The U.S. Women's National Soccer Team Has Brought Moneyball To The Women's World Cup

If you want to see United States women's national soccer team head coach Jill Ellis really get excited, ask her about tactics. Her eyes will get big. She'll bounce from her seat and find the nearest blackboard or scrap of paper on which to scribble how her strategic schemes evolve from defense to offense, or where she wants her central midfielders to move in the transition. She's an old-fashioned X's and O's coach.

But she's also the rare manager in the women's game to fully embrace the advent of analytics. Soccer, a fluid sport on which numerical order isn't easily imposed, has a complicated relationship with advanced statistical metrics. Most of the sport's this-is-how-we've-always-done-it establishment is leery of it.

That's perhaps even more true on the women's side, where a lot of national team programs are still figuring out how find the funds to stage proper pre-World Cup training camps, never mind calculate chances created per 90 minutes. The Americans, for their part, have the luxury of a full-time staff and year-round player salaries, camps and friendlies—plus a multimillion-dollar annual budget, which leaves room for advanced statistical analysis and sports science.

Increasingly, Ellis' squad needs every advantage it can get.

America's soccer dominance—decade-long stints as the top-ranked team in the world; a third place or better at each of the previous six World Cups; four gold and one silver medal in five Olympic tournaments—largely was legislated into existence. Title IX created a conveyor belt of elite female soccer players, produced by colleges and scooped up by the national team—a player development system unlike any other in the world. For years, the women's soccer gap between the United States and everywhere else was so wide, America could create second and third national teams that hardly would have looked out of place in international competitions.

If this ongoing Women's World Cup has taught us anything, however, it's that the rest of the world is rapidly catching up–a lesson first learned in 2011, when historical lightweights Japan and France emerged as world powers. (The former beat the USA on penalties in the final; the latter gave them a tough fight in the semifinals.) The United States' 3-1 and 1-0 wins over Australia and Nigeria, respectively, in the group stage, were arduous. A 0-0 tie with Sweden was even more so. It isn't so much that the Americans are getting worse; it's just that they couldn't get a whole lot better and other countries have caught up with savvy and aggressive development plans.

And so Ellis is hunting inefficiencies along the margins, where some gains can still be made.

"All those players know that we've gotta evolve to be successful," Ellis told me back in September in an interview for FOX Sports. "These players recognize it, the staff recognizes it, because this game is evolving so rapidly. We can't stay where we're at."

In the year since her appointment, Ellis has delved deep into advanced metrics, hoping to set her team apart. Some other countries use heart rate and GPS monitors. A few may be using some analytics as well. But none seem to exploit these newfangled tools as extensively as the Americans now do.

"As Jill has kind of gotten things going with the way that she wants to coach us and her style, she's brought more and more numbers into the game," says defender Meghan Klingenberg, who came from the rare college program, the University of North Carolina, that compiled a lot of stats. "So we talk about the number of max' sprints we have, and we have numbers on how we're performing in games."

"She's definitely into the stats," midfielder Carli Lloyd says. "If we're turning over the ball too much in a game, if we're inside the box and creating quality chances but not finishing them. We wear GPS units, which give you a good indication of how much ground you're covering, how hard you're working, if perhaps you can push yourself a little more. Those things definitely matter [to her]."

Ellis' predecessors, Pia Sundhage and Tom Sermanni, were more instinctive coaches. "Pia was big into the heart-rate [monitors] and video," says Lloyd. "But she wasn't to the full effect of 'What's the passes completed? Our possession ratio?'"

So far, Ellis has been careful not to overload her players with information, often sharing just enough detail to provide a key insight or emphasize an important point. But the Americans seem hungry for more. "It's great to have stats that you can physically see," says Lloyd. "Sometimes when you're playing the game you're kind of caught up in the moment and when you look at stats you get a bar as to where your game stands."

"I love that," says Klingenberg of the shift towards analytics. "I just keep hoping it keeps increasing to individual statistics in practice as well as in games, because I think it's so beneficial for players to see what they can do better. It's a completely objective viewpoint, it's great.

"There's no grey area and there's no bias to it," Klingenberg added. "I may think I've had an absolutely great game and I look at the numbers and I'm like, Holy crap, I've actually had a shit game. And that's pretty eye-opening the first time that happens to you."

Klingenberg argues that this was all overdue, that the way decisions were made in soccer had grown stale and a tad archaic. She also believes American success going forward will depend on being innovative, with analytics providing an edge.

"From a purely game-management standpoint," she says, "we're looking at how well we're keeping the ball and how we are going forward, when we're choosing to go forward, and what times we need or don't need to go forward or what kind of risks we're taking. Soccer for the most part, I believe, has been behind the times when it comes to analytics. I believe we [the USA] are hopefully at the forefront and we can continue delving into it because it'll only help our team become better and grow and continue to be on top of the world."