Real Salt Lake goalkeeper Zac MacMath makes a save during his team’s 0-0 draw with the Seattle … [+]
Last weekend, the final three matches of Major League Soccer’s Matchday 10 finished without goals. And while that was an extreme representation of an outcome critics of the sport often bemoan, in MLS this season, it’s not that extreme.
With a bit less than a third of the regular season complete, we’ve already seen 15 scoreless ties in MLS. That’s on pace for a league record both in terms of overall number of 0-0 results in a season and in percentage of scoreless games by a considerable margin.
Roughly one out of every nine MLS matches this season that has ended 0-0, or about 1 and 1/2 per 14-game matchday.
If it continues like that, we’d arrive at the previous league record in overall number of 30 scoreless draws — set two seasons ago — by the middle of July en route to an enormous total of 53 or 54. Since the league has grown from its initial number of 10 teams to 29, resulting in far more games per season now than when it started in 1996, it will take 29 more 0-0 results, or 44 total, to surpass the previous record of 8.8% of league matches finishing scoreless, set in 2011.
Most scoreless draws in MLS regular season by number
- 30 (2021 season)
- 29 (2022 season)
- 27 (2011 season)
- 26 (2016 season)
- 23 (2017, 2020 seasons)
2023 pace: 54
Most scoreless draws in MLS regular season by percentage
- 8.8% (2011 season)
- 8.6% (2004 season)
- 7.9% (2010 season)
- 7.7% (2020 season)
- 7.6% (2016 season)
2023 pace: 10.9%
Even before Matchday 10 — which could fairly be considered an outlier — we were still on a record-breaking pace, with 12 of the first 126 matches of the season finishing scoreless, a rate of 9.5%. So even if the overall trend might not be as drastic as it appears in this exact moment, it is still highly unusual.
Goals overall are also down to 2.48 per match, on pace for the third-lowest scoring MLS regular season overall and lowest since 2010. And that would be a major reversal of a recent trend toward more scoring: Every previous MLS regular season since 2014 has featured at least 2.75 goals per match.
So What’s Going On?
The gut reaction among some fans might be to blame the league’s new, more inclusive playoff format, which will now see 18 of 29 teams qualify for the postseason. And maybe some teams are playing more “not to lose” than “to win” because of the new playoff math. So far, 30% of MLS games have finished tied, which would be the highest proportion since the 2016 season.
There’s also probably some random variance involved, since MLS teams are averaging about 2.57 expected goals (xG) per game, nearly a tenth of a goal more than they are actually scoring. That xG stat is a measure of how many goals a team would be expected to score based on the shots they take. So it means teams are scoring slightly less often than they’d be expected to given the chances created.
But maybe most to the point, we’ve seen a few individual clubs pivot towards being substantially more defensively oriented in 2023.
Take the Eastern Conference quartet of FC Cincinnati, Toronto FC, the New York Red Bulls and CF Montreal. Those four teams combined to play games that averaged 3.23 goals per 90 minutes during the 2022 regular season. For a combination of reasons, the same four teams are playing games averaging just 2.33 goals per 90 minutes so far this season.
More goals to come?
It’s possible — and maybe even likely — that this trend won’t last the whole season.
History suggests games get slightly higher scoring as the season heads into the summer months. That happened in 2021, for example, when scoring began at a lower-than-usual pace through the first two months of the season. And it happened in 2022, when 12 of the 29 scoreless ties that year were played before May 1.
And we still haven’t seen teams playing multiple league games in a single week yet. Those midweek games test roster depth and that, in theory, can lead to more defensive vulnerability.
The unknown is whether the addition of two extra playoff spots in each conference will change those trends. The recent past suggest it won’t play much of a role.
The only other time 18 teams qualified for the MLS Cup Playoffs came in 2020, when the field was expanded as a result of a pandemic-shortened season. Teams posted an average of 2.88 goals per game and played to 23 scoreless draws, a rate of 7.7%.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianquillen/2023/05/05/major-league-soccer-on-pace-for-record-number-of-scoreless-ties-in-2023/