Orlando City Players Evaluated by the “Goals Added” Metric

Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now said that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning, and while I, thankfully, have no idea what that smells like, I do know a good quote when I hear one, and that line is widely considered one of the most memorable lines in movie history. It is also one of the most quoted, with various replacements for “napalm” being inserted as a turn of phrase. With that in mind, let me say that I love the smell of a brand new soccer dataset in the morning.

It’s not quite as catchy, but my love for soccer data at the very least approaches Kilgore’s love for napalm.

I reference a brand new soccer dataset because I just discovered a new one, with several new metrics and one of the best premises in all of soccer analytics. It is publicly available on americansocceranalysis.com and is updated frequently, and you can check it out yourself by clicking on this link.

The premise of this dataset (when I said new I really meant new to me, it has been around for a while but I just discovered it recently) is as follows, and while I highly recommend reading their more detailed explanation of goals added, the basic premise is this:

We wanted to derive a metric that values every action in units of goals, the currency of soccer. So many actions go unnoticed and/or underappreciated in traditional soccer statistics. Let’s measure them all, we said. And that’s what we did—well, for on-ball actions anyway.

Without copying even more from their explanatory articles on americansocceranalysis.com, the idea is that every action in a game creates the likelihood of a goal, and by summing up all of those actions, you can see which players contributed the most towards scoring goals and preventing goals. Most soccer metrics are heavily weighted towards offensive players, but the key one we will look at today, goals added (g+), gives credit to every play and not just the final plays that led to a goal.

For example, Martín Ojeda is having a monster season for Orlando City, and has had at least one goal contribution in his last 11 consecutive MLS games. Many of those goals or assists came from possessions that started several touches before he even received the ball, so while in the world of goal contributions (and also everyone’s favorite stats — expected goals and expected assists) the credit only goes to the assister and the scorer, in the world of goals added every player involved in the possession earned credit towards adding a goal.

Defenders, whose contributions to the beginning of a goal-scoring possession are often long forgotten by the final few plays, earn credit for the defensive stop that put the ball back into Orlando City’s possession and also for making forward passes that got the play started. The goals added metric sums up all of the actions that happen in a game and looks at whether they were positive or negative. Sometimes even a play that seems positive, like a completed pass from a left back to a center back, earns a negative value, since the pass went backwards and actually increased the opposition’s likelihood of scoring. Those actions fall into the following categories:

• Shooting: Shots
• Receiving: Receptions
• Passing: Passes
• Dribbling: Carries, Take-ons, Miscontrols, Dispossessions
• Interrupting: Tackles, Interceptions, Blocks, Clearances, Recoveries, Contested Headers
• Fouling: Fouls Committed, Fouls Received

Note that actual goals scored are not included in this metric. It is not that goals are not important — obviously they are — but this metric is about all the plays throughout the game that either prepare a team to score a goal or prevent the opposition from scoring. A completed pass into the center of the opposition’s box is much more valuable than a completed pass in the defensive third of the field, so it earns more g+ value for the passer and receiver. A tackle in front of a team’s own net is more valuable than a tackle at midfield due to the threat of the other team scoring, so those two tackles earn different g+ values as well. The research team looked at thousands of games to determine these assigned values, and in looking at the players who are at the top of the list for this season and previous seasons, their calculations definitely pass the smell test.

Their calculations also pass another test, a critical one that has been used for years when it comes to soccer data and assessing value. That test is known as the Messi Test, which is to say that for whatever metric you create, you had better hope that Lionel Messi comes out at or near the top, because even as much we at The Mane Land like to joke about Inter Miami and Messi, the man has been spectacular since he came to MLS and is head and shoulders better than everyone else in the league.

Even though he has played 300 fewer minutes than every other field player in the list below, Messi is still crushing everyone.

Now, I know you are screaming “where’s Ojeda?” just like D’Angelo Barksdale was screaming “where’s Wallace?” at Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire. A timely reference by me right there — you’re welcome.

