Is Luis Muriel Who We Thought He Would Be?

Winston Churchill famously evaluated what Russia would do during World War II by saying, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key.” In the grand scheme of things, the performance of one player on Orlando City’s 2024 squad is slightly less important than what Great Britain’s prime minister was discussing, I think, but when analyzing Luis Muriel and how his season has gone thus far, I continue to come back to the same question: is Luis Muriel underperforming expectations or were our expectations never correct in the first place?

Let’s get right into it — Muriel’s traditional stats thus far this season do not look fantastic for a striker (though it must be said that his post-goal dance on Saturday, dubbed “The Muriel” on this week’s episode of The Mane Land PawedCast, did look fantastic). Here is a chart, using data from fbref.com in collaboration with Opta, that shows some of his 2024 stats, their rank in MLS, and their rank on Orlando City (for some of these metrics I included a qualifier of number of attempts and chose 19 as the minimum, because for many teams that would mean a player had averaged at least one attempt per game in that category):

For a player who is, according to the MLS Players Salary Guide, the 12th-highest paid player in MLS, you would like to see a lot of those ranks closer to the top 10 or 20 in the league than what you see in that chart. For a player who is by far the highest paid on Orlando City’s 2024 team, and is the second highest-paid player ever for Orlando City (Kaká was the highest paid), you would like to see him leading the team in at least one of those categories, if not several.

The bottom two in particular stand out to me, as there are 125 MLS players who have taken at least 19 shots this season, and Muriel ranks 113th on that list in distance from the goal and 92nd in getting his shots on target, meaning he is shooting from farther away than nearly all high-volume shooters, and he is getting his shots on goal less often than most. In fact, his shot profile shows that he is taking a higher percentage of shots from 25+ yards away from the goal (dark purple section below) than any of his teammates are taking from 19+ yards away from the goal (dark purple + light purple sections), and he is taking nearly 70% of all of his shots from outside of the 18.

Now, were he putting these shots on goal — or, even better, in the goal — then nobody would care about where he was shooting from, but when you have three goals all year and 69% of your shots are not on target, then heads are going to shake, shake, shake, shake like a song by the Ying Yang Twins and Pitbull. But this is where I think a step back is needed, because if fans were expecting Muriel to come in and perform as a traditional striker or No. 9, then they were misreading his historical performance and his strengths as a player.

When you look at Muriel’s season-by-season statistics, two seasons jump out that would seem to contradict what I just wrote, and those are his 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 seasons, when he scored 18 and 22 goals, respectively.

“That seems like a lot of goals for someone you say is not a traditional striker, Andrew.”

Well, yes, but 11 of those 40 goals were from free kicks (which definitely takes skill, but skill that is not unique to a striker), and two were rebounds that fell to him inside the six-yard box, and while I do not generally love the statistic called xG (expected goals), it can be useful in some contexts, and those two rebounds both fell to Muriel in a location where a goal was expected 82% and 85% of the time. It’s almost so easy a caveman could do it.

So, either we are left with 27 of his goals (excluding 11 free kicks + two rebounds) or 29 of his goals (excluding only the 11 free kicks) that came from open play during those two high-scoring years — an average of 14.5 or 13.5 a season. Those are definitely good numbers, especially in a highly rated league like Serie A, but they are still also outliers when compared to his goals/year during most of his career.

Looking at his seasons from 2010-2011 through 2022-2023, excluding the two big seasons discussed above, Muriel averaged six non-penalty-kick goals per season. He scored those goals in Italy’s Serie A or Spain’s La Liga, top leagues, but six goals/year is not an amount generally associated with big-time strikers. To assume he would all of a sudden become a major goal scorer in the latter stages of his career just because he is joining a league rated lower than the one where he played previously is a bit of a stretch, and may be an unfair expectation by us as fans.

The other part I want to focus on that I think may be underappreciated by fans is all of the non-scoring contributions that Muriel has made during his time on the field. Yes, in the end the only stats that actually matter are goals and wins, and there have not been a lot of either thus far this season, but no single player is primarily responsible for that, even if they are a highly paid Designated Player.

A lot of the issues Orlando City has had this year are due to geometry (there will always be math when I write) and how the Lions’ shape needs to be in order to get the most out of the players on this year’s team. There are quite a lot of overlapping skills and overlapping places where players like to receive the ball, and that has frequently led to spacing issues on the field with creative players all wanting to go and get the ball in the same location at the same time.

Muriel, unlike many of his teammates, is a two-footed player and thus able to attack from anywhere on the field and in any direction, allowing him to create open spaces to play the ball all over the attacking third of the field. While this can get him into trouble (see: shots from very long range), he also has used this ability to be one of the more active and dangerous players in all of MLS when he has the ball:

As an aside, the last row there is interesting to me because Muriel ranks 16th in all of MLS, yet third on Orlando City (behind Nico Lodeiro in third overall and Facundo Torres in 15th overall). The Crew have two players in the top 16 as well, and every other player in the top 16 is the only one on his respective team. I am not sure whether Orlando City having three near the top is an example of an unselfish team that is comfortable playing the ball among playmakers or reflects a team that does not have the pecking order set, and thus it becomes a little of “my turn, your turn” type offense.

Last season, there was a clear order in that Torres led the team and was 25th in MLS, and the next-highest-ranking players were Martín Ojeda in 57th and Mauricio Pereyra in 79th. Is this something? I think it is still too early to tell, but removing own goals, Orlando City players scored 1.59 goals/game in 2023 and thus far this season they are only scoring 1.16 goals/game, and I believe that the lack of a defined primary creator is one of several contributing factors to the lower-scoring output this season.

Back to Muriel and that chart above, his talent and skill clearly shows in how he is able to thread passes into dangerous areas and create shots at a rate that puts him among the leaders in all of MLS. His dribbling ability, reflected in the progressive carry percentage, shows that he is moving the ball at least 10 yards forward towards the goal 12.7% of the time he dribbles the ball in the offensive half of the field. This puts the defense under pressure, because he is building up a head of steam and coming at pace, and since he is also completing approximately 80% of his short passes (0-15 yards) thus far this season, and completing many of those into the 18, he is a constant threat once he has the ball.

As I mentioned before, Muriel is a two-footed player (Opta’s tracking has the foot used for 83 Muriel goals — 22 were left foot and 61 were right foot, an impressive mix), so he is a player who can go left or right, is accurate with his passes in tight spaces, creates shooting opportunities for his teammates, and wants the ball at all times. These are all qualities you want in an attacking player, especially one as proficient as Muriel is in them.

So we return to the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma — a player with clear skill and pedigree who is contributing offensively but is not putting up the counting stats fans thought he would, even though he never really did aside from two outlier years. As much as I like to be more glass-half-full than half-empty, I do feel like Muriel should have contributed more goals by this point in the season, but unlike what the fan sitting next to me said during Saturday’s game, I do not think he is massively underperforming either.

In the end, I think Muriel’s performance thus far has been kind of like where we frequently see him on the field, more in the middle than in the front.