USMNT routs: a history and celebration {R galore}

Some people think lopsided wins against overmatched opponents are boring. I don't. I effing love watching teams I support (including, obv., the USMNT) drub opponents, score a ton, beat down the opposition, etc. So I got to thinking about the times when the MNT has really put the hurt on opponents, and being the obsessive soccer-and-stats freak that I am, I composed a list of all the times the USMNT has won a game by four or more goals. It appears two posts below.

[NB, for reasons I do not understand, I could not include the fancy image file of the orderly-looking table of the data that I originally made, either in this post or subsequent ones, so I just cut and pasted the text instead. But if anyone has ideas for how to put image files in opening posts, or in any posts of threads you start, by all means PM me.]

 

7.9.13: 6-1 v. Belize (Gold Cup)

7.5.13: 6-0 v. Guatemala (Friendly)

5.26.12: 5-1 v. Scotland (Friendly)

7.4.09: 4-0 v. Grenada (Gold Cup)

10.11.08: 6-1 v. Cuba (WCQ semis)

6.15.08: 8-0 v. Barbados (WCQ prelims)

6.12.07: 4-0 v. El Salvador (Gold Cup)

2.19.06: 4-0 v. Guatemala (Friendly)

1.29.06: 5-0 v. Norway (Friendly)

10.13.04: 6-0 v. Panama (WCQ semis)

7.19.03: 5-0 v. Cuba (Gold Cup)

1.18.03: 4-0 v. Canada (Friendly)

5.16.02: 5-0 v. Jamaica (Friendly)

3.2.02: 4-0 v. Honduras (Friendly)

1.27.02: 4-0 v. El Salvador (Gold Cup)

11.15.00: 4-0 at Barbados (WCQ semis)

8.16.00: 8-0 v. Barbados (WCQ semis)

6.3.00: 4-0 v. South Africa (Friendly)

6.18.95: 4-0 v. Mexico (US Cup)

5.7.94: 5-0 v. Estonia (Friendly)

12.5.93: 7-0 v. El Salvador (Friendly)

11.14.93: 8-1 v. Cayman Islands (Friendly)

4.4.92: 5-0 v. China (Friendly)

8.13.88: 5-1 v. Jamaica (WCQ)

10.6.84: 4-0 v. Netherlands Antilles (WCQ)

 

Some thoughts about the foregoing:
--I did this list only going back to a bit before what I regard as the modern era of US Soccer (the '90 WCQ cycle). There are some more games before that (we beat Bermuda by 4 or 5 goals in 1979), and if I'm bored sometime (likely) I might go all the way back to 1913.
--Is the four-goal threshold arbitrary? Yeah, as all numerical thresholds tend to be (e.g., the cult of statistical significance and its fetishization of the 95% confidence interval). I basically went with my gut here. A three-goal win is obviously a great performance, and may reflect dominance by the winning team. But (from looking over US games a lot recently) it's not that rare, and anyway not all dominant wins are "routs" IMO. But merely to score four goals is rare and remarkable, so to win by that margin strikes me as a good place to draw the line.
--Isn't it possible that some games where we dominated we simply scored fewer goals? Oh most definitely. Goals scored is not a perfect reflection of quality of play, as even a casual observer of the game knows full well. But this project is explicitly about goal-routs, not general dominance of an opponent (which would be virtually impossible to measure objectively anyhow). And winning by four goals is also a pretty darn good proxy for dominating the opposition.
--Both because of the relative arbitrariness of the four-goal threshold and the low-n, I don't think it's possible to extrapolate anything rock-solid from this list about, e.g., the relative quality of the USMNT, though I've made 1-2 tentative points along those lines below. Mostly I mean this just to be something interesting for those who, like me, enjoy stats and seeing the USMNT kick ass.

As for the list of games itself:
--The unsurprising strongest correlation with a rout is playing at home. Of these 25 goal routs, only 1 took place away from the US (v. Barbados, WCQ semis '00). And that game was very close until the US finally broke a tense scoreless draw in the 60-somethingth minute.
--The temporal increase is marked: there were two routs in the 80s; five in the 90s; 15 in the 00s; and three so far in the 10s. Obviously decades are a bit arbitrary and to get a sense of the meaning of this we'd have to know how many overall games there were (for one thing, there were far fewer USMNT games in the 80s so that number is a little deceptive). But without running some kind of complex stats dealie I feel reasonably confident in saying that the number of routs has risen as the team has gotten better over time (though for what it's worth with only 3 routs this decade so far we're somewhat off the pace of last decade--not sure if we can read anything into that).
--Two opponents account for almost 1/4 of our routs: Barbados and El Salvador, each routed thrice. Barbados is also the team we've routed most soundly, twice by 8-0 scorelines. We've routed Jamaica and Cuba twice each.
--We've never given up more than one goal in a rout, and 20 of the 25 routs were also shutouts.
--Once before this week we routed teams in consecutive games: Cayman Islands followed by El Salvador in late '93 (this was a period when we appeared to be playing a frenetic number of friendlies against just about any opponent we could find, presumably to gear up for WC '94).
--Just under half these games came in friendlies as opposed to tournaments (the latter including the US Cup). Seven of them were WCQs.
--Twice we routed three teams in a calendar year: 2000 and 2002.
--By contrast, the longest rout-drought the MNT has had since 1992 was about five years from 1995-2000. There was also an almost three-year drought between 2009 and 2012.

A coda: I did not triple-check these numbers, so treat this as a necessarily imperfect draft that you are welcome to help improve if you so desire. If there's a match missing or a date wrong or whatever let me know and I'll make the necessary changes.

 

Not sure what makes you think my post is about the "importance of punish[ing] an inferior opponent." I just like to see the US win and win big, and I also like historical stats. There may be serious debates to be had about the morality of drubbing opponents, but they don't interest me.

For what it's worth, none of the US wins come close to the legendary 31-0 win Australia recorded against American Samoa back in 2001 WCQ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_31–0_American_Samoa

 

I looked into this project but it got pretty grim. Some not so hot memories in there: 5-0 in GC final '09, most saliently.

 

That was before my time as an MNT fan. My fave one from the list is thus a sleeper: The 4-0 win against Honduras in early 2002 (two goals from LD, two from Mathis, three assists from McB). Just a friendly, but the first game I attended as an MNT fan was the ignominious 3-2 loss at home to Hondo in early Sept 2001. Drubbing them again in a friendly six or so months later felt like it went a little way to cleansing the stench of that crappy loss, and was also part of a pretty nice run of results in exhibitions that portended our big success in WC 02.

 

With yesterday's 5-1 rout of El Salvador, the US has tied the most number of routs in a year (3, also achieved in 2000 and 2002).

By routing los Salvos yesterday, we have now routed El Salvador four times--more than any other country (three of which were in the Gold Cup).

We've now routed three teams in five games. First time that's ever happened. Also first time three routs in a single month.