I am wondering if anyone here can explain this strange but persistent anomaly. What anomaly? This one: At home, the Galaxy is the absolute worst team in the league by a wide margin. But away, the Galaxy is the best team in the league, again by a wide margin. I first noticed this back in May, as I noted here. In fact, Houston was looking pretty anomalous back then too. At the time I figured it was just some sort of fluke that would correct itself with more games. And in Houston's case it was. But nothing has changed for the Galaxy, and I just don't get it. How can a team perform so well away, and be so lousy at home? It doesn't make sense to me. Do you guys have an explanation or a theory?
Have you looked at strength of opposition? Don't know if that fully explains it, but think it may be a big part of it. Edit: see analysis here..... https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/flattery-by-schedule.2059277/
The only strength of opposition numbers that I track are prospective, not retrospective. If that's right, however, this should be self-correcting. We'll see if it is. LA's strength of opposition going forward is much middle of the road.
I'm leaning towards strength of schedule, but the alternate story is the Jones injury/VanDamme benching. Here is the mls results (home in caps) up through and after the Chicago game. L,L,w,l,W,l,L,D,D w,w,w,d,D,W,L,l 8 points in 9 games at the start (0.83 ppg H, 1.0 ppg A) 14 points in 8 games after (1.33 ppg H, 2.0 ppg A) So one interpretation of this is that we kind of sucked at the start, Jones got hurt so we started playing much better, but now we're running out of players. Those three wins away (NYRB, Minnesota, SJ) were when we were at our peak for other reasons and the fact we were away is probably just a coincidence. But the samples are all too small to make much of it.
The Jones injury was a good thing (at least as far as I'm concerned) since he didn't fit with the rest of team. And once he got hurt, we saw an improvement in both home and away form. Since we played more of the first half at home and more of the second half away, the improvement in performance gets attributed to being away.
On the other hand, our away form was still better than our home form over the subsample after Chicago. I can explain it away by the number of players we've lost (in the game at San Jose, only 2 of the starters were starters at the beginning of the season), but who knows. I think there are too many stories for such a small set of games.
As discussed in the flattery by schedule thread there were a number of explanations for better away record: 1. We played softer teams on the road For example half of the away games were against teams with the 3 worst records in mls. Average ppg rank of road opponents ~15th, average for home opponents ~10th place. 2. Mainly due to the timing of injuries but also due to some bad decision making in home games we tended to put out stronger personnel when we were on the road: Early home stand: Garcia at rb, followed by Smith (coaches choice, both disasters) Jones at mid (coaches choice, didn't work well) Ema subbed out early or didn't start (coaches choice, made us slow and less dangerous) Diop at gk (coaches choice, guy makes repeated game changing mistakes) Subsequent road stretch: Diallo at rb (coaches belated choice, big improvement over Garcia and Smith) Jones out and Ema always starting and getting more minutes. (injury related, improved midfield) Rowe (3 games) and Kempin (1 game) replaced Diop as starter during our long road stretch (Rowe -coaches belated choice then ended by injury. Kempin - coaches choice.) Short version: We played with better personnel against weaker opposition on the road compared to home games. Plus some random shxx.