When the Los Angeles Galaxy beat the Seattle Sounders, 1-0, when Major League Soccer opened its 2011 season on Tuesday night, each team took nine shots on goal, committed eight fouls, saw two yellow cards and was awarded four corner kicks.

Although the atmosphere at Qwest Field was special, the match itself was, well, average: in the 2010 regular season, M.L.S. teams on average scored 1.23 goals, took 9.2 shots, were awarded 4.2 corners, committed 9.7 fouls and saw 1.5 yellow cards per match.

So if L.A.-Seattle was an average match, what do these numbers tell us about the league? How does soccer made in M.L.S. compare to the big leagues of Europe? If you had to guess, would you say that the Galaxy-Sounders match had more or fewer goals, shots, or corners than the average Bundesliga match in Germany?

Here are some data on league performance to help you out. To make things comparable, I collected data from ESPN.com for the 2010 M.L.S. season (each team played 30 regular-season matches) and the current season in the big European leagues (where each team had played about 25 matches through February); that is a total of 1,215 matches.

Offensive Production

Let’s start with offensive production: the number of goals teams score per match.

M.L.S. is at the low end with 1.23 goals, along with Italy’s Serie A with its 1.19 goals. At the other end, Bundesliga teams net an average of 1.5 goals, followed by the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga with 1.36 each. So fans see about 2.5 goals in the typical M.L.S. and Serie A match, but about 3 in a Bundesliga match (a difference of 20 percent).

But lower scoring does not have to mean boring. What about other measures of offensive production?

Again, M.L.S. comes out on the low end. While teams take about 12-13 shots in a typical European league match (ranging from a low of 12.38 in the E.P.L. to a high of 13.7 in Serie A), the average in M.L.S. last year was 9.2. For the match, this means that fans see roughly 25 shots on goal in Europe, but only 18 in M.L.S.. These differences also show up when we look only at shots that are clearly on target: M.L.S. has the lowest number of shots on target, with 4.1 per team and match; at the other end, the E.P.L. has more than 6 (6.7), with the other three European leagues between 4.5 to 5.

So M.L.S. is a relatively low scoring and shooting circuit compared to the European leagues. But what happens in M.L.S. when strikers actually get a chance to take shots? How accurate are they, and do they convert their chances? There are three metrics that are useful: the ratio of goals to shots (efficiency); the ratio of shots on target to overall shots (shooting accuracy) and the ratio of goals to shots on target (conversion).

It turns out that this is where M.L.S. shines. In the typical European league, the goal-to-shot ratio tends to be about .111, or 1 goal in 9 shots taken. So far this season, the Bundesliga and the E.P.L. both have goal-to-shot ratios of .119, and La Liga is not far behind at .107; only Serie A has been struggling with a ratio of .09 (or 1 goal in 11 shots). M.L.S. shooters are much more efficient: M.L.S. clearly outpaces the European leagues with a whopping goal-to-shot ratio of .155 during the 2010 season, or 1 goal in 6.5 shots taken. That is almost twice as high as in Serie A, and more 30 percent higher than in La Liga, the Bundesliga, and the E.P.L.!

M.L.S. also performs well in accuracy and conversion (as the graphs below make clear). M.L.S. shooters are accurate (second only to the E.P.L.) and their conversion rates surpass the five leagues.

So the challenge for M.L.S. seems to be in creating enough chances for shooters to take advantage of. You can see this when you plot the number of shots (creating chances) by conversion rates (taking chances). Clearly, M.L.S. is different — on average, the league’s teams create fewer chances, but their strikers score when they do get the ball in promising field position. It is a dilemma; you cannot score if you do not shoot, and this helps explain differences in average goals per match between M.L.S. and Europe.

Fouls and Cards

Finally, a quick look at fair play, measured by fouls and yellow cards.

This season, teams in the Premier League have been called for an average of 11.3 fouls per match, while teams in the other three leagues have fouled a third more (ranging from 15 in La Liga to 16.3 in the Bundesliga). But what is most interesting about the foul statistics is that M.L.S. has by far the lowest foul totals of any of the five leagues at 9.7 per team and match.

So M.L.S. clearly is the cleanest of the leagues or its referees pay the least attention (I bet it is the former), even though M.L.S. has a reputation around the world for being a physical league. This also means that play is interrupted for a foul only every 4.6 minutes in M.L.S., but roughly every 3 minutes in the Bundesliga.

What about yellow cards? Here, too, M.L.S. refs are the least busy. M.L.S. leads the leagues in fair play at 1.51 yellows per team and match; compare that to the average of 2.64 in Spain’s La Liga. The numbers of yellows in the other leagues are 1.60 for the E.P.L., 1.67 in the Bundesliga and 1.96 in Serie A. Whether this variation reflects differences in playing style, instructions from the league, training of refs, or more skillful diving is unclear, but punishment is clearly not meted out equally. So over all we see the fewest fouls and the fewest yellow cards in the M.L.S.

M.L.S. Really Is Different

What does it all mean?

On metrics of fair play and offensive production, professional soccer made in the United States is different from the top European leagues. Play is interrupted less frequently because of fouls and there are fewer delays because of yellow cards meted out. Teams across M.L.S. take fewer shots than teams in the big leagues. But when they do, they are significantly more likely to be accurate and to produce goals than in the European leagues. Taken together, this suggests a more continuous pace of play, coupled with fewer chances leading to goals.

Here is the good news for soccermetricians and fans. In the wake of Major League Soccer’s recently announced deal with Opta, one of Europe’s top sports data providers, we will have more opportunities to compare play across the leagues. So next time you have a chance to watch a Premier League and M.L.S. match side by side, see if you can confirm what the data tell you. But, as Einstein allegedly said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

When he is not kicking the ball around with his sons or teaching at Cornell University, Chris Anderson writes about Soccer by the Numbers at soccerquantified.com.