Earlier this month, MLS commissioner Don Garber said an interesting thing about the league in an interview with Sky Sports. The commish has long been externally bullish on the league’s prospects, partly in an effort to echo the strides the league’s made and partly to inflate the league’s value beyond its current stature to a wider global populace that has little frame of reference when it comes to MLS.

But this was as lofty as he’s ever been. This is where I’d like to focus today.

“I do believe in 10 years’ time or less, people will think of us like Serie A, La Liga, and hopefully the way they think about the Premier League. If we continue to do things right and stay to our plan.”

And then this.

The commissioner is bullish in his belief that MLS is firmly on course to become one of the best leagues in the world by 2022. “I believe without doubt we will,” he said.

There are vagaries involved here, some of them probably intentional. What that means to Garber – how he defines what constitutes what a top league is, fundamentally – is unclear. But I can tell you how I define it, and that’s based on how teams play over their individual talent. The closer you are to fluid, pass-and-move soccer – whether that looks like the Gegenpress or Tiki-Taka – the closer you are to the Pura Vida that soccer offers. Take the long, hoofed balls over the top, lower their trajectory and play some soccer.

So how, exactly, does MLS stack up with those leagues based on those ideals? And how far does it have to go to get there? This is one window as to what that might look like where we currently stand.

First thing’s first. What follows initially is a look at the top teams in 11 of the world’s key leagues (including MLS and the English Championship, which are often compared) in three key possession metrics: percentage of average overall possession per game, season-long successful passing rate and the percentage of short passes over long passes. The total possession numbers are perhaps the least precise of the three, but each has a story to tell.

This is that story.

Where appropriate (i.e. all of Europe) the seasonal litmus is 2014-15, so a nearly full-season MLS catalog of statistics in 2015 has a similar statistical point of comparison. And keep in mind this is one litmus among many. For those of us who judge a league’s progress by the strides it makes in progressive, idealistic soccer, it’s higher on the list. But there is a list, and this is only one thing on it. An important thing, but only one thing.

Possession

Bundesliga: Bayern Munich (65.8%)

La Liga: Barcelona (65.3%)

Ligue 1: PSG (61.1%)

Turkish Super Lig: Fenerbahce (59.2%)

Eredivisie: Feyenoord (59.1%)

EPL: Manchester United (58%)

Serie A: Inter Milan (57.8%)

Russian Premier League: CSKA Moscow (57.5%)

English Championship: Bournemouth (56.4%)

Brazilian Serie A: Atletico MG (54.6%)

MLS: New York Red Bulls (54%)

Pass success rate

La Liga: Barcelona (88.2%)

Ligue 1: PSG (88%)

Bundesliga: Bayern Munich (87.5%)

EPL: Manchester United (85.1%)

Serie A: Roma (85%)

Eredivisie: Ajax (83%)

Brazilian Serie A: Sao Paulo (82.9%)

MLS: Orlando City (82%)

Turkish Super Lig: Fenerbahce (81.5%)

Russian Premier League: Zenit (81.3%)

English Championship: Bournemouth (79.5%)

Percentage of short passes

Ligue 1: PSG (92.7%)

La Liga: Barcelona (92.4%)

EPL: Manchester City (91%)

Serie A: Inter Milan (91%)

Bundesliga: Bayern Munich (90%)

Brazilian Serie A: Gremio (88%)

Eredivisie: Ajax (87%)

Turkish Super Lig: Fenerbahce (84.4%)

English Championship: Bournemouth (83.5%)

MLS: Seattle Sounders (83.4%)

Russian Premier League: Zenit (83.1%)

The three major instances in which league numbers are obfuscated by the top team are in Ligue 1, the Bundesliga and La Liga. Each league is screened by a picket of the galactic talent mainly on three teams: PSG, Bayern and Barcelona. That’s especially the case in the Bundesliga.

Peel back Bayern’s numbers to reveal the league’s underbelly and you get something that looks more like MLS, possessionally, than most would care to assume. Even if individual quality is at a higher premium in Germany than it is in the U.S., the next highest possession team in the Bundesliga during the ’14-15 season was Wolfsburg, at 54 percent even. That’s level with the MLS-leading Red Bulls right now. As for successful pass rate, Glabach was No. 2 behind Bayern with 82.7, which is nearly level with Orlando City. The joys of parity, which exists in Germany (Bayern aside) like nowhere else in Europe’s top leagues.

Still, on an elite level, this doesn’t project particularly kindly on MLS’s whiteboard. In terms of narrative, this is precisely what we hear on a daily basis in terms of the league’s place in world soccer. One league’s elite judged against another. This isn’t entirely out of place, either, since a league is represented globally by its most visible elite. In MLS, pinning down the elite based on playing style, and not necessarily trophies, is a harder proposition.

But that’s an incomplete cross-section precisely because of some of the issues we enumerated. Europe (and Brazil to a lesser extent) is a playground for the rich few. The top team (or the top 3-5 teams) in the league isn’t always indicative of the type of wider play you see on Saturdays and Sundays.

