Orlando City Players Who May Contend For End-of-Year Awards

As one of the world’s leading connoisseurs of television shows, I was, of course, glued to my couch to watch every second of the Emmy Awards on Sunday night, with a bowl of popcorn on my left, a bowl of snacks on my right, and a throw pillow handy at all times so I could scream into it (my kids were asleep) when my favorite actors and shows were robbed of their rightful opportunities to bloviate into a microphone after winning their category.

I’m kidding, of the 36 programs that were nominated for the seven major awards, I watched seven of them, a paltry 19%, and it surprised me that it was even that high of a percentage. With what little free time I have, I like to watch sports — soccer in particular.

I may not be the biggest fan of tv shows, but I do like awards, and so with the Emmys in the recent rearview mirror, I thought I would revisit our old friend “goals added,” which I wrote about a month ago, and use the Emmys as a model to see how Orlando City’s players are doing in the positional rankings going into the final weeks of the MLS regular season. So without further ado, and completely without Freddy Adu, let’s get on with the show.

The article I linked to in the previous paragraph contains the particulars around the calculation of goals added, but my TL;DR (for my mom, and any others, that’s “too long; didn’t read”) refresher is that soccer is about goals, so goals added (g+) is a measure of the value of a player in terms of creating goals and preventing goals. The more goals added, the more valuable the player.

The team at American Soccer Analysis has its formula for g+, but instead of looking at the raw calculations of g+ for every player, for this article I wanted to use a different metric on offer, which is g+ above average. This metric takes into account the average performance of a player at a given position, and then compares every other player’s performance to that of an average player.

For example, suppose there is an MLS player, let’s name him Werdna Ovlased, and he is a striker who has a g+ above average of 9.0. That 9.0 means that this player is worth nine goals more than the average striker in MLS. Pretty simple concept, right? Someone should sign him that Ovlased to a multi-million dollar contract, posthaste.

The average player is obviously worth zero goals added above average, because of the laws of mathematics (thank you Archimedes, for the gift that keeps on giving), but each position has a different contribution to goals added, as you will see from the box and whiskers (sometimes just called a boxplot, but that is not as fun to say/write as box and whiskers) chart below. I have been waiting to break out this type of chart, and the appropriate time was right here, right now. Feel free to take a second to queue up Fatboy Slim, because I know that song just came to mind after seeing “right here, right now” in print. [Editor’s note: I’m going with the Jesus Jones song by the same name. Sorry, Andrew!]

If, for some reason, you forgot what a box and whiskers chart was, it is a chart that shows the middle 50% (i.e. the values between the 25th percentile and 75th percentile) of all values inside of a rectangle, and then there is a bottom “whisker” and a top “whisker” that extends either to the maximum value or to 1.5 times the length of the rectangle (called the interquartile range, or IQR), whichever comes first. What this does is show the viewer where the middle 50% perform, and also a reasonable value for a top performance and a bottom performance. As you will see below, however, a box and whiskers chart also shows outliers, which are the performances that are either below or above the whiskers. These are players who are performing way better, or way worse, than the average player.

My guess is that, just like back in high school, it will make more sense when you see it rather than reading about it, so here are the box and whiskers charts by position (the positions are on the bottom) for MLS, with data through Sept. 15:

Each circle on the chart represents the g+ above average for a player who has played more than 430 minutes (including stoppage time) thus far this season (there are 536 players who meet this threshold). I usually use 500 minutes as a cutoff, but Son Heung-Min from LAFC has played just more than 430 minutes, so I decided to make the cutoff low enough to include him, as he is already contributing majorly to his team and is among the best players in the league. As you can see from the chart, there are some wide variations by position for goals added (higher is better on this chart, and yes, some players have negative values for their g+ above average, which means they are performing below average, even though the metric is called g+ above average. Fun with words!).

Goalkeepers, by nature of the requirements of their position, contribute majorly to goals added, since every save by definition prevents a goal. Central midfielders and Defensive midfielders have a pretty tight middle 50%, and show very few outlier performances thus far this season. A certain striker who plays in “Miami” is a massive outlier as compared to the average player at his position, but so is a fullback who plays in the same state. More on him in a little bit.

As this is an Orlando City-focused site I am not going to go into detail on the leaders across the league at every position, but rather, using the Emmys as an inspiration, focus on which Orlando City players are finalists for “Outstanding Player at X Position.” If you take a look at the chart below, it looks remarkably similar to the one I just showed, except I have also added purple arrows pointing to the 17 Orlando City players who have played at least 430 minutes in MLS play. I kept Ramiro Enrique (he ranks right behind Luis Muriel), but I did not include an arrow for Rafael Santos.

We will start with the good news, which is that of the players who have played the most minutes for the Lions this season, most are playing at an above-average level. This is good, and for a team that for most of the season has been around the top 10 in the overall league standings and went deep into Leagues Cup, not that surprising.

Four players stand out among the Lions, as each are in the top 10 at their positions. Two of those players, Eduard Atuesta as a center midfielder and Marco Pašalić as a winger, would definitely be strongly considered as candidates for Outstanding Player at their position, but as they rank ninth (Atuesta) and eighth (Pašalić), they pretty quickly would fall out of consideration once voters picked up their ballots.

The two who will receive serious evaluation for our made up “Outstanding Player” award and also for the real end-of-seasons awards of MLS Best XI and other individual awards are, unsurprisingly for anyone who has watched Orlando City this season, Martín Ojeda and Alex Freeman.

Ojeda ranks third behind Evander (1) and Carles Gil (2), and while he is considerably behind Evander in the attacking midfielder rankings, he is right behind Gil for second and well above Albert Rusnák in fourth. After that debacle in D.C. last weekend, Ojeda needs to get his mojo back and get the offense going again for the final few games, but that does not take away from what has been a tremendous season to this point.

As well as Ojeda has played, Freeman is on track to becoming the second Orlando City player in the club’s MLS era to finish the season ranked as the best player at his position (Araújo ranked first among defensive midfielders in 2023). Freeman has a g+ above average of 4.59 as compared to the average MLS fullback, and the second place player is at 3.09, so Orlando City’s right back is performing nearly 50% better than the player ranked in second place in the entire league! The gap between first and second is as large as the gap between second and ninth, which is a testament to the all-around performance of Freeman this season.

Awards, whether contrived or real, are nice but what really matters are the results on the scoreboard. We will all remember the great seasons from Freeman and Ojeda and the solid debut seasons from Atuesta and Pašalić, but what we really want to remember are five wins in the postseason, because banners fly in the stadium for championships and not individual awards.

Here’s to hoping that at the end of the season many Orlando City players, coaches, and front office personnel are bloviating into a microphone like those winners at the Emmys on Sunday night. If so, you will find me front and center in downtown Orlando after awarding myself a day off to soak in a championship.

Vamos Orlando!