So how can this be useful for a front office? A couple of pointers below:

Putting all of this data into a database, alongside basic player information, you could have a useful starting point. For example fishing into teams 11–15 of the rankings shows CSD Comunicaciones of Guatemala - the only team from Guatemala in the top 25.

Considering this is one of the best teams in North America, and from a tiny footballing nation like Guatemala, I’m assuming that it won’t take much money to bring a player from this team or league into MLS.

Quickly eyeballing Comunicaciones’ squad and its goalscoring statistics, I can see 25 year-old Rolando Blackburn might be someone to pay close attention to. He has a decent goalscoring rate and is consistently playing on a top 20 team in North America. He’s also called Rolando Blackburn.

Blackburn’s performance data, taken from Soccerway

You could quite easily repeat this exercise for any team or position you wanted to fill - narrowing your search using the FootballDatabase rankings.

Looking at some of the players that have come into the league recently, they have performed well and have lower wages compared to some of the leagues more established, but lesser talented, players.

For example, Johan Venegas recently joined the league from Alajuelense - the 6th best club in North America according to the rankings above. According to Soccerway, Venegas played a lot of the available games in his two seasons at the club.

Venegas’ performance data, taken from Soccerway

Considering that there are 44 games in a Costa Rican league season (split into two separate leagues - the Invierno and Verano) Venegas featured in 67% of the minutes available to him (5330/7920).

Considering Alajuelense are a good quality side and Venegas has played a lot of minutes for them, he would be the sort of player that I would reccommend a side scout further through this type of analysis (which Montreal evidently did, with them signing him in August 2015).

Going back to the original point about wages - Venegas has a cap hit of just $120,000 (base salary) and is 27 years old. Referring back to the peak years I mentioned in my previous post Venegas is past the peak of 24 years old, but still represents significant upside compared to the ageing Justin Mapp (31) who had a cap hit of $187,000 last year.

Edit: Johan Venegas’ salary was paid down using Targeted Allocation Money to ensure he was below the Designated Salary player threshold.

Another example of a player like this would be Dairon Asprilla of the Portland Timbers. Asprilla entertained many a crowd this year with his trickery:

2 x Taxi for Laba + Rivero please Mr Operator.

And he cost just $60,000 of cap space:

Taken from Tom Worville’s brilliant MLS Salary Database

Asprilla’s previous side had the following Global, Regional and National rankings at the time of writing:

Data taken from FootballDatabase

Although Alianza may not show up as a side that are performing well and should be viewed, they do represent untapped potential - greatly reinforced by Asprilla’s performance data with him appearing in a lot of games, similar to Venegas:

Asprilla’s performance data, taken from Soccerway

Potentially a system like this is being used by the Timbers already? That would explain why they reportedly spent $5million to buy Lucas Melano from Lanus to go from the 176th best team in the world to the 495th team in the world.