About 3½ years ago, MLS commissioner Don Garber said 25 words that, uh, well ... here's what he told reporters before the start of the 2022 season:
"We don't need to bring in a big-name player at the end of their career because they decided they want to retire in MLS."
In just this summer alone, 33-year-old Son Heung-Min joined LAFC from Tottenham, 31-year-old Rodrigo De Paul joined Inter Miami from Atletico Madrid and 35-year-old Thomas Müller joined the Vancouver Whitecaps from Bayern Munich.
Lionel Messi, of course, is currently the best player in MLS -- and he's 38. At Inter Miami, the current betting favorites for MLS Cup, he's flanked by 38-year-old Luis Suárez, 36-year-old Jordi Alba, and 37-year-old Sergio Busquets.
Since Garber's quote, the likes of Gareth Bale, Giorgio Chiellini and Olivier Giroud have already come and gone at LAFC, whose current goalkeeper is 38-year-old Hugo Lloris. The two highest-paid players on the New York Red Bulls are Eric Choupo-Moting and Emil Forsberg, who are 36 and 33 years old, respectively. A then-35-year-old Marco Reus won MLS Cup with the LA Galaxy last season, and a now-35-year-old Ashley Westwood has played more minutes for Charlotte FC than any other midfielder in the league this season.
Despite MLS publicly claiming it doesn't want to be a final port of call for fading European stars, the league continues to open its arms to those same fading European stars before retirement. So, given the latest influx of aging, high-profile talent to MLS this summer, let's take a look at the history of these kinds of moves:
How often do they work out? How often do they fail? And what can that tell us about which older stars are most likely to make it work in MLS?
A brief history of older, famous guys coming to MLS
This whole thing basically started with a 31-year-old David Beckham leaving Real Madrid and joining the LA Galaxy in 2008. What many saw as a pure publicity stunt actually worked out on the sporting front.
Beckham played about only 50% of the available minutes for the Galaxy over his six seasons with the club. That's not ideal, especially for a player who was theoretically the most talented and definitely the most famous to ever play in the league. But even though he wasn't in his prime anymore, Beckham was still a fantastic player when he came to MLS. He just spent large chunks of his third and fourth seasons of the league not playing in the league. He went out on loan to AC Milan in 2009 and 2010 and played a lot for a team that was in the Champions League.
But in his final two seasons with the Galaxy, he didn't go to Europe, he played about 70% of the available minutes, and the Galaxy won MLS Cup in both seasons. He finished his MLS career with 0.55 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes -- higher than the 0.45 he averaged at Real Madrid, and just a tick below the 0.58 he produced from a much more attacking position during his prime years with Manchester United.
Beckham was the league's first designated player -- an, ahem, designation that allowed teams to sign and pay players outside of the salary cap, and one that seemingly opened the floodgates for the increasingly byzantine and opaque roster-construction rules governing the league today.
Stevie Nicol praises Son Heung-min's decision to leave Tottenham as he believes it comes at the right time in his career.
Interestingly, when Ryan Rosenblatt wrote about the best and worst designated players in MLS history for ESPN earlier this summer, all of his 10 best DPs were attackers, while the positional spectrum was mixed for his 10 worst: five attackers, two goalkeepers, one defender and two midfielders.
Perhaps this is the logical outcome of the league's roster rules, which encourage teams to devote disproportionately high portions of their payrolls to attackers. So, there are both more attackers as DPs, and then the ones who hit really hit because they're playing against defenders who are getting paid way less than they do.
On top of that, maybe it's hard for aging midfielders and defenders to succeed in the same way. These players usually need some skill around them to prop them up -- say, runners who let a defensive midfielder dominate in possession, or a more athletic center back that allows a savvy vet to read the game -- and those kinds of hole-filling players just don't really exist at any kind of scale in MLS yet.
So, we're going to limit the analysis for this piece to attackers and attack-oriented midfielders. First, we've gathered a list of all the attacking players who moved from a Big Five top European league to MLS at age 30 or older and who had an estimated market value, per Transfermarkt of €5 million or higher. Then, we threw in a couple of more players who fit the spirit of the exercise.
That leaves us with 20 players:
• Lionel Messi (36 at the time of the move, PSG to Inter Miami, €35 million market value)
• Lorenzo Insigne (31, Napoli to Toronto FC, €25M)
• David Beckham (32, Real Madrid to LA Galaxy, €19.8M)
• Gonzalo Higuain (32, Juventus to Inter Miami, €15M)
• Thierry Henry (32, Barcelona to NY Red Bulls, €12M)
• Clint Dempsey (30, Tottenham to Seattle Sounders, €10M)
• Wayne Rooney (32, Everton to DC United, €10M)
• Chicharito (31, Sevilla to LA Galaxy, €9M)
• Xherdan Shaqiri (30, Lyon to Chicago Fire, €8M)
• Juan Pablo Angel (31, Aston Villa to NY Red Bulls, €6.6M)
• Jermain Defoe (31, Tottenham to Toronto FC, €6M)
• Emil Forsberg (32, RB Leipzig to NY Red Bulls, €6M)
• Christian Benteke (31, Crystal Palace to DC United, €6M)
• Robbie Keane (31, Tottenham to LA Galaxy, €5.5M)
• Zlatan Ibrahimovic (36, Manchester United to LA Galaxy, €5M)
• Marco Reus (35, Borussia Dortmund to LA Galaxy, €5M)
• Tim Cahill (32, Everton to NY Red Bulls, €5M)
• Olivier Giroud (37, AC Milan to LAFC, €3M)
• Gareth Bale (32, Real Madrid to LAFC, €3M)
• Luis Muriel (32, Atalanta to Orlando City, €3.5M)
What can we learn from that?
