The Colorado Rapids won a low-percentage game in which they were objectively poor last weekend. And Rapids coach Pablo Mastroeni has feelings about this, notably about your perception that numbers are ever in a position to outweigh the heart.

The following is the numerical backdrop for those comments. The Rapids were statistically wasted by Sporting KC last weekend, ground into dust over 90 minutes that were mostly hard to watch from a neutral’s perspective. The Rapids, of course, won anyway.

This is, by most objective measures, not good (!) from the Rapids’ point of view. They naturally limited their chances by possessing the ball for 27 percent of the match, and in terms of chance creation they were dire. And recent history this season would bear this out with some consistency. The Rapids have been tremendously poor in most all attacking metrics this season, and their 2.3 shots on target per game is almost two full shots less than the next worst team. Correlation between shots on target and wins is usually a decent enough indicator of success (not perfect of course – ask TFC about the 2016 cup final), and so perhaps it’s worth noting that Sporting KC, the loser in our present scenario, is currently third in the league with 4.7 and currently sits in first place in the West.

The Rapids? Last.

Mastroeni’s stinging riposte to these numbers more or less framed the man himself. Mastroeni is a feel coach, not an analytics coach, and if there is a timeline of these things he’s on the absolute extremity. He seems to distrust numbers to a startlingly feverish degree, and at least on a basic level it’s hard to understand why.

In this case, anyway, he’s wrong to distrust analytics to such a vehement degree.

Earlier this week, Zonal Marking’s well respected analytics and tactical guru Michael Cox stepped on his Twitter soapbox to elucidate why the derision of possession as a unit of importance is overstated. It’s worth pondering. The point isn’t necessarily to say that possession is a key to winning unto itself, but that it does have a story to tell in statistical probability. And that it matters, however that’s to be interpreted.

Here’s what that looks like put in MLS context over the past five years.

If anybody was wondering, here’s what the plot looks like in MLS from 2011-16 https://t.co/PaQzI3wIl8 pic.twitter.com/YhDEiH3qx9 — Ben Baer (@BenBaer89) May 30, 2017

Specifically, this quadrant is where I’m looking, the nexus of where possession and positive goal differential meet.

There are 41 clubs in this quad, the one that indicates plus-50 percent possession and a positive goal differential. There are, in comparison, 31 in the plus-goal differential with sub-50 percent possession average. That isn’t an astounding difference, but it’s enough of one in a highly limited capped league to believe you give yourself a better chance of winning than not if you keep a higher share of possession than your opponent. It perhaps isn’t paramount, but the numbers support possession being roughly equal to slightly more points per season.

The point isn’t that you can’t win by having an average possession share below 50 percent, or even that you should objectively pursue a strategy that would consistently win you a high percentage week over week. MLS is an odd enough duck that you can take a hundred different paths to the same goal. It’s merely to say that you give yourself a better chance at winning, statistically speaking, over a length of time by having the ball more than your opponent. However you choose to go about getting there.

What’s really stark, though, is what happens when possession begins to dip below even these thresholds. No team in MLS over this time period finished with anything approaching a positive goal differential with less than 46 percent possession. And MLS is even more friendly than most of the world’s leagues in this regard because parity is a field-leveler. And yet still, the numbers are there before you.

Where Mastroeni seems to run into his argument headlong is where the numbers seem fudged. I won with 27 percent possession, you can practically hear him strain through his words, so how can I ever trust them. And the true answer is that by looking at them molecularly, perhaps you can’t. But I’d argue these numbers aren’t necessarily meant to be looked at on a granular level divorced from wider context. Just as the most possession-oriented team in MLS over this frame was not all that close to its most successful in terms of goal differential, so will 27 percent possession rarely ever give you anything close to a positive result.

But it happens sometimes. Soccer happens. The game is a fickle beast, prone to setting numbers upon themselves like feral beasts caged together in close proximity. But it doesn’t discount them. Not in any meaningful way borne out over the course of an entire season, anyway. It merely provokes more important and pointed questions. It should open doors to discussion, not close them and lead to inane mic drops at postgame pressers featuring oblique mentions to heart and tenacity and whatever other buzzwords you can conjure.

Because in reality those words are just as useless as stats without the benefit of context. Mastroeni just picked a different, far less useful poison.

What’s most unfortunate is that Mastroeni seems to view all this as so much nerdspeak to be digested on a surface level and then spat out without any true introspection. I don’t doubt Mastroeni has employed some level of statistical analysis in his coaching career, although how deep it’s really gone is anyone’s guess when he questions the validity of possession and shots on their face publicly. But it’s ultimately a child’s reading of the game to take one match out of a dismal run of form in which you were dominated in every fashion except the one that matters and use it as a bludgeon for your critics. It’s weak stuff.

An analytical inspection of the game isn’t an avenue for stat geeks. It’s a legitimate pathway for those who simply want to learn more about the game. There are no truly sacrosanct stats in the game other than the final score, but if you had the opportunity to explore why the final score is the way it is, and then move to more consistently shape those final scores into palatable things that hit your record positively, why wouldn’t you? It speaks to some sort of internal defensiveness over a lack of understanding, or perhaps just a lack of curiosity to understand. Nobody would ask anyone to become an analytics fiend overnight, or ever, but to openly rage against them smacks of insecurity.

I freely admit I am math averse (I am, after all, toting a journalism degree). I freely admit there are many things about the analytical analysis of soccer I don’t understand. And yet I’d like to. If the game has secrets embedded in those numbers it’s willing to tell me, what do I have to lose in the end? Even if I doubt them, or enter a discussion over their best use, at least I’ve joined the conversation. Mastroeni would shut it down entirely.

Yes, the possession numbers didn’t ultimately matter that day on a field in Commerce City, Colorado on a particular day in late May 2017. Again, this is soccer, a game chock full of inherent statistical improbability. But to rage against and ultimately shut out the advancement of that knowledge is to leave yourself outside the reckoning of the game’s advancement entirely.