⚽️ The NWSL will be a completely new world for Jonatan Giráldez
My Week in Sport(s): Barça Femení's outgoing coach, a win for Scottie Scheffler and Carlos Alcaraz
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⚽️ How the competitive structure of the NWSL compares to European football
⛳️ Two things that are true about Scottie Scheffler
🎾 Carlos Alcaraz, elite ball-striker
⚽️ The NWSL will be a completely new world for Jonatan Giráldez
Spend even a short amount of time wandering around Barcelona, and you might wonder why anyone ever leaves.
But both incumbent managers of the Spanish city’s major football club will be departing at the end of the current European season — albeit in very different circumstances.
Xavi — approaching the end of a relatively poor campaign with the men’s side — simply doesn’t want to put up with the mental strain of one of the biggest jobs in football any longer.
Barça Femení head coach Jonatan Giráldez, on the other hand, has made a decision that is likely to result in him feeling even more stressed1.
One way of thinking about European football is that its competitions are optimised for quality over jeopardy.
The way financial resources are earned and distributed means that today’s top teams are operating on a completely different level to those lower down the table — but football’s inherent randomness also means that upsets are never out of the question.
In the women’s game in Europe — where the pace of adaptation to professionalism has varied considerably between leagues and between clubs — that model is currently being stretched to its limit.
This iteration of Barcelona’s women’s team has been so good that — in league play, at least — their opponents rarely even sneak a lucky, undeserved result.
They have won 46, drawn 2 and lost 1 of their Liga F games across the last two seasons2 — and have actually improved their underlying performance levels between last season and this season.
In aggregate, they have created 3.4 expected goals per game on average and conceded only 0.4 to their opponents since the beginning of their 2022-23 league campaign.
There is daylight between Lyon — the team with the second-best underlying numbers over this period — and all the other top teams in Europe.
Then there’s daylight between Lyon and Barça, too.
In this context, it’s not as surprising that Giráldez has accepted a job with the National Women’s Soccer League’s Washington Spirit, which he will begin at the conclusion of the ongoing European season.
He will reportedly be receiving a healthy pay bump in the NWSL — but he’s probably also just become a bit bored by the relatively uncompetitive footballing landscape:
What he will encounter in the USA will be unlike any challenge he has faced in Spain (or on the continent) during his time in Barcelona.
The different style of play he will encounter from his competitors in the NWSL is one major question, which has repeatedly flagged by
3 and others in their analysis of Giráldez’s move.Current San Diego Wave head coach — and former England international — Casey Stoney had this to say about the transition that lies ahead of him:
But even before you get to questions of tactics, far more important is the fact that the relative talent advantage he has over every other opponent will disappear as soon as he arrives in Washington, DC in June.
Barça under Giráldez have tilted the field to a comical degree against the other teams they’ve faced over the last couple of years.
They live in the opposition box — and rarely spend any time defending their own — in both their domestic league and the more competitive UWCL4.
They may do this to a greater degree under Giráldez than they would do under a replacement-level manager — but it’s probably prudent to conclude that it’s much more to do with the calibre of their squad relative to other teams’ than with his coaching.
And this sort of talent disparity just doesn’t exist in the NWSL, where parity abounds5.
Every NWSL team in 2023 averaged at least 16 touches in their opponents’ penalty area per game — and no one had more than the Portland Thorns’ 28. On the other side of the ball, every team allowed between 17 and 30 penalty-box touches per game.
So far in this year’s Liga F campaign, Barcelona have averaged 54.6 penalty-box touches per game — and conceded only 5.5.
The league’s salary-cap rules will make it difficult for the Spirit to create anything like such a talent advantage for Giráldez in the NWSL — even with the financial backing of majority owner Michele Kang.
Competitions set up this way have obvious virtues for spectators who crave jeopardy.
But they also have real downsides. The NWSL is simply not designed to accommodate all-conquering football teams of the kind that Giráldez is used to managing.
In a recent post about randomness and parity in football,
had this to say in relation to MLS — the USA’s other major professional league:It’s plausible to argue that ‘the decided upon level of parity’ in the NWSL has been set too high too6; at minimum, it requires those who come over from Europe to make significant adjustments to their mental model of how league football works.
DC is notoriously a pretty oppressive place to spend a summer — and I wouldn’t be surprised if Giráldez felt the heat7 much quicker than his impressive track record with Barcelona might lead you to predict.
