The numbers really love Josh Atencio

Every so often, I’m asked to do a statistical profile of a Sounders player, and I usually find more or less exactly what I expect to find. The stats tend to tell a similar story to what we see on the field with our own eyes, but not always. Josh Atencio is a player that I really like, and that I’d like to see play more often, so when I was asked to look into his statistics, I expected to see a pretty good young central midfielder. Statistically speaking, I found a borderline elite one, albeit with some pretty important caveats. 

The first caveat is sample size/gamestate. Josh Atencio isn’t playing a lot, and I’m not sure that these stats would maintain quite their level of impressiveness if he were asked to do it over 3,000 minutes a season. Some of his appearances are coming in mop-up time, and those kinds of minutes can produce some wild stats due to game state. How much his stats might suffer isn’t something I feel like I can confidently predict, so unless he suddenly finds himself with a lot more playing time, we’re all going to have to go with what data we have. 

The second caveat is that defensive statistics can be a little misleading, as it’s not always a great sign to see a player making lots of tackles depending on their role/position and the tactics of the team. The amount of stock you put in these numbers will vary depending on your own philosophical beliefs about stats, but I think in this case, he’s doing precisely what you’d want someone in his position to do defensively. 

The third caveat is that a lot of you don’t believe statistics have any place in the evaluation of players, and while I strongly disagree, I respect your viewpoint and would encourage you to just skip this one, and definitely don’t go into the comments to say something like “stats, lol”. 

Now, if we can get past these caveats, let’s talk about Joshua Atencio – aka Maple Valley Messi – for a lot longer than I intended.

Despite being just 21 years old, Atencio is in his fourth season with the first team, having logged an impressive 58 league appearances in that time. His play has earned the appreciation of the analysts and his training has earned the plaudits of his teammates, but for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he seems to have fallen down the pecking order behind Obed Vargas for regular first-team starts over the last couple of months. 

Now, the nature of the sport is that if I advocate for one player to play, it means I’m also advocating for another player to, well, not. So, given that Atencio seems to be competing with Vargas for that starting spot, I’m going to have to compare and contrast these two players. That being said, I don’t want any of this to come across as an attack on Vargas. He’s a very good young player doing incredibly well with the difficult task he’s been asked to do at his age. But he also only just turned 18 years old, and 18-year-olds are, by and large, not as good at professional soccer as players who are closer to their prime. I’m not asking for Obed Vargas to be banished to the bench – there seem to be plenty of minutes to go around and I think it would be better for both Atencio and Vargas if both had first-team opportunities. So let’s take a look at the numbers and see what Atencio brings to the team when he’s called upon.

That’s a good-looking bar chart right there. We can see that Atencio profiles very well defensively and as a progressive passer and dribbler. Let’s take a look at Obed:

Now just a cursory glance at these two charts might lead you to believe that Atencio is just a flat-out better player than Vargas, and while there’s certainly an element of truth to that notion, it’s not that simple. 

The main difference you’re going to see here on the main chart is that Obed Vargas has a much higher pass completion rate than Josh Atencio.  Pass completion is an interesting and often misleading statistic, and I’ll explain why here. Obviously, failing to complete passes is generally “bad” because it means you lose the ball. Having the ball is often considered a pretty key pillar of scoring goals. Misplacing passes is a surefire way to kill attacks and upset the fans and coaching staff. BUT, there has to be some tolerance for misplaced passes when you’re playing the ball more progressively.  American Soccer Analysis tracks something called expected pass completion. This takes historical data between two different points on the field and figures out how often passes from point A to point B are successful. Passes forward and in attacking positions tend to be successful less often because defenders are more inclined to intercept them. Think about how many times you see a simple sideways pass played between two centerbacks or two midfielders. This doesn’t mean those passes don’t have value per se, but they are a lot simpler passes to complete as the opposition is usually pretty predisposed to just letting those happen.

Obed Vargas has the highest xPassing percentage on the Seattle Sounders at 87.1%. This means that his passes are expected to be successful at that rate. He completes those passes at a rate of about 87.6%. That’s pretty good! He’s a very safe passer.  For perspective, let’s take Seattle’s most creative and ambitious passer, Nico Lodeiro. Lodeiro is often tasked with finding the “killer ball that unlocks the defense” Lodeiro’s xPassing success is 74.2%. This is by design. If you’re going to use a 10, you’re going to have a not-insubstantial amount of passes that don’t work out, and I’m pretty sure Brian Schmetzer would be furious if Obed Vargas started attempting the kind of pass profile that Nico Lodeiro does. 

