Martín Ojeda is Passing This Season With Flying Colors

School is back in session all over the country, and that means that the age-old chant of “reading, writing, arithmetic, too much homework makes me sick” is also back in vogue, to the disgust of teachers and parents everywhere. As a former mathematics teacher, I know that it is the reading and writing that cause most of the frustration, because obviously everyone loves arithmetic, am I right?

Don’t answer that.

It goes without saying that I love arithmetic, and for this week I have a different little rhyme that will be the subject of this article, which is: “Martín Ojeda is amassing some incredible stats for passing.” It is not quite as catchy, but it works.

And speaking of working, Ojeda has been putting in the work on the offensive side of the ball this season, leading the team in both goals (14) and assists (14) and threatening to become the first Orlando City player to reach 30 goal contributions during an MLS regular season. With two weeks in between Orlando City games, I had a lot of time to look at the numbers, and Ojeda is in some rare air with how he is creating shots for his teammates with his passes.

There are two types of passes that create shots: live ball passes and dead ball passes. Opta tracks both of these on fbref.com, and Ojeda is one of only two players in MLS this season to average at least 3.5 shots created from his live-ball passes per 90 minutes and at least 1.3 shots created from his dead-ball passes per 90 minutes. The other player is an Argentinean midfielder in his 30s who wears number 10, and just as you thought, it is Cristian Espinoza of the San Jose Earthquakes. Lionel Messi, who I am guessing you thought of initially, does not create enough shots via dead-ball passes to join Ojeda and Espinoza in that 3.5/1.3 club.

Very few players in the tracking era (Opta started tracking shot-creating actions in MLS in 2018) have reached this standard. Including Espinoza and Ojeda, there have only been 21 player-seasons of at least 3.5 and 1.3, and only 13 different players (Ojeda is the only one from Orlando City) have achieved both of those averages in the same season.

The main reason that most attacking players (it is almost exclusively attacking midfielders and wing players who put up big shot-creation numbers) fall short is that they do not create enough shots from dead-ball situations. Among players who have played at least 500 minutes in MLS play this season, only 17 average creating at least one shot per 90 minutes via dead-ball passes, and the reason so many fall short is likely because:

• Their team’s offense does not generate enough chances for dead-ball opportunities.
• Their teammates are not effective enough in the box to turn their dead-ball passes into shots.
• Their dead-ball passes are not accurate enough to generate a shot.
• They often choose to shoot rather than pass when they have dead-ball opportunities.

The first two items in the list above are mostly around the capabilities of a player’s teammates, and the second two are about the player tasked with playing the dead ball. In the case of Orlando City, Ojeda plays for one of the most prolific offenses in the league, so the team has not struggled to create chances or to win balls in the air and turn them into shots. Ojeda is an unselfish player, so he often chooses to pass rather than shoot in dead-ball situations, and he is incredibly accurate with his left foot, so nearly all of his dead-ball passes land in threatening areas.

There are 323 MLS players who have played at least 500 minutes this season and who Opta does not list as a goalkeeper or exclusively a defender (some players are listed as defender and midfielder, they are included in the 323). The chart below shows each player’s performance in shots created per 90 minutes from live balls and dead balls, and Ojeda is inside the purple circle in the upper right part of the chart.

Being in the upper right portion of a chart does not automatically mean a player is better than another player who is closer to the bottom or the left side, but it does mean that a player’s coaching staff entrusts that player to handle critical dead-ball situations, and that the player is effective in creating shots for their teammates through both live-ball and dead-ball plays.

American Soccer Analysis did some, ahem, analysis a few years ago, looking across thousands of plays from multiple leagues, and found that approximately 11% of goals come from dead-ball passes. It is a big deal to have a player who can take advantage of set pieces by placing the ball in dangerous locations, and with Ojeda, who takes more than half of the dead-ball kicks in the attacking third, Orlando City has one of the league’s best at creating shot opportunities from set pieces.

It is a similar story when it comes to live-ball play as well, which can also be seen from that scatterplot above. Ojeda ranks eighth in shots created from dead balls per 90 mins and 10th in shots created from live balls per 90 mins, and he and the aforementioned Espinoza are the only two players who rank in the top 10 in both categories.

Ojeda is in the top 10 in both categories this season in all of MLS, and his combined total of 5.1 shots created from live-ball passes and dead-ball passes ranks him fourth in the league, behind only Espinoza (5.8), Jack McGlynn of Houston (5.5), and Carles Gil of New England (5.4). Looking back in Orlando City history, however, Ojeda’s 5.1 is slightly more than 6% better than any other player’s average, as you can see from the chart below, which shows the club’s top five seasons (reminding you once again that this stat was not around before 2018, meaning that there is no data for Kaká):

The Lions return to play on Saturday night, and when that game kicks off I expect Ojeda to be right where he has been all season long, in the middle of the field and in the middle of everything for Orlando City’s offense. Hopefully his teammates are ready to convert all the chances he creates on their behalf, and they do not pass up the opportunity to take a pass and put the ball past D.C.’s goalkeeper.

Vamos Orlando!