What Wins Games (Part 1)

In the last possession article, I concluded that possession is pointless although there was a small sample size. Recently, I built a scraper to scrape the match stats from every MLS match this season. The results point towards the same conclusion.

	Possession
Win % with 55% or more possession	27.03%
Win % with 45% or less possession	41.67%

So if not possession, they what? Shot Dominance, the ratio of a team's shots to its opponents' shots and Shots on Target Ratio, the ratio of a teams shots on target to the total shots on target are also tools used to evaluate match outcomes. The results of the tests of these two metrics are below

	Possession
Win % with 2.5X or more shot dominance	58.33%
Win % with .4x or less shot dominance	21.43%

	Possession
Win % with .75 or more STR	70.59%
Win % with .25 or less STR	7.89%

In conclusion, STR is the best predictive metric available readily on MLS Match Reports.