by @jmoorequakes

Christopher Wondolowski should be an American sports icon. He should be beloved and admired. If he is hated by anyone, it should be by MLS fans in the same way Indianapolis Colts fans “hate” Tom Brady. He is the underdog of underdogs – the working class man who beats the talented elite at their own game. At 36, he keeps breaking scoring records in MLS, including setting the all-time big one a few weeks ago with a four-goal match. He is on the precipice of being the first player to score 10+ goals in 10 straight MLS seasons. His time and opportunity with the US Men’s National Team should have been longer than it was – but for many fans, there would be no cry for Wondolowski’s return to the national team. No matter how many goals he scored or how often his league form was more impressive than the strikers getting the call, his national team legacy was cemented. Outside of a few San Jose Earthquakes fans and pundits, there are no calls for “Wondo” to be on the team by the American soccer public because of one infamous situation that occurred on July 1, 2014.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of that day. Chris Wondolowski will do what he does on any Monday following a Saturday MLS game. He will begin the process of preparing for the next game. Even though the Earthquakes soundly defeated the LA Galaxy in front of 50,850 at Stanford Stadium on Saturday, it is already in the past, and he’s already looking forward to the next one. Dwelling in the past would have crushed him long ago. For every goal, there are two or three misses. If you focus on the misses, Wondo, like most excellent goalscorers would probably tell you that you will never make the next one.

Only for Wondo it’s highly unlikely there will ever be a “next one” for the USMNT. If the toxicity on Twitter is any indication whenever he breaks a record, he would have to win a Men’s World Cup to erase the Belgium game – and probably still half the tweets would say, “yeah, but he missed that sitter against Belgium”, complete with a gif of the shot using an angle diagonally behind the goal. Even when he broke Landon Donovan’s all-time mark this season, at least two-thirds of the comments on any tweet from MLS, Alexi Lalas, Grant Wahl, and the like, were about the Belgium miss.

Before we move forward, let me share my own personal Wondo story. In 2012, my seven-year-old son was getting into competitive soccer. I decided he needed more exposure to the game than Fox Soccer was providing at the time, so I started taking him to Earthquakes games to see live matches. We went to an Earthquakes friendly with Swansea City at Santa Clara University, and he brought a program and a sharpie. We didn’t know at the time where the best spots were for autographs, and found ourselves standing by ourselves away from where the autographs were being signed. After the game was done and hands were shaken, Chris looked around from standing in the middle of the pitch and saw my son standing all alone against the railing. Wondo immediately ran over, jumped over the advertising boards, and gave him an autograph. That’s Wondo for you – never missing an opportunity to positively impact a young player. In 2014, he signed my son’s US jersey in the final Earthquakes game before going to the World Cup. My son was wearing that jersey during the game on July 1, 2014.

I understand that being nice to my son and other soccer loving youths in the Bay Area isn’t likely going to absolve Wondolowski of that fateful miss against Belgium in the 2014 World Cup. If you still harbor ill will toward him for that day, then this article is unlikely to change your mind. After all, this Grantland article still exists which captures the painful emotions of a nation, a national team, and Wondo himself better than any article I could possibly write. However, this is an attempt to bring an analytical approach to a matter of the heart.

Years ago one of my favorite sports segments on Fox Sports and ESPN (depending on the year) was SportsScience. The aim of the show was to take an incredible sports moment and break it down with physics – the speed of a player, the spin of a ball – and show the slimmest of margins for how the moment happened. The show demonstrated regularly the greatest of accomplishments would not have happened if they were off by tenths of a second here or there. I wish SportsScience was still around to analyze this situation, because I strongly believe the physics at play here would have much more to do with the outcome than data analytics could possibly show. But, alas, I had a poor Physics teacher in high school, and got my only C between grades 1 and 12 in that class. As such, I am woefully unable to do anything resembling a proper physics breakdown (if you can, my DMs are open). Instead, I will use data to analyze the shot and the play leading up to it and compare it to similar situations.

Let’s start by looking at the expected goal (xG) probabilities. xG probabilities tell us the likelihood that a team will score a goal based on the quality of the shot. With xG probabilities, effectively three 0.2 xG (20% chance) shots are worth the same as one 0.6 (60% chance) xG shot. We’ll revisit this later.