Christen Press
All indicators are that Press is going to be returning soon, possibly even getting playing time during the upcoming Summer Cup. I’m definitely excited for her to return, but I don’t think it’s fair to expect that she’s going to be able to come back to the same level she was at previously, and I was curious if there was any kind of way to determine what we might expect. It’s been over two years since she last played, which is something in itself, and she’s also had a major knee injury. When I looked even closer at it, though, I realized that Press actually hasn’t played 1,000 minutes since 2019. I feel like that year is better to provide a baseline for comparison, as her time at Manchester United was short, and obviously full of changes and acclimating to a new team, and her first season with Angel City was also short, and full of changes, and acclimating to a new team. There was also the issue that she hadn’t played in nine months before her first Angel City game. There’s a lot of variables here, but let’s look at some other players to see how they fared. I’m going to restrict this to the NWSL, just so there are a few less variables. We’ll look at elite attackers and compare their Age 30 season to their Age 35 season, as that represents Press in 2019 vs Press today, and try to factor injuries in as well.
Christen Press
For our baseline, in 2019 Christen Press was with the Utah Royals. She played 14 matches, all starts, for 1,253 minutes. She scored 8 Goals and added 2 Assists, from 7.4 xG and 2.6 xAG. She had 61 Shots, with 25 on target, good for 41% Shot On Target Percentage, and 29 Key Passes. She made the NWSL Team of the Year.
Alex Morgan
It seems like a good place to start is with the player that Press beat out for WPS Rookie of the Year in 2011, Alex Morgan. Morgan is almost the same age, so that should provide a good comparison, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Morgan was out for her Age 30 season with a combination of maternity leave and the Covid shutdown, and her Age 29 season was also cut short, with only 395 minutes played. If we go back to her Age 28 season, she had 5 Goals and 2 Assists in 1,511 minutes, but unfortunately they weren’t yet collecting all of the other data yet. If we just want to go from peak Alex Morgan, strictly in terms of her club career, that would be her Age 32 Season, and also her first in San Diego. In that season she had 15 Goals and 2 Assists, from 10.5 xG and 1.3 xAG. Of her 57 Shots, 21 were on target for 36.8% and she had 16 Key Passes.
This year, clearly there’s a lot wrong in San Diego, but even so, Morgan’s decline has been steep. This is her Age 34 Season and she’s played roughly half the minutes of her full season in 2022. So far she has 0 Goals and 1 Assist. xG looks better, with 3.1 (6.19 over similar minutes) and .5 xAG (1.0 full season). So that’s a decline of 4.61 Expected Goal Contributions. She currently has 26 Shots, with 11 on target, for 42.3%. Again, for similar minutes as 2022, that’s 52 Shots, with 22 on target. And Key Passes are at 6 right now, or 12 for comparable playing time. So, her goals fell off a cliff, but she dramatically overperformed in 2022, and is now dramatically underperforming. Her shot totals are actually pretty similar, but her Expected Goal Contributions are down by 39%. We know that there are other factors, though. The Wave as a whole have played poorly, not just Morgan.
Morgan also just doesn’t provide a good statistical comparison. It’s kind of crazy to think that she’s not elite, because of her USWNT record, but her club career just hasn’t been at that level. Her first time in the NWSL Best XI was in 2022, while Press had four appearances on the list between 2015 and 2019. And just as an aside, it makes Casey Stoney’s firing even more shocking when you see that those first two seasons in San Diego were two of the best seasons in Morgan’s whole career.
Amy Rodriguez
Rodriguez seems like a good name to turn to next, maybe just thinking of coaches who were fired that probably shouldn’t have been, or thinking about Press’ time in Utah. Rodriguez also has her own experience coming back from an ACL injury in 2017. Her Age 30 season was the following year, 2018, and she had 5 Goals and 1 Assist in 1,290 minutes played, but 2018 is the last year that we don’t have any advanced stats. The following year, her Age 31 Season, Rodriguez had 9 Goals and 0 Assists in 2,086 minutes, 11.0 xG and 1.2 xAG, with 69 Shots (31 On Target), 44.9% Shot On Target Percentage, and 18 Key Passes. And while she didn’t make the NWSL Best XI that year, she was 3rd in the league in Goals, and incidentally, was also nominated for the Puskas Award that year.