So. Let’s say we did the same calculation for the mid-table team from each league, which cuts the silliest money out of the equation and drills to the beating core of the league. What might that look like?

Like this.

Possession

EPL: Stoke City (50.2%)

Brazilian Serie A: Palmeiras (50.2%)

Ligue 1: Rennes (49.8%)

Russian Premier League: Kuban Krasnodar (49.8%)

English Championship: Bolton (49.7%)

MLS: Montreal Impact (49.5%)

Eredivisie: PEC Zwolle (49.4%)

Turkish Super Lig: Eskisehirspor (49.4%)

Bundesliga: Eintracht Frankfurt (49.4%)

Serie A: Cagliari (49.1%)

La Liga: Malaga (48.9%)

Pass success rate

Serie A: Sampdoria (80%)

EPL: Aston Villa (79%)

Brazilian Serie A: Internacional (78.4%)

MLS: Real Salt Lake (77.3%)

Turkish Super Lig: Trabzonspor (77.2%)

Ligue 1: Reims (76.8%)

Eredivise: Willem II (76.2%)

La Liga: Elche (75.1%)

Bundesliga: Stuttgart (73.9%)

Russian Premier League: Ural S.R. (73.4%)

English Championship: Bolton (72.5%)

Percentage of short passes

Brazilian Serie A: Atletico PR (85.4%)

Ligue 1: Reims (82.7%)

Serie A: Torino (82%)

La Liga: Valencia (81.6%)

Bundesliga: Bayer Leverkusen (81.6%)

EPL: Aston Villa (80.2%)

Eredivisie: Heerenveen (79.8%)

Russian Premier League: Ural S.R. (79.6%)

MLS: New England Revolution (77.3%)

Turkish Super Lig: Eskisehirspor (77.1%)

English Championship: Bolton (76.8%)

Paints a slightly more shaded Rembrandt, doesn’t it?

The possession numbers were destined to shake out in the same neighborhood – the median literally demands it – but pay closer attention to the other two categories. They’re more important anyway.

Isolate each league from one another for a moment. Where MLS is concerned, it’s clear there’s more individual quality in, say, the Eredivisie, which sold on a player just this calendar year in Memphis who’d have topped every MLS 24 Under 24 list in history. But take each case as an insularity, judging teams against the only thing they can ultimately be judged against: their peers. So in lieu of comparing Real Salt Lake’s 77% pass accuracy ratio to Willem II’s slightly lower one directly, use that as a wider litmus against the league. The individual quality may be higher, but the possessional meat beneath the skin in each league isn’t as different as you’d imagine. Especially when you consider how much lower the payroll of the MLS team is when compared to every other team on the list.

The reason this type of judgment can be important to keep in mind is because it strips out cross-league comparisons and judges teams (and leagues) based on internal competition. It’s largely irrelevant how the Revolution would perform if you dropped them into Ligue 1 tomorrow. If the logic follows the scribbled line that, well, of course Stuttgart’s passes are more widely inaccurate than RSL’s because the league is tougher, then in that case, shouldn’t we also acknowledge that Stuttgart also has more individual talent than RSL? In the face of that, the only option is to judge against the league and not the world. Like putting Jim Brown side by side with Adrian Peterson, there’s little value in taking the direct comparison beyond the system in which they inhabit.

Instead, it’s far more germane to judge how, say, the Revs play in MLS compared to a team in the same league position elsewhere. It’s a far more accurate depiction of the kind of play the league fosters and values.

MLS is still lagging behind in this sense. There’s little question in that, and you won’t find anyone on this celestial rock arguing otherwise. In particular, the league plays longer than most in lieu of more technicians than you find in Europe. Caleb Porter’s backslide from possession to an uglier, more blunt style is a particularly concerning referendum. As a whole, too, the league still values coherent play along the ground less than the world’s pace-setters, which is governed as much by wider coaching style as it is parity, which thereby limits wages which limits talent. But widen the lens from just the tip-top of each league and the conversation suddenly becomes a bit more nuanced than the global discussion might lead you to believe.

Whether MLS can actually be expected to reach the lofty heights already occupied by the world’s best leagues in 10 years is a hard topic to tackle. It doesn’t seem likely. The league needs to be better, of course, but it has some severe gaps to close in playing style before it can reach those altitudes. But those craggy impediments to the summit are perhaps not as insurmountable as they seemed even a half decade ago.

Ultimately, the point isn’t to say MLS teams can objectively compete on an individual basis with the muscle-backed hounds topping the world’s best leagues. The league isn’t all that close yet. But we need to re-frame the locus of discussion. In terms of palatable playing style, MLS is a galaxy away from England and Germany and France based based on the best teams in the discussion and far closer to the mean everywhere else. The reality, though, is that Chelsea and Manchester City and Bayern Munich center the discussion, and MLS is left – fairly or not – with those comparisons.

So perhaps we should stop trying to group the playing styles of, say, the Red Bulls and Manchester City together as part of their own league ecosystems, and look at the New England Revolution and Aston Villa instead.