Justin Ellis On Track to Follow in Alex Freeman’s Footsteps

As I type this article, Orlando City’s Alex Freeman is participating in the 2025 MLS All-Star Game, yet another accomplishment for a young player who primarily played with Orlando City B a season ago. Freeman’s meteoric rise likely would not have happened had he not played more than 5,000 minutes in MLS NEXT Pro during the last three seasons, allowing him the opportunity to develop in those games while also practicing with the senior Orlando City team and even making three brief appearances in MLS games in 2023 and 2024.

Freeman has permanently graduated from OCB, but several players on this year’s reserve team are vying for the opportunity to follow in his footsteps and make the leap from MLS NEXT Pro to being…the club’s next MLS pros (is that good prose? I digress), and I have been most impressed with the play of attacking midfielder Justin Ellis. The 18-year-old definitely passes the eye test, which is important because his counting statistics, while good, are not among the very best in the league.

There is a good reason for that, however, and it is that Ellis missed several OCB games while playing for another one of Orlando City’s youth teams, leading the U-18 team to victory in the Generation Adidas Cup (he was the top scorer in the competition with six goals in six games) and also to a semifinal appearance in the MLS NEXT Cup. He has played the ninth-most minutes on the team, but even so, he is tied for the team lead in goals scored with seven and leads with three assists. Those 10 goal contributions tie him for 14th in all of MLS NEXT Pro, and his 0.92 goal contributions per 90 minutes ranks him 12th.

Being in the top 14 in both categories is impressive, especially for a player playing in a league with 29 teams in it and who only played in 12 of his team’s 18 games. As a mathematician, I generally prefer normalized data over raw counting data when it comes to comparing players, as the data per 90 minutes allows all players to be compared evenly if they have played different amounts of minutes. Counting stats certainly matter, as scoring 10 goals per 90 minutes is not that valuable if a player only played nine minutes, but once you remove the small sample size players and compare all players over 90 minutes the cream generally rises to the top.

Ellis’s 0.92 goal contributions per 90 minutes is an example of the cream rising to the top, but there is a better measure that I think tells more of the story of what Orlando City has in the young attacking midfielder. Fotmob.com has a measure called…wait for it…the FotMob Rating, which is their version of a 1-10 player grade for every game that is tracked on the site. Because this rating is purely a data-driven statistic, I find that it skews slightly higher for players, defenders included, who contribute more offensively than defensively.

Orlando City is a great example of this, as Joran Gerbet has a higher average FotMob rating than Robin Jansson does this season, and while Gerbet has been really good, I do not think he has been better than Jansson. The captain is a rock on defense, but there have been many games when he did not accumulate a lot of stats, and with a rating system that relies on data inputs, that means he, like many other center backs and defensive midfielders, often rates slightly lower than players in other positions.

This is not an issue for Ellis, however, as he is an attacking midfielder. Ellis is averaging a FotMob rating of 7.68 thus far this season, which places him just outside the top five among all of MLS NEXT Pro, as you can see from the table below (I also included Alex Freeman’s 2024 season for perspective — coincidentally Freeman also ranked sixth overall during the 2024 season):

When I looked up his exact age I found that Ellis just turned 18 in May, so during part of this season he was playing as a 17-year-old. I then wondered how rare it was that a player of his age was having as much success as he was having, so I pulled out my abacus slide rule Pascaline Leibniz wheel TI-92 (if you know what all of those are I am impressed; also, you are lying) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and went to work.

MLS NEXT Pro has been around since 2022, so I pulled out the top 25 players by FotMob rating from each year and looked at the average age of the players who made that top 25. This table below shows the season-by-season breakdown:

The average scores for the players in the top 25 have been pretty consistent, within one-tenth of a point between the four years, so I believe the equation that FotMob uses is trustworthy to use to compare performances.

Among those four years there are 100 total player-seasons, and only 12 of those 100 seasons, including Ellis’ 2025 season, come from players 18 years old or younger. The Young Lion’s 7.68 rating ranks sixth in 2025 and tied for 21st in the last four seasons, but it ranks only behind Cavan Sullivan (you may have heard about Manchester City’s interest in Sullivan) among the 12 seasons by players 18 years old or younger. The average age of the top players in 2025 is 22.5, so Ellis is four years younger than the average of the other top performing players.

Major League Baseball (I’ll return to soccer shortly!) has long used its minor league system, creatively called Minor League Baseball, as a proving ground for young players. Teams use traditional baseball statistics as a measure of proficiency for their minor league players, but they also “age-adjust” those values too, based on the age of the player at the level of the league.

A common baseball statistic is on-base percentage (OBP), and while an OBP of .400 means a batter gets on base after 40% of his plate appearances (this would be excellent performance), a team internally adjusts that 40% up or down based on if a player is older or younger than the expected age of a player at that level of the minor leagues. A 19-year-old playing in AAA baseball, for example, is playing in a league that has an average age of 26, so while .400 is .400, an OBP of .400 is much more impressive by a young player than it is by a player who is of the average age of the league.

Stathead’s site baseball-reference.com includes a player’s age difference (shown as AgeDif) alongside their minor league statistics, as you can see here for Jackson Holliday of the Baltimore Orioles. I chose Holliday because he dominated the minor leagues, playing in leagues in which he was a top performer while several years younger than the average age of the league. He has now graduated to playing Major League Baseball, which sounds a lot like Major League Soccer, which gets us off of baseball island and back to soccer island. Ellis island. Has a certain, monumental, ring to it.

Not every young player who put up high FotMob ratings in MLS NEXT Pro has gone on to have the type of success that Freeman is having this season, but being that the league is only four years old, all of these players are still very early in their careers. Freeman is a poster child not only for OCB players, but for all players in the league, and there will be many who follow in his footsteps, going from playing significant minutes in MLS NEXT Pro to MLS to being on the radar of teams in Europe.

I believe Ellis will have a similar trajectory to Freeman, albeit at a different position. Ellis is in his second season with OCB, and with 10 regular-season games remaining, he likely will surpass 2,000 total minutes in MLS NEXT Pro by the end of this season. He also has played with the United States U-18 National Team, and as he is now 18, he is likely on the radar for the U-20 National Team, so he will continue to test himself against elite competition at his age while also playing against older players while with OCB.

The Young Lions have several players who frequently make the bench for Orlando City, and Ellis, Gustavo Caraballo, Colin Guske, and Zakaria Taifi all have made late game appearances during MLS play. At just 16 years old, Caraballo has an even larger age difference to the average MLS NEXT Pro player than Ellis, and he ranks just outside the top 100 (102nd) in FotMob rating. He is performing extremely well, but he still has work to do to catch Ellis, the clear top prospect on OCB.

According to fbref.com’s database, Ellis is one of only 356 field players (i.e. non-goalkeepers) aged 18 or younger to play in an MLS game in league history. While 356 players might sound like a lot, more than 700 field players have played at least one minute in MLS this season, and the league has been around since 1996. Óscar Pareja does not just give out MLS minutes for fun, and I think that the coaching staff believes that Ellis is a special talent and a player who earned those minutes at a precocious age.

With the Leagues Cup about to start, we may see Ellis get an opportunity to play for Orlando City again due to the glut of matches during the next few weeks, but it is still likely that the vast majority of his minutes the rest of this season will be with OCB.

When he does come on next for Orlando City though, you can be sure that it will be just in time.

Vamos Orlando!