I was surprised not to see Ojeda in the top 10, but he is not far behind, sitting in 13th place through the games from this past weekend. The main culprit is that he does not get fouled as often and in as dangerous locations as other players, and he is not as much of a dribbler either, as he has only the sixth-most attempted take-ons and the fourth-most progressive carries on Orlando City. Ranking 13th out of 788 MLS players still puts him in the top 2% of all players, but I thought he would be higher.

I am sure Ojeda would rather contribute to real goals by scoring or assisting than to rack up value in a derived statistic like g+, but it goes to show that the creators of this metric took pains to be fair to all players in how they contributed to scoring and preventing goals, even if they are on a, shall we say, not-so-good team like Montreal. They mention in the explanation that I linked to earlier that actual goals scored are more random than most people think, which is why they excluded goals from the g+ formula.

As for looking at values, let’s take a look at Orlando City’s primary players and how they’ve performed this year.

I love the position rank feature, because unlike many other sites I think americansocceranalysis.com accurately depicts how soccer is played, breaking players out into eight distinct positions. If you don’t immediately recognize the abbreviations above, in this model, they stand for: goalkeeper (GK), center back (CB), fullback (FB), defensive midfielder (DM), center midfielder (CM), winger (W), attacking midfielder (AM) and striker (ST). The distinction between DM and CM is difficult. Araújo is more of a DM than a CM, but they classified him as a CM, so that is how he is listed. Had he been a DM, he would have ranked ninth, which feels more fair to me with how and where he plays.

How dare they not perfectly allocate the positions of more than 700 MLS players on 30 different teams on a free site! The nerve.

For those of you wondering about Kyle Smith, he is listed as playing AC, for Accountant. Just kidding, they listed him as a FB, which they also did for Dagur Dan Thórhallsson. Feels more fair for Thórhallsson than Smith, but I am sure every team has players who could slot into multiple spots, and again, I am not going to complain about something that is provided to everyone for free.

Going back to Orlando City’s primary players, it is testament to how well the team has played offensively and defensively that nine of the Lions’ 11 most frequently played players are in the top 20 at their position. Most teams start two fullbacks, two center backs and two wingers, meaning that across 30 teams there are 60 players at those three positions, and Orlando City has two in the top 12 at fullback, two in the top 17 at winger, and two in the top 28 at center back.

For the individual positions, the Lions feature players in fifth, 11th (two), 17th (“should” be ninth though), and the lowest is Gallese in 24th, which feels a bit low for El Pulpo, but the same data inputs apply to all goalkeepers, so there is no bias in their rankings.

Orlando City has four players in the overall top 33, and every other team either has zero, one, or two. This is another reason why Ojeda is not even higher on the individual rankings, as he is flanked by three elite playmakers, and they share in contributing to the goals — not just at the end with the actual goal contribution, but also in the buildup play as well.

Iván Angulo also deserves a special mention here, because he often draws the ire or frustration from many fans and, if we are being honest (we are), from The Mane Land’s staff at times due to some offensive shortcomings, but g+ puts him in the top third of MLS wingers this season. And he was 15th in 2024 and 13th in 2023. Maybe Óscar Pareja deserves a little more credit than we usually give him for seeing a winning all-around player in Angulo, who is on track for his third consecutive season of at least five goals added. Only three Lions have ever had three consecutive seasons of at least five goals added: Dom Dwyer between 2017-2019 (in 2017 he started with Sporting Kansas City before being traded to Orlando), Facundo Torres between 2022-2024, and Jansson, who still has a chance to add to his current streak of four straight seasons, which started back in 2021.

I really like g+ as an all-encompassing metric, and while it has some flaws (specifically that it only captures on-ball actions, and not anything that happens off the ball), it does better than anything I’ve seen at capturing the entire set of plays that lead to positive or negative outcomes. I really like that defenders and goalkeepers have opportunities to score high, as the plays they make to stop the opposition and initiate offensive attacks are just as important as the plays made at the end of offensive possessions. I think of goals added as a statistic about increasing goal differential, which is critical, because in order to win a game, a team needs a differential of at least one.

And when that winning team is Orlando City, I love the smell of that in the morning, afternoon, and evening.