Ranking the Best Attacking Seasons by Orlando City Players

I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to quantify soccer players and soccer teams, because even though I love soccer purely as a game, I am always thinking about how to measure what I see as well. There is a scene in the movie Moneyball in which Brad Pitt, acting in the role of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, says that he does not even watch the games. In his eyes, he has done all the analyzing and put the team in the best situation in which to succeed, but the games are random, so he does not even watch.

I will never reach the point where I would rather just look at the statistics to see what happened as opposed to watching the games, but I will also never stop trying to figure out ways to channel Tina Turner and figure out who is simply the best. And so, while we are still in off-season mode and do not have any new games to look at, I thought I would look at something that is always enjoyable: offensive attacking players.

ESPN soccer writer Ryan O’Hanlon, a favorite of mine, recently wrote an article ranking the top 100 men’s attacking players in Europe based on data. In that article, he created a formula for how he ranked the players, and I took that formula and applied it to MLS. His formula is pretty simple, as it has four inputs:

• Goals
• Expected Assists
• Progressive Carries
• Progressive Passes

The idea is to find the players who put the most pressure on a defense, and who puts more pressure on a defense than a player who scores goals, completes passes to teammates in scoring positions (regardless of whether they actually score or not), carries (dribbles) the ball at least 10 yards towards the goal in the attacking half of the field, or completes passes of 10 yards or more towards the goal in the attacking half of the field?

Basketball coaches always talk about being in “triple threat” position when you receive the ball, as you want to be able to dribble, pass, or shoot, and while scoring in soccer is slightly different than basketball, the idea is still the same — goals are created by players dribbling, passing, or shooting.

O’Hanlon’s formula is the following: Goals Scored + Expected Assists + 0.0113 (Progressive Carries + Progressive Passes)

I know there is an obvious question when you see this formula, and that is about how did he arrive at the 0.0113 value. Looking at the 2022 and 2023 seasons in Europe’s top leagues, he determined that a goal was scored per every 88.44 progressive actions, and so, as I know all of you just did in your head, one goal per 88.44 progressive actions = 1 divided by 88.44 = 0.0113. Actual goals scored and passes completed to teammates in shooting positions are valued much more highly than just attacking dribbles and forward moving passes, but if we are looking to find out who is attacking during each game I liked how he laid out his reasoning for what he called his version of a soccer “game score,” modeled after a concept created by the father of sports analytics, Bill James, for starting pitchers in baseball.

For those of you still awake, it is now about to pay off, because now we will look at Orlando City’s players going back to 2018, the first year Opta started tracking expected assists and progressive carries and passes for MLS. We will look at this statistic in two different ways: once as an overall score, which favors the players who played in more games and therefore contributed more attacking plays, and then we will normalize all the data on a per-90-minute calculation, to see who made the most of their minutes on the field.

Without any further ado, and without any Freddy Adu, your top 10 Orlando City attacking players since 2018 by their aggregated full season game scores (reminder that the 2020 MLS season was 23 games instead of 34; all data from fbref.com):

I cannot say that I am surprised that Nani and Facundo Torres lead the way for Orlando City attacking players. They both played a lot of minutes and had a lot of the ball during their time in purple, and they are two of the best offensive players to ever play for the Lions. Data for expected assists and progressive actions was not available in Kaká’s era, but had it been, I am sure he would have made this list as well. The player who likely would have benefitted the most, however, is Cyle Larin, as even with no available data for expected assists or progressive actions, he would have ranked fifth with just his 2015 season tally of 17 goals.

Any metric that heavily weights goals favors forwards, as they usually score the most goals, as evidenced by the fact that Harry Kane led all of the major European leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) in 2024 with a score of 44.0, and Denis Bouanga led MLS at 32.6. Looking at Orlando City though, it is quickly evident that the team has primarily been led by attacking midfielders as opposed to forwards when it comes to the attack. Larin might have passed Nani for the single-season lead had there been other data for him, but perhaps not, as he was a finisher and not someone who was involved as much in the buildup.

The last item around the aggregated season-long totals is to look at how far away Orlando City’s leading players always were as compared to the MLS leader. The Lions have only averaged 1.5 goals/game or more (in MLS regular season play) during five of their 10 seasons, and only at least 1.7 twice. Larin remains the only player to score more than 14 goals in a regular season, and so for any metric where goals are heavily weighted, like this one, which is attempting to evaluate attacking production, Orlando City’s individual players will often lag far behind those from other teams, even though the full team has been successful in recent years.

We could also look at this data in a different way, and instead of looking at the aggregated scores for the season, which benefits those who play the most minutes, look at per-90-minute game scores instead. In many cases I prefer to normalize the data and evaluate everyone not on totals but by looking at per-90 statistics, but in this case I will present the per-90 data, but I think the raw data matters more, because I wanted to see who had the best overall attacking season, and overall production matters more than per-minute production in this case. If you disagree, I will happily entertain your reasoning in the comments.

Looking at game scores normalized per 90 minutes, Orlando City’s top 10 since 2018 looks as follows (among players who played at least 500 minutes in a season):

Some of the same full-season leaders are on this list as well, but we also see the entrance of several players who rarely had the burden of being expected to play a full game. McGuire, Benji Michel, and Ramiro Enrique were more supersub or rabbit-type players who started with the expectation of going around 60 minutes or came off the bench for the final third of the game. While they had to be productive to make the top 10 ranking, their smaller sample size of minutes helps them on a per-90-minute calculation.

The Money Badger, Chris Mueller, makes this list twice, and while his post-Orlando City career has likely not been what he hoped, I wonder whether I did not appreciate how well he performed while a Lion. Torres played a lot of minutes during all three of his seasons with the club, and so while he racked up counting numbers (which it is important to note are what matters when trying to win games), his per-minute performance knocks two of his three seasons out of the top 10 (2024 was 16th and 2022 was 24th). Nani remains elite, whether by totals or per-minute calculations, and McGuire’s 2023 season moves to the top for Orlando City. That season ranked fifth in 2024 and 33rd overall among all MLS seasons since 2018, and makes it hurt all the more that he will be out for a few months to start the 2025 season.

It sure would be nice to have some more attacking options joining the team for 2025 with McGuire’s injury and Torres’ departure. I am just saying. Loudly.

This article is about Orlando City, but I wanted to briefly flip to the Pride to note that Barbra Banda’s 2024 full-season game score was 19.2 in a season that had eight fewer games than a standard MLS season. Banda ranked second in the league in overall game score and game score per 90 minutes, which for her was 1.04. That darned Temwa Chawinga (26.6 total, 1.12 per 90) of the Kansas City Current beat her out for both the total and per-90 lead.

As with any metric that tries to pull in different parts of a player’s performance, nothing is perfect, and any measurement formula could be tweaked until the lions sleep at night. In looking at how the results shook out across the major European leagues in O’Hanlon’s original article and in my own application to MLS, I found that the rankings seemed to work to push players who pass the eye test and the math test (my favorite test, to the surprise of no one) to the top of these charts.

I plan to continue to look at this metric, among others, throughout the 2025 season to see how Orlando City and the Orlando Pride’s players are performing. I hope to see players in purple at the top of the charts, though at this point I am more confident in those being Pride players than Lions. With every week that passes, we get closer to the 2025 season, and comparing predictions and hopes to actual results, and I am as excited as ever for the new seasons to start.

Vamos Orlando!