By Jared Young (@jaredeyoung)

Major League Soccer just completed a busy offseason with record amounts of money at the disposal of the owners. Roughly 80 players were brought in from outside professional leagues while approximately 50 players departed for those same leagues. That’s roughly the gap created by the addition of LAFC. There was plenty of shuffling within the league as well but it's safe to presume that's not increasing the quality of the league substantially. The assumption is that the league as a whole is doing good business internationally and improving the league, but it’s difficult to measure whether or not that assumption is justified.

There are a number of reasons why assessing player movement is so difficult. Critical is the fact that it’s challenging to analyze the relative quality of leagues around the world. MLS pulled seven players from the Venezuelan league this offseason. Is the Venezuelan league better than MLS? Is it worse? If so, how much worse? Then there is the challenge of evaluating the individual talent within the context of a given league. Did MLS sign the seven best Venezuelan’s or seven also rans?

It’s difficult to answer these questions but frameworks are developing that open the door to a public conversation.

The first issue being tackled is to compare the quality of leagues around the world. A company called 21st Club, a consulting company for clubs globally, has developed a World Super League that effectively simulates games with clubs all around the world and ranks them based on the results. The Super League also evaluates the players on each team. The results are proprietary but reveal that the world of football is moving toward more quantifiable methods of evaluating global talent.

FiveThirtyEight has created a similarly developed ranking for 453 of the top teams in the world and also published a ranking of 73 leagues. FiveThirtyEight combines two methods in their league ranking, inter-league results and the financial value of the leagues according to transfermarkt. The inter-league results we can use as a proxy for league quality and the market values as a proxy for the relative price of players in that league. Borrowing from 21st Club’s method, the FiveThirtyEight data provides a way to assess the talent movement in MLS.

The following chart indexes the FiveThirtyEight leagues against MLS on both inter-league results (y-axis) and league values (x-axis). FiveThirtyEight also scores the teams in the second divisions of the top five leagues in Europe, and I added their position on the graph as well. Since FiveThirtyEight doesn’t score their market value the assumption used is that the second division will have the same distance from the best fit curve as the corresponding top division. Here is the chart with 78 leagues and MLS at the intersection of the axes.