The Seattle Sounders Win Cheaply

Now here’s a confession you might not be expecting: we’re kind of geeky here at KCKRS. Not in the 80s way, with super-thick glasses and graphing calculators, but in a modern, overly enthusiastic yet still casual sort of way. Anyway, we really like stats. Stats are great. Stats help us make sense of the chaos that makes up life. We digress. The Seattle Sounders win a lot without spending a lot of money. That’s what this post is about.

Howard Hamilton, who runs the Soccermetrics blog, is a really smart fellow. He recently crunched the numbers to come up with a formula that reveals how much each MLS team pays per point in terms of payroll to determine the efficiency of each team.

As it turns out, Seattle, over the course of their existence, has spent less than $4,000 dollars per point. Their fellow PCNW team, the Portland Timbers, are second, with just over $10,000. Meanwhile, the third member of the Cascadia menage a trois, the Vancouver Whitecaps, have spent over $275k per point, an even worse return on investment than New York or LA.

Since we’re writers, and figuring out the tip at restaurants is basically the most advanced math we do, we’ll have to take his word on his methodology and figures, but here’s the table, calculated relative to the average cost per point of $78,783.46.

For full explanation of the math, and the table relative to the median, check out Soccermetrics.