(Note: If using a mobile device, reading this post sideways - landscape - will improve readability of tables, data, etc.)
Comparing ECNL vs MLS NEXT "performance" through game data is meant to be a balanced exercise, executed with caution. Useful insights do exist: let's strive to uncover some of them.
Here's an overview - let's compare these:
In this post, we compare these league results through 2 frameworks:
- Consolidated Rankings: ECNL & MLS NEXT, unified under a single ranking grid.
- Quality-of-Opposition Analytics: team results are compared in-relation to the quality of their opponents.
Consolidated Rankings: 32 Teams Within Mid-Atlantic's U15 2010
Here's a summary of 2024-25 Season results:
Let's consolidate results from both leagues, in a way that's similar to how ECNL unifies nationwide conferences into its single Champions League ranking .
The above yields some insights, but it's difficult to isolate the effect of relative competitiveness levels between these leagues. The next section below gets further into this.
Quality-of-Opposition Analytics: A 3-Tier Approach
This approach:
- Aggregates each league teams into 3 cohorts: the Top 1/3, the Mid 1/3 and the Base 1/3.
- Compares the relative performance of these cohorts against each other.
- Differentiates the strongest teams in a given league... and compares them to the strongest teams in another league.
- Integrates the concept that the quality of a team's opposition will influence Attacking and Defending profiles.
For the 2024-25 Season, these teams populate their respective tiers as follows:
Here are visuals that highlight how these tiers competed against each other:
Let's go deeper into the data:
Top Team Benchmarks
Let's compare Top Teams against other tiers:
Mid Team Benchmarks
Let's compare Mid Teams against other tiers:
Base Team Benchmarks
Let's compare Base Teams against other tiers:
Specific-Team Benchmarks
Let's compare the Top 5 Mid-Atlantic teams against all 3 tiers:
Here are 3 open-ended questions related to these 5 top teams:
- When these 5 teams play against weaker opponents, shouldn't their performance improve?
- Should we expect all of these 5 teams to have ≈100% wins against Base Teams?
- Are the MLS NEXT teams on this list more-dominant than ECNL against other Top Team opponents?
ECNL vs MLS NEXT: Top-Half of the Rankings?
Quality-of-Opposition Analytics can also yield insights for questions like: what does it "take" for a team to reach the top-half rankings in these leagues? An example of an approach that addresses this question is to compare Mid Team performance... but only against other Top & Mid teams combined. See here:
Summary
During the 2024-25 Season, the U15 2010 Mid-Atlantic divisions of both ECNL Boys & MLS NEXT played a combined total of 240 regular season league games (no tournaments). We evaluated Mid-Atlantic "competitiveness" by using a Quality-of-Opposition framework, which slices each league into 3 cohorts: Top Teams, Mid Teams and Base Teams. Insights include:
- ECNL Boys' best team was Beach FC, with an 86% win-rate, and MLS NEXT's top team was Philadelphia Union, with an 80% win-rate. MLS NEXT's last-place team had no wins, whereas ECNL Boys' equivalent secured 1 win during its season.
- Although MLS NEXT produced higher GF-G as a whole, most of that variance was driven by results against its Base Teams (ie: the bottom 33% teams in that league). In relative terms, MLS NEXT Base Teams may be weaker than their ECNL Boys counterparts.
- When aggregating Mid Teams data - but only against Top+Mid Team opponents - the results:
- MLS NEXT - 59 Game Results - %W-L-D: 24-47-29
- ECNL BOYS - 45 Game Results - %W-L-D: 24-62-13
Although both cohorts achieved identical 24% wins, the variance on draws and losses is very - very! - significant. In MLS NEXT, you have to lose "... a lot less often" to increase the odds of making it to the top-half of the rankings. Said differently - in MLS NEXT - the tactical value of a draw is high... or at least, it was inside the 2024-25 Season U15 2010 Mid-Atlantic division.
Richard - from SoccerAnalytix