparent attitude of teams at the bottom?

“The game’s not played on a spreadsheet, mate.”

That zinger came to define the public perception of the Loons’ attitude toward data in soccer, complete with the imagined voice of a classic English soccer traditionalist. Minnesota had zero staff members with an analytics-focused job title, and so from the outside, it appeared that Minnesota was stuck in the backwards, numbers-free days of yore.

By summer 2024, the Loons had finally hired an employee with a job title that included the word “analytics.” So they managed to escape the bottom tier of the yearly ranking — though they still finished in last place in a league-wide survey of other teams’ analytics staff members, showing how little regard the rest of MLS had for Minnesota’s analytical skills.

Despite that, the ASA writers hinted at more, writing, “We have also heard that Minnesota is working with at least one group of anonymous soccer analytics consultants.”

In March, that anonymous group was revealed: it was, well, American Soccer Analytics.

As it turned out, the partnership between Minnesota United and ASA’s consulting arm dated all the way back to October 2023, back before the Loons had hired new chief soccer officer Khaled El-Ahmad or new manager Eric Ramsay.

Hank Stebbins, Minnesota’s “Head of Recruitment, Roster Strategy and Negotiation” had been hired in summer 2023 to oversee player acquisitions, and was already a longtime fan of ASA’s work. So much so, he’d been a supporter of theirs on Patreon, just because of his respect for them.

After some informal consultations with the team at ASA, Stebbins moved pretty quickly to formalize the relationship, specifically working with consultant Mike Imburgio – all in the hopes that ASA could help the team with player recruitment.

“Our goal is really to gather and analyze as much information as possible on prospective players,” said Imburgio. “We just want to build the most complete picture of a player we can, from as many different angles as we can, before any decisions are made.”

Imburgio should know about how decisions are made; he has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Texas A&M.

Trying to uncover potential soccer players from around the world is a huge task, given the sheer number of leagues and players. The Loons have scouts and video scouts watching all corners of the globe, but any sort of numerical work helps serve to filter the reams of soccer data being produced by an endless stream of games.

Stebbins says the foundation is identifying which of the world’s leagues are important and valuable in terms of acquiring players to play in MLS, and using that as the first step.

“The process that we have in place to make sure we are covering the leagues that we’ve identified as being significant, and other leagues, is the most important piece,” he said.

For evidence of how wide of a net Minnesota is casting, look no further than the leagues they’ve signed players from over the past year and a half: Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, the French second division, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden and the American second division are all represented.

Despite outside perception, the Loons’ analytics department was more than just an old dog-eared copy of “Soccernomics” in a desk drawer when Stebbins arrived. “I was pleasantly surprised with the level of some of the people in the building already,” he said, noting that the current front office has done nothing but ask for more — in the hopes of finding any edge they can get.

It’s now a data-based organization. Even for on-field play, both Ramsay and El-Ahmad regularly cite objective, stats-based evidence for their decision-making. And when it comes to how the Minnesota recruitment team now uses data, it’s not really about job titles.

“Every member of our recruitment team should have ‘analytics’ in their title, in the sense that we expect them to be doing analytical work — whether that’s data-driven, whether that’s visual, what we’re doing is large-scale information gathering about players,” said Stebbins. “Everyone should have an analytical focus.”

There’s officially no overlap between the media side of American Soccer Analysis and the consulting side, so the fact the Loons now have ASA consultants in the fold won’t affect their rating in 2025’s version of the survey — nor the attitude of their coverage. The analysts can still say Imburgio missed, “if Minnesota signs a dumb player,” said Kieran Doyle-Davis, one of the authors on the ASA website.

Consultants don’t count for the purposes of the survey, either — so despite the partnership, expect the Loons to once again be in the next-to-last tier of the rankings. Know, though, that there’s much more to the Loons and their analytics than just their staffing numbers.

You could say that this, too, is a game that’s not just played on a spreadsheet.

3:30 p.m., Saturday at Allianz Field

TV; radio: MLS Season Pass on Apple TV; 1500-AM

LA (0-3-1) has struggled to begin the year without All-Star attacking midfielder Riqui Puig (knee injury) and forward Joseph Paintsil (quadriceps). The Galaxy do have former Loons fan favorite Christian Ramirez, who scored his first two goals for LA last week. Minnesota (2-1-1), meanwhile, is missing five of its starting 11 from last week, thanks to games for international teams — including keeper Dayne St. Clair, who earned 50 of the team’s 52 points in the standings last year despite missing eight games.