Unfortunately, the comparison really breaks down here, as Rodriguez never played an Age 35 season. She retired after the 2021 NWSL Season, at age 33, to take a job as an assistant coach at USC. If we look at that final season, things are also a little more complicated, as she was traded midseason from Kansas City to North Carolina. But this is how that season looks: 5 Goals and 0 Assists from 7.3 xG and 1.6 xAG. She had 51 Shots, with 19 On Target, which is 37.25% Accuracy. Key Passes were 15. So from Age 31 to Age 33, her xG decreased by 3.7, but her xAG actually went up by .4. She had 18 fewer shots, and her accuracy went down 7.65%. So, she was trending slightly down, but there were lots of other factors. It is also encouraging that she was the third highest goalscorer in the league, and had her second best season, at Age 31, two years after her ACL injury.
Carli Lloyd
A player that definitely did play to Age 35, and then some, is Carli Lloyd, but going back into her career is definitely going into a time when advanced statistics were not kept for the NWSL. Her Age 30 season was the NWSL’s first, and she had 10 Goals for the Western New York Flash. The statistics I found have her with 0 Assists, but I’m not sure that anyone was even counting assists at that time. It’s hard for me to believe that Lloyd played a full season with Abby Wambach and Sam Kerr and never managed an assist.
In her Age 35 Season, Lloyd had 4 Goals and 1 Assist, although it’s worth noting that the following year, she was back up to 8 Goals and 1 Assist. I feel like Lloyd was kind of up and down her whole career, so I might average those two and say 6 Goals at Age 35.5, which is 4 fewer than her Age 30. But the data here is pretty murky.
Megan Rapinoe
Rapinoe also played to Age 35 and well beyond, but it’s actually her Age 30 season that is problematic here. That year, in 2016, she only managed 205 minutes. The following year, at Age 31, she actually managed the most minutes of her career (or at least that I can find documented) with 1,519 and she scored 12 Goals + 1 Assist. In her Age 35 season, that was down to 6 Goals + 2 Assists. But that was also fewer minutes played. If we look at Goals per 90, the two seasons are very similar (.71 in 2017 and .75 in 2021). It is, of course, a factor that she missed a lot of time with various injuries in her final seasons, but the quality of her play never really dropped off. We’re also in the position with Rapinoe that we don’t have any advanced statistics for her Age 30 (or Age 31) season.
Christine Sinclair
Switching to a Canadian for a change, we take a look at the greatest goalscorer in International Soccer, Christine Sinclair. It is frankly amazing how long Sinclair has been playing at the highest level, and while we run into some of the same issues as we had with other players, namely a lack of advanced statistics, there is still a lot to learn. Sinclair has been doing this for so long, her Age 30 season was in 2014, only the second year of the NWSL’s existence. In that year, she had 7 Goals and 1 Assist in 1,987 minutes, or .32 Goals per 90. In 2019, her Age 35 Season, Sinclair played even better, scoring 9 Goals (tied for her career high) and 1 Assist, with a Goals per 90 of .53. We do have advanced statistics for that year too. Her xG was 6.3 and her xAG was 3.4, so she overperformed her shooting, but her teammates underperformed theirs. So 10 G+A does sound about right when it’s all balanced out. She only took 31 shots, with 10 on Target, for 32.3% Accuracy, and had 29 Key Passes. 9 Goals off only 31 shots is kind of an amazing level of efficiency, maybe even unsustainable, but I think it’s clear that Sinclair was still playing at a high level. Her 9 Goals in 2019 were only behind Sam Kerr and Lynn Williams. And arguably, she was playing even better than at Age 30, although that Age 30 year, she was playing with Jessica McDonald and Alex Morgan, both more traditional strikers that would want the same space as Sinclair, while in 2019, she was playing with Midge Purce and Tobin Heath, who I think of as usually playing wider. No matter what, it has to be acknowledged that Sinclair has played at a very high level for a very long time, and has been the very model of consistency.