⛳️ Run the Numbers
Scottie Scheffler — who I wrote about in the newsletter last summer — got his first PGA Tour win of 2024 in last weekend’s Arnold Palmer Invitational.
A major part of that was the fact he sorted out his putting: he gained more than a stroke per round on the greens over an average Tour player for the first time since February 2023, according to Data Golf’s model.
Brody Miller of The Athletic wrote an interesting article about his game titled ‘How should we discuss Scottie Scheffler’s greatness vs. his weakness?’ a couple of weeks before his win at Bay Hill.
I find that sort of framing a bit perplexing, though.
To a greater degree than perhaps any other sport, golf allows observers to break down an athlete’s game into its discrete parts and estimate how much of an impact each part has on their overall performance level.
For Scheffler, as for any other sportsperson, multiple things can be true at the same time. A measure like Strokes Gained illustrates this perfectly — and it’s precisely why he’s such an interesting golfer.
The most probable career path for him from this point on is the most obvious one: he will keep competing at the top of the sport because his ball-striking is that good, but his putting will hold him back from reaching Tiger-like levels of dominance.
With athletes like Scheffler, it’s best to simply enjoy their game for what it is. Time spent pining for further technical improvement which might never come is time we could be spending marvelling at the jaw-dropping skill that is already right there in front of us.
🎾 Watch the Games
How you feel about consuming a sport via highlights8 probably depends on what you’re trying to get out of the time you’re investing.
Of course, it’s not the best way to try and understand the completeness of a contest — or of a single player’s strengths and weaknesses.
But there’s nothing wrong with simply marvelling at the creativity and skill of someone like Carlos Alcaraz, who has a game which is built for highlight reels.
His feathery drop shot — which stretches the area of the court his opponents have to try and cover during every rally to breaking point — rightfully gets a lot of attention.
There’s nothing quite as sweet as watching him dispatch a rocket forehand, though — and he opened the first set of his third-round victory over Félix Auger-Aliassime at Indian Wells earlier this week with a beauty.
Alcaraz’s seventh shot of the point was preceded by a cross-court backhand from Auger-Aliassime, who had served to begin the match.
With supreme balance, the Spaniard is able to backpedal a couple of steps towards the left corner while simultaneously raising his racquet to shoulder height to create an efficient and powerful path to the ball.
He then reverses direction and explodes forward through the shot — with both feet leaving the ground momentarily, in characteristic style — and sends a winner down the line that his opponent has no hope of reaching.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday March 23rd.
If also much better remunerated.
They’ve been clearly better than everyone else in Champions League play by the underlying numbers, too — although Lyon will have closed some of that gap with a strong group-stage showing this year.
Context for the Liga F figures which follow: in the UWCL in 2022-23 and 2023-24, they have averaged 50.2 touches per game in their opponents’ box and conceded only 8.6.
For reference, the best NWSL team by xG difference per game in 2023 — the Portland Thorns — recorded a figure of +0.6. The number of clubs across England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain which have a higher per-game xG difference since the start of 2022-23: 18. (Across the NWSL seasons for which advanced statistics are available on FBref — 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 — only 1 team has ever had a per-game xG difference of better than +1: the 2019 North Carolina Courage.)
The best team in MLS in 2023 was at around +0.5 xG per game — in a comparable range to the top of the NWSL.
On a related note, I really like this chart of historical average temperatures on NWSL matchdays from Alison Gale; it captures the range of conditions in which the Spirit can expect to play their home games very nicely.
This is a good read from on ‘TennisTok’.
It took me a week to get back and read this, but I'm glad I did. First, it made me wish I knew more about last season's Barca women when picking my Dominator of the Year for 2023. I'll add them to my list of team's to pay closer attention to as their season wraps up this spring. And second, the concept of "the decided upon level of parity" is something I'll file away to think about for future champions and their particular league environments.
Thanks so much for reading Scott!
Last year’s team was so good - and the fact they’re better by the underlying numbers this year is just silly. I’m hoping they end up playing Chelsea in the next round of the UWCL so I can go and watch them!
On the competition structure aspect of things - no one is better at discussing all of the factors which go into it than Twenty First Group, whose work I’ve referenced a lot in the past: https://www.twentyfirstgroup.com/content/thought-leadership/