What about Atencio though? Atencio has xPassing success of  82.7% (and on a statistic like this, the difference between 82 and 87 is quite a lot). Atencio completes 81.8% of his passes. This is because his passes are way more progressive. Let’s take all of Atencio’s passes this season. The average distance of all of his passes is 18.34 yards. The average verticality (movement of the ball in the attacking direction) is 3.09 yards. Obed Vargas’ are 16.98 yards and 1.80 yards, respectively.

Atencio actually more closely aligns with the Lodeiro passing profile (Lodeiro has an average distance of 18.77 yards and a verticality of 3.84). So you can see that while Atencio and Vargas are competing for the same spot on the field, how they go about doing their job is very different. 

Both Atencio and Vargas are plus ball-winners. 

Atencio:

Vargas:

Statistically speaking, Atencio is one of the best ball-winning CMs in the league (his tackles plus interceptions is in the 98th percentile of central midfielders) but Vargas’ offerings are quite good in their own right. Defensive statistics can be a little bit misleading due to tactics and game states and a variety of other reasons, but I’m pretty confident based on these numbers and my own eyes that Atencio is just a better ball-winner. 

Atencio also doesn’t foul players – he averages a little over half a foul per 90 minutes played, which puts him in the 95th percentile league-wide. That’s pretty remarkable considering how often he’s winning the ball.  But that’s not all. Here’s the thing that I found most unbelievable in my research. He’s averaging 9.50 loose ball recoveries per 90. You are no doubt asking “is that a lot?” Yes. It’s actually the best in the entire league for central midfielders with at least 600 minutes. It’s also about twice as many as Obed Vargas recovers. So he tackles and intercepts at a rate very near the top of the league for his position, and he also vacuums up loose balls better than anybody. Not only that, he’s doing it high up the pitch in very valuable areas to win back possession. If you traded this guy to St. Louis (please, I beg of you, do not) he’d never leave their lineup.

So what does Josh Atencio NOT do well? Despite having an ambitious and progressive pass profile for a center midfielder, thus far it hasn’t exactly bore fruit as far as chance creation/assists/goals. He’s registered one goal (quite a banger to be fair), no assists, and an xA per 90 of 0.01.  Surprisingly, Obed Vargas actually does just a touch better in these categories (other than goals), but neither is making a notable amount of direct goal or chance contributions. This leads me to believe it’s probably more of a tactical issue with the role the players are being asked to play.

The biggest deficiency in Atencio’s game (statistically speaking), is that he tends to give the ball away a lot. He’s not very strong at taking on defenders off the dribble – he succeeds about 45% of the time he tries to dribble past a defender (league average is 55.9%), which puts him in the 9th percentile of central midfielders. That’s not awesome!  Vargas does even worse here, with a successful take-on percentage of 22.2%, which is right about the very worst in the league. 

Atencio is dispossessed 2.30 times per 90 minutes as well, which puts him at the very bottom of the league for central midfielders. This again, is not awesome. Vargas is dispossessed 0.74 times per game which is just below league average. 

Atencio is far from a perfect player, but he’s also far from a finished product. I can’t speak to anything that goes on behind the scenes with regard to why Schmetzer seems so reluctant to put him in the starting XI. Generally speaking, Vargas is probably a little bit safer with regard to possession and passing, and while I’m not a great judge of “effort” that coaches love so much, he does seem to contribute a lot of it when he’s called upon. The decision could also be tactical or maybe Atencio just isn’t doing something that Schmetzer and company demand either in training or during matches. There may very well be good reasons, but looking at statistics and statistics only, it’s incomprehensible to me that he isn’t being utilized more. I don’t think that swapping one for the other necessarily solves all of what has been ailing the Sounders this season, but I do think that there’s a case to be made that given Seattle’s struggles in transition and going forward, having a player like Atencio next to João Paulo gives you options that Vargas simply does not offer.

All of that being said, I think Vargas is a fantastic young player, and the last thing I want to see is him being frozen out of the team entirely. Selecting Atencio isn’t without risks, but the potential upside just strikes me as too good of a deal not to take. With the end of the season looming, and legs getting heavier throughout the squad, I hope that we get to see more of Joshua Atencio. Both him and Vargas have bright futures in Major League Soccer, and may well find themselves starting next to each other within a couple of seasons.