In recent seasons, when Arsenal lost—especially to a mid- or bottom-table team—they weren’t outplayed. Arsenal supporters, with an air of moral righteousness, could point to Arsenal’s beautiful play in contrast to their opponent’s negative tactics (read Jacob Steinberg’s introduction to the Guardian’s minute-by-minute coverage of Arsenal-Swansea for a great summary of Arsenal’s transformation). However, it would be nearly impossible to make a convincing argument that Swansea didn’t deserve three points. Even the often delusional Arsène Wenger admitted, “[Swansea] played well and they deserved to win.”

Prior to the two fixtures played in 2012, Arsenal had been out-passed by three Premier League opponents this season: Liverpool (in their 2-0 victory over Arsenal in the second week of the season), Manchester United (in their 8-2 thumping of Arsenal just a week later), and Chelsea (in a 3-5 loss to Arsenal). In other words, only members of the traditional big four had out-passed Arsenal; two of those fixtures were within the first three weeks of the season when Arsenal were in shambles, and the other was a 5-3 victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.

The new year has been a different story, however. Arsenal have opened up 2012 with two away losses to Fulham and Swansea. To the bemusement and discouragement of Gooners, Arsenal didn’t deserve to win either game, and they were out-passed by both opponents. Arsenal have, on average, completed 157 more passes than their Premier League opponents. Fulham, on the other hand, completed 55 more passes than Arsenal, and Swansea completed an incredible 86 more passes than Arsenal—only Manchester United, in an 8-2 victory, have out-passed Arsenal by a greater margin.

As an Arsenal supporter, I’ve been thrilled with Robin van Persie’s form. But, like most Arsenal supporters, I’ve bemoaned the lack of a scoring threat besides van Persie. In fact, RvP has scored nearly half of Arsenal’s league goals so far this season. As the season goes on, a diversified strike force could become increasingly important. Injury and fitness concerns could arise (especially for someone like van Persie who has a history of persistent injuries); opponents may adapt and better defend against a single, predictable scoring threat; and it’s incredibly difficult for a player to maintain a high level of form indefinitely.

Let’s first take a look at the number of goals scored by each of the top six clubs (ordered based on their current place in the table):

The Manchester clubs have the most potent attack while Liverpool has the weakest attack. Now let’s try to measure (roughly) the number of scoring threats from each of the top six clubs. I consider a player that has at least five goals to be a scoring threat.

Both Manchester clubs and Tottenham have 4 or 5 players with at least 5 goals compared to only 1 or 2 players for Arsenal, Chelsea, and Liverpool.

Five goals is admittedly an arbitrary cutoff. The table below shows the number of scoring threats for each club if the cutoff is set to 4 goals, 5 goals, and 6 goals.

If the cutoff is lowered to 4 goals, Chelsea seems to have a more diversified attacking force, but Arsenal and Liverpool only have 2 scoring threats. And, if the cutoff is raised to 6 goals, Liverpool no longer have any scoring threats. With a 6 goal cutoff, Manchester City have 3 scoring threats rather than 5, but all 3 are very dangerous threats: Aguero with 13 goals, Dzeko with 10 goals, and Balotelli with 8 goals.

Torres’ poor scoring form continues

In nearly 1,000 minutes of play in league games for Chelsea, Torres has found the net just once.

The U.S. Soccer Federation has released the roster for the August 10 friendly against Mexico:

GOALKEEPERS (2): Bill Hamid (D.C.United), Tim Howard (Everton) 
DEFENDERS (8): Carlos Bocanegra (Saint-Etienne), Edgar Castillo (Club America), Timmy Chandler (FC Nürnberg), Steve Cherundolo (Hannover 96), Clarence Goodson (Brondby), Michael Orozco Fiscal (San Luis), Heath Pearce (Chivas USA), Tim Ream (New York Red Bulls) 
MIDFIELDERS (7): Kyle Beckerman (Real Salt Lake), Michael Bradley (Borussia Mönchengladbach), Ricardo Clark (Eintracht Frankfurt), Maurice Edu (Rangers), Jermaine Jones (Schalke 04), Brek Shea (FC Dallas), José Torres (Pachuca) 
FORWARDS (5): Freddy Adu (Benfica), Juan Agudelo (New York Red Bulls), DaMarcus Beasley (Puebla), Edson Buddle (FC Ingolstadt), Landon Donovan (Los Angeles Galaxy)

Grant Wahl linked to a very interesting piece on Jurgen Klinsmann from the Sports Illustrated archives (June 20, 1994). Some highlights (all excerpts):

• Klinsmann grew up watching his parents, Siegfried and Martha, tethered to their bakery in Geislingen, near Stuttgart, where they showed up at five every morning to bake the pretzels for which they were locally famous. Jürgen is trained as an apprentice baker, yet it still gnaws at him that he left high school before earning his Abitur, the degree that allows young Germans to go to a university.
• After neo-Nazis threatened to disrupt an exhibition between Germany and England scheduled for April 20, Hitler’s birthday, Klinsmann spoke out stridently when organizers called it off. “Giving in to bully boys and political extremists is always wrong,” he said. “Don’t people ever learn the lessons of history?”
• “In Holland people hate Germans and German soccer,” says Mart Smeets, a broadcaster with Dutch national TV. “And we have a saying here: There’s only one good German—Jürgen Klinsmann.”
• He negotiates his own contracts, a quirk that caused one Italian agent to harrumph that the German star signs deals shortchanging himself by 80%.

Another interesting tidbit: Klinsmann played under Arsene Wenger at AS Monaco.

It was a tough loss in penalties for the USWNT against Japan earlier today, but I love this kid’s celebration after Alex Morgan’s goal.

The Telegraph:

“I have lost my enthusiasm to continue,” Warner told Bloomberg. “The general secretary that I had employed [Blazer] who worked with me for 21 years, with the assistance of elements of Fifa has sought to undermine me in ways that are unimaginable.

“Payments throughout the Concacaf and the regions and so on over the last 30 years have been done for all kinds of things.

“I’m not saying I have seen Bin Hammam make payments at this meeting, but if he did, it’s not unusual for such things to happen and gifts have been around throughout the history of Fifa. What’s happening now for me is hypocrisy at the highest level.”

Each year, the MLS Players Union releases data on compensation for every player in the league, and the union recently released the data for the 2011 season. With these new data available, I decided it might be interesting to take a quick look at the salary distribution of MLS players. This first blog post will focus on the distribution of all players in the league. In the future, I hope to also look into the distribution of compensation within teams and across teams.

From the MLS Players Union data, I use guaranteed compensation. “The annual average guaranteed compensation number includes a player’s base salary and all signing and guaranteed bonuses annualized over the term of the player’s contract, including option years.” See here for more details on the data.

The table below displays some basic summary statistics and values at various points on the distribution. As the table indicates, mean guaranteed compensation is nearly $155,000 while median compensation is just above $80,000.

The next figure displays the share of compensation received by each quintile. While the shares of the bottom and second quintiles are 5-6 percent of total compensation, the top quintile’s share is greater than 60 percent.

Within the top quintile, compensation is heavily concentrated at the very top of the distribution. The share of compensation for the top 10 percent of players (in terms of compensation) is almost 50 percent, but over half of this share—28.6 percent of total compensation—goes to the top 1 percent. In other words, the five MLS players with the highest compensation receive 28.6 percent of the total compensation to the 518 players in the league.

I was at this game last night. Thierry Henry had two goals, but Juan Agudelo had the best finish of the evening. It seems like Agudelo might have studied this classic Henry goal. Admittedly, Agudelo’s goal was not nearly as difficult of a finish, but it still resembles the Henry goal.