Teamgeist Ball No Nightmare for Mls Goalkeepers

Michael Giberson

In a follow-up to my World Cup posting comparing hype and data on the new Adidas Teamgeist soccer ball design, I’ve taken another look at the Major League Soccer data. You may recall that the new ball was supposed to be a striker’s dream and a goalkeeper’s nightmare. In fact, the Washington Post had quoted DC United goalkeeper Troy Perkins saying exactly that about the new ball: “a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.”

The World Cup data didn’t reveal a scoring boom. I wrote in July:

But the numbers generated by the 62 games played so far suggest little effect on overall performance. There have been 1458 shots taken in the 2006 tournament so far, of which 674 have been on target (46.2 percent). Goalkeepers have recorded 474 saves, amounting to just over 70 percent of shots on target.

Compare those numbers to the results through the 64 games of the 2002 World Cup: a total of 1423 shots, of which 689 were on target (48.4 percent). Goalkeepers made 451 saves, which constitutes about 65 percent of shots on target.

Average goals per game are down as well, dropping to 2.23 goals in 2006 so far compared to 2.51 per game in 2002.

So, with MLS teams now having played 29 games each with the new ball, how’s that nightmare going?

To date in 2006, both the average number of shots and the average number of shots on goal per game are down slightly in MLS games. The percentage of shots that produce a goal has fallen just a bit, too. The average number of goals per game has fallen about 12 percent, from 2.87 in 2005 to 2.53 in 2006. I don’t have complete goalkeeping stats handy, but comparing 2006 to 2005 league leaders for saves as a percent of shots on goal suggests that saves percentages are up from last year in the MLS.

It would be useful to look back more than one year, and also to analyze the numbers more carefully, but in any case it sure isn’t obvious that the ball has made life more miserable for the league’s goalkeepers.

And how about Troy “absolute nightmare??? Perkins? He’s leading the league with a 1.11 Goals Against Average.

NOTE: I failed to notice when posting the picture above that the ball in the picture is an “official replica” Adidas Teamgeist ball, rather than the true, new, high tech ball used in World Cup and MLS this year. A little inspection of the picture reveals the familiar hexagon and pentagon patterns of the typical 26-panel soccer ball. Wikipedia has more on the ball. (The Encyclopedia Brittancia online seems not to have an entry on it.)