High Press, High Stakes

My name is Charlie Skahen, and I am a Junior at Jamesville-DeWitt High School. I have always been interested in the analytics side of sports, and over the past few years I've had a growing interest in soccer. This led me to decide that I wanted to research the New York Red Bulls, and how they use their tactics in games. I arrived at the research question: How did the New York Red Bulls utilize their tactics and formations to find success against their opponents? I communicated with experts and people in the field such as Francesco Riverso who is a professor for sports analytics at the Falk College at Syracuse University, Rachel Comfort who is a video and data analyst for Bay FC in San Francisco, and AJ Sikora who is a former JD student and currently a student at Dartmouth. I created multi-part video series where each video focused on a different game that the Red Bulls played in the 2024 MLS season. In the videos I breakdown the tactics and formations used by each team, and how those choices affected the result of the game.