About 24 hours after each Minnesota United FC match, Loons sporting director Manny Lagos and coach Carl Craig receive an emailed ream of PDFs from Moscow.

It’s their weekly trove of soccer stats and diagrams from InStat. United has hired the Russian-based company to track and record the Loons’ success in the North American Soccer League, which until a few years ago had no measurements beyond goals, saves and maybe assists.

In a click, Lagos can dive into data that was nowhere to be found back when he hung up his Major League Soccer jersey and moved into the front office of Minnesota’s only pro club, then known as the Thunder, in 2006.

Back then, Lagos said, “The analysis came through just the head coach and through the coaching staff’s eyes and their gut reactions to watching players.”

Lagos and Craig have had access to InStat data for a few years. But now this season, another stat company, Opta, has begun providing online, in-depth stat displays to club supporters. This has been trending through the world’s top leagues.

Among the statistics: passing accuracy (percentage of completed passes based on direction), clearances (removing the ball before an opponent’s scoring chance), crosses (a longer pass entering the area in the front of the opponent’s net). And there is much, much more.

“Instead of a foreigner’s game, it can be viewed as an American game because stats are so important in American sports,” said Craig, who shares a birthplace with the sport, England.

Opta also provides field diagrams that show, for instance, average position of players, revealing a side’s formation — from defenders, midfielders and forwards — and where the attack is focused and successful. Lagos and Craig also can see an opponent’s passing history to identify and try to neutralize integral players.

“It’s been an astronomical shift,” Lagos said.

Here’s United’s MatchCenter spread on their website from the 2-2 tie with Ottawa last Saturday. This shows, for instance, that United forward, No. 21 Christian Ramirez, and No. 10 Ben Speas were much closer to Ottawa’s net than the Fury’s attacking players were to the Loons’:

BOOKED

United supporter Dave Laidig co-wrote a chapter on soccer analytics in “The Complete Darkness 2015,” an annual book about each Loons season.

With the assistance of United’s InStat reports, Laidig and Wes Burdine looked into, for instance, the number of goals off set pieces (corner kicks, throw-ins, free kicks and penalty kicks) and the most-used and successful direction of their attack — left, center or right.

They also examined how United highly values the attacking prowess of outside defenders Kevin Venegas and Justin Davis, owners of contracts that will carry over to United’s jump to Major League Soccer as soon as next season.

Laidig and Burdine wrote, “Venegas’ role in the attack stands out for his relentlessness in putting the ball in dangerous areas. He led the (NASL) with 11 balls into the box per 90 minutes.”

Venegas most recently showed off his play-making ability in the 75th minute of United’s 2-2 draw with Ottawa last Saturday. He dribbled the ball down the right side of the penalty area and targeted a cross to attacking midfielder Ben Speas, who converted the goal.

That play was depicted in United’s MatchCenter, pictured below. United midfielder Lance Laing, No. 17, threw the ball in at the bottom of the shot. He later passed it to Venegas, No. 22, who crossed the ball to Speas, No. 10.

The “cross” stat is nascent, as is Venegas’ perfect-touch recipe of velocity and angle on the pass to a teammate, said Craig, an assistant coach in Minnesota since 2010 before succeeding Lagos this year.

“Venegas’ delivery in previous years has left a lot to be desired,” Craig said. “Now he is a lot more composed, and he is putting the ball into areas where basically you just have to get on the end of it, and it will probably fly in.”

Understanding the nuance of the cross, and Venegas’ improvement in his delivery, is not represented in a new stat column. That’s something that remains qualified by the coaches’ eye.

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Minnesota United’s injury list won’t shrink much in near future But when fellow defender Damion Lowe, on loan from MLS’ Seattle Sounders, was named to the NASL team of the week in April, a full stat line better represented his impact on the game. He scored a goal, but also had five duels (beating an opponent one-on-one), four interceptions and two clearances.

“I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback,” Neal Malone, the NASL director of public relations, said of the new stats. “It lets you understand how well a player is playing in their particular position, even if they don’t get the main stats like goals and assists all the time.”

NEXT LEVEL

Since 2008, Manchester City, one of the top teams in the English Premier League, hired a large team of data analysts.

Gavin Fleig, City’s head of performance analysis was quoted in the book “Soccernomics” as saying, “The top four (EPL) teams consistently have a higher percentage of pass completions in the final third of the pitch. Since the recruitment of (four players) over six months, our ability to keep the ball in the final third has grown by 7.7 percent.”

Simple possession percentage — United’s 52.7 to Ottawa’s 47.3 last Saturday — is often mentioned by fans and commentators as having perceived value, but Craig’s focus is on how possession is obtained and maintained in the final third, the area closest to the opponents’ net.

“The fact the other team might have the ball for more minutes and seconds is really irrelevant,” Craig said. “Ultimately, it’s how many times do we get into the attacking third (of the field) with the ball in possession, with the opportunity to score goals. That’s the key stat for me.”

Laidig compared valuations on possession in the attacking portion of the field to how the the Oakland Athletics equally valued walks and singles in the famous movie and book “Moneyball.”

Malone added, “Sabermetrics and all that stuff is huge (in baseball); I don’t think we are necessarily getting to that point yet.”

At least not publicly.

Laidig said an up-and-coming advanced stat is “expected goals,” meaning the probability a player will score from different places on the field — from the top of the 18-yard penalty area or, say, from six to 10 yards out on the left side of the net. In theory, this resembles a shot chart in basketball and can favor a player’s preferred foot.

“You get an idea if a striker is a little bit better than another striker,” Laidig said.

Laidig has heard Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who leads another top English club on the field, mention expected goals in post-match interviews.

For instance, Wenger said, “ ‘Our expected goals was 1.5 goals, and we were a little bit unlucky,’ ” Laidig relayed. “It’s not just the stat geeks; it’s the large clubs that are mentioning this.”

CRUZ-ING ALONG

During his seven-season career, including three MLS stops, United midfielder Danny Cruz has seen clubs place an increasing importance on statistics. When he was with the Philadelphia Union from 2012-14, he received stat packets before weekly training started, and a computer program would categorize situations for players to peruse.

“It would be clip after clip after clip of touching the ball; things like that helped, for sure,” Cruz said.

Last year, Cruz played for FK Bodo/Glimt in Norway’s top league. The coach there didn’t care about stats at all, he said, but players could check them out if they wanted.

Cruz said he’s between those two schools of thought on stats. He says circumstances must be factored in. For instance, he might have barely gotten a touch on a ball, and it’s considered an incomplete pass. However, in the bigger picture, that touch could have disrupted the other team’s attack.

But as an attacking player, Cruz focuses on “key passes,” movement of the ball into a goal-scoring position. “If you are playing in a key pass, then you’ve done part of the job and hopefully someone gets on the end of it and scores,” Cruz said. “That is interesting to me.”