One of the things Sounder at Heart has strived to do for as long as we’ve been around is to give Seattle soccer fans the tools they need to be the most informed and well educated. That’s why we have reporters at virtually every Sounders training session, attend every Sounders and Reign press conference and generally do the kind of beat reporting so few outlets bother to do. We then use that information to form opinions that are grounded in fact and first-hand observation.
This is what I believe has made Sounder at Heart such an important resource and why I think so many of you are paid subscribers.
But we’re never satisfied and were recently inspired by some of the features our friends at SixOneFiveSoccer.com have added to their site. So, we worked with one of our own web designers and cooked up these treats:
Get to know the navbar
Before we get into the new features, I'd also like to draw your attention to an old feature you may have skipped right over. At the top of the page is our navbar, which takes you to a variety of pages on the site. If you've not checked these out, feel free to do that now. But specifically, I'd like to draw your attention to two entries:
Standings page
I assume everyone reading this has figured out that you can find the standings as easily as you can google "MLS/NWSL standings" but what you've not been able to do until now is find the MLS, NWSL and MLS Next Pro standings all in one place. Now you can!
Not only that, but we've also included all sorts of advanced analytics that will help you understand how teams are performing beyond all the obvious stuff. (We're also working on add per-game toggles.)
Stats page
The new stats page is possibly a little more revolutionary, at least as far as this site goes. For the first time, we now have a place where you can look up Sounders, Reign and, eventually, Defiance player stats.
For now, we're only tracking league stats but we do have a ton of advanced analytics in here that come from American Soccer Analysis as well as a player rating that comes from a frankly mysterious API that we just find interesting.
What else do we have cooking?
We're still trying to figure out how to revamp our salary cap and depth chart pages, which for now are pretty rudimentary, and is Sounders-specific as the other leagues don’t make salary information public. There's also a link to the Form Guide, which is a pretty robust page that is maintained by friend-of-the-site Matt Montgomery of Wasatch Soccer Sentinel.
As you have probably noticed, we've been doing a lot of growing over the past few months and we actually have a couple more announcements to make in the near future, all of which will only add to the offerings we are already making available.
At the risk of sounding desperate, though, I want to reiterate that this is all only possible because so many of you are paid subscribers. But to keep improving things and making sure we can pay people to do all this stuff, we need even more of you to support these efforts. Please consider joining and to entice you a little more, here's a 10% off coupon to either become a Backer or Supporter.
