Hi everyone, As I continue on the quest to someday get a PhD, I find myself going nuts with data collection. I have now hit my newest obstacle. I am writing a thesis on attendance and competitive balance in MLS, and I'm looking for several ways to measure team strength. One of which I have agreed with my advisor will be the number of players on a team, that were capped in each year for every team. Now my question is, does anyone know where I can find information like this? I have search the MLS site and came up with some people, but I don't think its a definitive list. Any help would be appreciated.
http://www.ussoccer.com/common/stContent.jsp_16-TMNT04.html Here's a link to the U.S. Soccer 2005 player pool. Probably a good starting point.
American Soccer Archives A wealth of information can be found there. US soccer hall of fame player registery US international results and lineups Major League Soccer player registery There you go. You have to search through it, but all the info you want is there.
You're talking about both US and foreign players, I assume? That's going to be a difficult project. The US players won't be that tough given the resources that were provided already. Foreign players will be another story altogether - and I think you need them to do what you're discussing. You'll probably have to go through and list all the foreigners first for each team/year, then figure out which ones were likely to have played internationally at the time, then go chase down the box scores for their countries' games that year. I've never heard of a site that has those box scores, but there may be one, I don't know. Good luck!
What you need to do is contact both the U.S. Soccer Federation and MLS HQ. Ask for the "communications" or "media" department. Explain what you're doing (your research) then request the most recent media guide - or in the case of MLS, team guides. MLS may just supply you with contact information for the 12 existing franchises.
Well I use to intern in the league and have been unsuccessful so far in finding anyone who has such information. And yes I'm looking for all players both domestic and international. The original study that looked at attendance (done by Todd Jewell) used number of All Stars as a variable to help determine team strength. With the numerous changes in All-star game format, I found that using this variable to retest would not be a good way to test team strength. Thus I decided to look at callups for national team games.
you can always list all the foregin players on Big Soccer at appropriate times with the appropriate lip service and let everyone else do the work for you
Well still no word for MLS, I would prefer not to have everyone do data collection for me, since it is a lot of work. But this brings up yet another problem I have run into. Another of my variables is attendance/stadium capacity ratio. So now I am trying to collect data of where every game ever in MLS history was played and what the stadium's capicity was in that year. Fun fun!
Well my advisor might murder me, or my thesis might get beaten down in the review process but I have decided to include number of all-stars in as a measure. Instead of having it number of all-stars, I decided to put the ratio of all-stars a team has. This should help to deal with the change. Also those playing for the US. National team in the US vs All Stars game will also be considered all-stars. But that brings up my next problem............ Data collection again. I have found the game recaps for all of the games, but the problem is some of them don't mention everyone who was on the bench and didn't play. And I need everyone and which club they were in service to at the time of the all-star game. Once again, I call upon the citizens of BigSoccer, do you know any references that has all of this information lumped together? Also I emailed MLS twice, and another company that does attendance number analysis, and the authors of the other paper. None of them have replied. The fun world of data collection!
Ooh, I'd take a look at the rosters for the 1998 All-Star Game before going with this. [Professor Frink voice]Many players, not too many good[/glaven]
Has there ever been anyone who stayed on the bench throughout an All-Star Game, unless injured? I thought the idea was to give everyone a run-out...