We’ve talked a lot this season about the term “unlucky.” It’s been used pretty extensively, from players and the manager, to fans, media, and even the club president. Hosting San Antonio in  a game with heavy playoff implications, Republic once again felt unlucky, walking away with just a single point in a nil-nil draw despite dominating every single statistic and hitting the woodwork 3 times, something they’ve now done twice the season.  

But is Republic actually unlucky? Statistically, this does have its arguments—Republic is arguably the 3rd most “unlucky” team in the league, depending on how you measure it. But what does that mean? And how do you even measure that? Let’s dive into it. 

Before we get into the detailed numbers, let’s take a quick look at how Republic lined up against San Antonio. This far into the season, there are few surprises. The back 4 of Desmond, Timmer, Kleemann, and Gurr remain solid, with Desmond in particular really taking to that left wing back role that he took over last week against Detroit. Until MAK and Benítez return, Collins appears to have found his center midfielder pivot as well, with Crisostomo and Casas partnering up at CDM while Memo controls things as a more attacking midfield. And finally, Jennings up top is no surprise. The only real surprises are on the wings, where Midence played on the right for his 2nd straight start and Malango started at the left. 

Midence has been really fun to watch, and may have earned himself the right wing spot going forward—his 6 shots accounted for ~30% of Republic’s shots, and, with 4 of those on target, he had more shots on target than any other individual player had total shots. He should have had a goal too, I still have no idea how his curling shot bounced out off the post instead of in. 

Malango has been… the opposite. His 6.63 player rating average on the season is the 2nd lowest on the team (min. 5 matches played), trailing only Blake Willey. While every source calculates player rating differently, it’s very telling that the average Malango start looks something like this, as SofaScore has it:

The man can dribble his way through nearly everyone… and that’s about it. He hasn’t had a shot on target since August 8th. He’s scored just 1 USL-C goal to go with 1 assist, all while missing 3 “big chances.” It’s just not working out wide, and I’d love to see Wolff, Spaulding, or even Leibold get the start out there to help Republic become more of a scoring threat. Malango has been called up by the Malawi National Team through October 6th, so someone on the bench has a real chance to show what they can do during the next 2 matches.

Usually, this is where we discuss the actual tactics of the match—the chess match if you will. But really, there wasn’t much to discuss here that’s outside of the norm—Republic controlled the game (64% of possession in the 2nd half), had the majority of the chances, shots, passes, etc., and just... didn’t find a goal. This has occurred far too often, often enough that the Quail City Soccer chat room is often alive with comments that Republic has been cursed. But outside of just this match, how bad have things actually been?

So let’s move on to the luck topic. One of the few ways to measure “luck” in football is with “expected goals” (xG) and “expected goals against” (xGA). xG is calculated by how likely an individual shot is to be a goal based on historical data, with a higher value being a higher chance of that shot being a goal—for example, a shot with a xG of 0.1 means that, on average, 10% of the time you would expect a shot from that location and situation to be a goal.

You can extrapolate a lot from just that statistic. For example, in this match, Republic had an xG of 1.25, meaning you would expect, on average, their attempts to result in just over 1 goal being scored. Republic’s xGA, which is San Antonio’s xG, was just 0.23, meaning they resulted in just over a 23% chance of scoring a goal between all their chances. The difference between these 2 values is called “xG difference”—and generally, if you have a positive xG difference, you would expect to have outscored your opponent.

Ok, so we would have expected Republic to have scored at least a goal against San Antonio. That they didn’t, in and of itself, is unlucky. But let’s take it a step further. How do Republic fair on the season? Well, Republic are averaging an xG of 1.48 per match, but are only averaging 1.25 goals per match. So they’re underperforming in the goal scoring category, which everyone already knew, by 0.23 goals per match. But on the other side of the ball, they’re averaging an xGA of 1.14… but only allowing 0.83 goals against per match. So arguably, they’ve actually been getting lucky on the defensive side of the ball, by 0.31 goals per match. 

Statistically, Republic has been more lucky defensively than they have been unlucky offensively, by about 0.08 goals per match. To compare this to prior years, I pulled the xG difference values in USL play over the last 6 seasons: 

So yes, Republic is actually getting quite unlucky this season in the goal scoring front, and tonight was a great example of it. In context, this is roughly offset by how lucky they’re getting defensively, but it at least can help provide some context for the offensive woes.

But we can go deeper from here. How much has all this xG vs xGA madness actually affected the season? Well, we can take those xG values and we can calculate expected wins, losses and ties, or xWins, xDraws, and xLosses, if you’re feeling fancy. Basically, you take a match, like this match, and you round each of the xG’s to a whole number. In this case, Republic’s 1.25xG rounds to 1, and San Antonio’s 0.23xG rounds to 0, and that is your “expected result”—in this case, a 1-0 win for Sacramento. Do that for all matches played, and you can calculate how many points a team should have:

Based on the statistics, these are the 5 most “unlucky” teams in the USL, with Republic technically the third most unlucky team in the league. The luckiest 5 are: 

New Mexico is particularly egregious—they’ve won double the number of games than they’ve actually won on xG. Tulsa, on the other hand, is working miracles, given they’ve won 10 games but the xG says they should have won just 1. The entire Western Conference gets completely reworked if you go based on expected points:

Republic would be in 2nd, New Mexico would drop from 2nd to out of a playoff spot all together, and Oakland and Vegas would move into playoff contention. You can sense the frustration in the Republic camp, with Head Coach Neill Collins saying this post match:

Frankly, I can’t blame him. As a manager, what else can you say when you do everything right and don’t win?

+1.02
The difference between Republic’s xG (1.25) and San Antonio’s xG (0.23). That is complete dominance of the goal scoring opportunities.

4 and 6
Midence’s Shots on Target and Total Shots, both season highs for any Republic player in a single match this season in all competitions.

3
Times Republic hit the woodwork, tying the 2-1 loss to El Paso in March for the most times in a game this season.

17
Times Republic has hit the woodwork this season. If you want to talk about luck, imagine if just half of these went in.

374.2
The average number of accurate passes Republic make per match this season, the 3rd highest in the league.

Now, the real question—does any of this really matter? In one sense, no, not at all—this is the reason the matches are actually played on the pitch and not simulated like this is Football Manager or FIFA. Anything can happen. On the other hand, knowing which teams are under performing and which are over performing can be important when analyzing teams. The “it” factor is important and some teams, like New Mexico, just seem to have it this year while others, like Sacramento, don’t. Hitting the post 3 times in a match and not scoring a goal can be demoralizing—but the odds will eventually come around. 

The Quails will just have to hold hope that the pendulum swings the other way before the playoffs. Their next big chance is this weekend when they go play the “luckiest” team in USL, New Mexico—a clash between the team most overperforming the statistics and one of the teams most underperforming them.

It’s a chance to show that Republic can play better than luck allows.