Lynn Williams
Lynn Williams does not fit into the age brackets that we’re looking at, but she does give us a recent example of an elite attacker coming back from a major injury in the NWSL. In 2021, Williams had 7 Goals and 2 Assists with the Courage. In March of 2022, she hurt her hamstring, and not the usual tearing of the muscle, but actually pulling the tendon off the bone, and she missed the entire season. She was traded to Gotham after the season and came back that year with 7 Goals and 2 Assists. Her Shooting Accuracy remained similar, 42.2% to 42.5%. Her shots went up tremendously with Gotham, 80 to 64, but her xG went down, 9.2 to 7.4. So of course, her Goals per Shot went down (.11 to .08), as well as her xG per Shot (.13 to .09), but having that higher volume of shots meant that she equalled the same level. This doesn’t seem as surprising, given that she played for different teams before and after the injury. I think that it’s fair to say that she has remained at a similar level, but the decline in her Goals per Shot and xG per Shot makes me feel like there was a slight decline that was papered over by the extra volume. Of course, we do have to acknowledge the age here. Williams was 27 in 2021 and 29 in 2023 when she returned from injury.
Marta
And finally, maybe our best comparison, which is fitting as she’s a player that the term “best” is often associated with. In her Age 30 season, 2017, Marta was electric scoring 13 Goals and adding 6 Assists for Orlando, playing alongside Alex Morgan. She finished second in the league in Goals Scored, behind only Sam Kerr. This was by far the best year that Marta has had in the NWSL. Her Age 35 season was wiped out, though, by an ACL tear suffered in March of 2022 during a Challenge Cup game. She returned in 2023, playing 1,439 minutes and scoring 4 Goals with 4 Assists. It’s really tempting to look at this and say that there was a huge dropoff in these six years, but actually in her Age 31 Season, Marta also had 4 Goals + 4 Assists in 1,308 minutes. Things just really clicked in 2017. Every season after that, she’s finished with between 4 and 6 Goals and 6 and 8 G+A, although it looks likely that she’ll finish ahead of both of those this year.
Looking a little closer at her Age 36 Season, since we have the advanced statistics, we do see a decline, especially in goalscoring. Her 28 Shots are her lowest recorded season. Her xG was 5.6, marking the only time that she underperformed her xG in the time that that stat was measured. And perhaps the worst sign, all 4 of those goals came from penalties. She scored no goals in open play. Her playmaking did get better, with the number of Key Passes increasing each year, and 2023 marking highs in xA and xAG.
Overall Comparisons
I’m including a graph here to put all of this information in one place. The first number represents an average of the Goals + Assists from the Age 30 season, or the closest to it, with an additional season before or after. I’m doing this to try to get a clearer picture of where that player was generally at, and not have the data skewed by one monster season, e.g. Marta. The second number respresents the G+A from the Age 35 season or final season.
G+A Comparison
Conclusions
Sinclair is the only player that improved her G+A over this timespan (side question, would that give her the edge over Marta in the GOAT debate?), while Lynn Williams kept her level, but is an outlier due to her age, plus we’re only looking at seasons two years apart in her case. I’ve also changed Morgan’s second number from a 1 to a 2, as a projection of her current G+A over a full season, as that number is coming from the current season.
If we put all seven of these players together, we find that the G+A in the later season was 59.26% of the orginial number. If we apply that to Press, this is easy, because in her 2019 baseline season, she had 10 G+A, so we’d expect somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.9 G+A in a full season now. Of course, the season is already underway, with 16 of the 26 games played. So for the final 10 games, going off of these calculations, we’d expect 2.27 G+A from Christen Press.
I’m going to be the first to say that I don’t consider this exercise to be completely accurate. There are far, far too many variables impacting all of these numbers, and I think that some of the early data is suspect. Also, these are all attackers, but they do play different roles and positions. There’s also the issue of how good the rest of the team was in each respective year. However, I think that there are some overall trends that have value. We do see a general decline in offensive output, but while that’s most apparent in goalscoring, we often see an upward trend in playmaking. Injuries also seem to have less of an impact than the player’s age, which slightly surprised me.
But the whole point of this exercise was just to get an idea of what we should expect, and I think that between 2 and 3 G+A does sound fair. Can Press beat that? Absolutely, but in terms of what we should expect, I think that 2.27 G+A is a good number. I do think that it’s encouraging to note that several players have returned to their previous levels after major injuries, and we’ve also seen players performing well in their Age 35 seasons. And if nothing else, this exercise was a fun trip down memory lane to look at some of the true NWSL greats. Let me know if there’s someone else you think I should have included.
I do also have thoughts on Angel City cutting Le Bihan, as well as Bay and Iger offically becoming controlling owners, but I’m going to wait to write about it, as I think that a few more dominoes are going to fall in the coming days. We’ll see.
Stats are from FBRef.