What makes a big Europe-to-MLS move work?
Now, this is a somewhat subjective, 20-person list. Tim Cahill is not Lionel Messi is not Christian Benteke is not Zlatan Ibrahimovic. But these are all relatively high-profile, attacking players who moved from one of Europe's five biggest leagues while in their 30s. That description also fits for Son, De Paul and Muller.
So, what can we say about these 20 deals?
• Average age: 32.0 years
• Market value: €10.3 million
• Non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes in last full season with previous club: 0.51
• NPG+A/90 in first full season in MLS: 0.66
• Percentage of available minutes in last season with previous club: 42.8%
• Percentage of available minutes in first full MLS season: 61.7%
We've excluded Zlatan Ibrahimovic from all of the average numbers because he missed nearly the entire pre-MLS season with Manchester United because of a torn ACL ... and then put up 1.01 npg+a/90 in his first season with the Galaxy at age 36. Since it's such a small sample size, we're better off just saying "there's only one Zlatan" and excluding him from the averages.
But broadly, these so-called retirement-home moves for aging attackers don't go as poorly as their reputations might suggest.
An average of about 60% of the minutes and 0.66 non-penalty goals+assists in their first full season in the league is not a bad return. About only 15 players in the league right now are hitting both of those thresholds. And missing nearly 40% of the minutes isn't as penalizing as it is in the Premier League, where every game counts toward your final point total, because of MLS's very forgiving playoff system.
Of course, these are all averages. Plus, it's skewed somewhat by Messi putting up video-game numbers in MLS last season, when he averaged 1.81 npg+a/90 -- better than even his best season with Barcelona.
But even if we remove Messi out of the dataset, the average attacking contribution in the player's final European season remains a quite-good 0.60 per 90 minutes.
To see if anything separated the moves that failed with the ones that succeeded, we have to determine which moves were failures and which were successes. And we've done that by creating a complex formula where we just, you know, look at each player's MLS stint and simply decide whether or not it looked like a success or a failure. The successes: Messi, Beckham, Higuain, Henry, Dempsey, Rooney, Angel, Keane, Forsberg, Benteke, Ibrahimovic and Reus. The failures: Insigne, Chicharito, Shaqiri, Cahill, Defoe, Giroud, Bale and Muriel.
You can quibble with a couple in either section -- the jury is still out on Muriel, Reus and Forsberg, if we're honest -- but the takeaway is that about half, or maybe a little more than half, of these moves were successes. That sounds terrible, but it's broadly in keeping with the transfer market as a whole, where about 50% of the moves end up succeeding.
If we look at the averages of the successful and unsuccessful moves, there are notable differences. The successful moves were for older players: 32.4 years, compared to 31.4 years for the unsuccessful moves. On top of that, the successful transfers graded out better in the three other metrics we're considering:
• Market value: €12.1 million to €7.9 million
• NPG+A/90 with previous club: 0.58 to 0.42
• Percentage of minutes played with previous club: 45.2% to 39.5%
Now, the wrong way to interpret this would be to say, "MLS teams should sign the oldest players possible." All this is showing us is that if you're able to keep playing in Europe at a high level into your mid-to-late 30s, it means you're a talented outlier like Zlatan or Messi.
Meanwhile, plenty of early-30s players still get competitive minutes before their clubs have realized that they've fallen off. It would make sense, too, that MLS teams would struggle to acquire still-great early-30s players who can still play at a Champions League level, while they are able to attract the still-great later-30s players who can still play at a Champions League level but might feel as if they've already proved everything they need to prove in Europe.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the most productive players in Europe and the ones who played more in Europe also tend to be the ones who do better in MLS. But if we strip out Messi from the dataset again, then there's almost no difference between the successful and unsuccessful moves.
The unsuccessful moves actually had a slightly higher output in Europe -- 0.5 npg+a/90, compared to 0.48 -- while the successful moves played slightly more -- 41.5% of minutes, compared to 38.6%. Their ages also were almost exactly the same: 31.8 for the successful moves, 31.9 for the unsuccessful moves.
The only notable difference, really, was in the market value of the players: €9.6 million for the successful moves, €7.8 million for the unsuccessful ones. These values are simply crowd-sourced numbers, and they are influenced by the remaining length of a player's contract, but they're generally a representation of what the world thinks a player is capable of providing in the future.
And that is what was most notable about looking at all of these moves together. The ones for the biggest names were the ones that worked, and the moves for effective-but-not-as-famous players -- such as Lorenzo Insigne and Olivier Giroud -- were the ones that failed.
To take all of this and apply to the three major deals from this summer: Both Son Heung-min and Rodrigo De Paul arrived to MLS with estimated market values north of €20 million or more and played more than 60% of the available minutes for their club teams. Thomas Müller goes to Vancouver with a market value of €6 million and played just 40% of the minutes for Bayern Munich last season.
It turns out that when we're talking about players we've seen play at the highest level for a decade or more, it's really not that hard to figure out which ones are more likely to work out.