By Tom Worville (@worville)

This post sets out to use expansion side Orlando City as an example of how value in MLS can be calculated, and how a teams’ management of the salary cap can be scrutinized using a simple visualization.

With the release of the salary cap last week there are a hundred and one things I want to do with this data. The first idea is something that myself and Ben Torvaney thought of when discussing what we would do if we had the salary data of the Premier League and other European leagues if it was available like it is in MLS (fun topic of conversation I know). Evidently, that data is unlikely to ever be released for any of the big leagues, so MLS is the only league these ideas can be applied to.

This idea revolves around how much “value” teams have been able to get on the pitch, and whether this represents good allocation of salary money or not. Orlando City have been used in this example because they are an expansion team (so have had to basically build from scratch), I quite like them as they’ve done a decent job of settling into the league and they have a squad made up of players both expensive and cheap.

To calculate value, two metrics are used. The first – Value Available (VA) – is a player's overall compensation for the year adjusted for how many games for the season there have been played. For example, if all games have been played then the full amount of player compensation could have been on the field of play throughout the season. The thinking is that teams are going to pay for the best players, and try and play those players as often as they can.

By adjusting this value to what is available at any snapshot in the season, we can see the players that a team has used a lot and have been wise to invest in and also those players that the team maybe should have thought twice about signing. Currently we are 59% of the way through the regular season, so I have used VA figures that are 59% of overall compensation.

Secondly “Value on Field” (VoF) is the compensation on a players contract multiplied by the percentage of minutes available so far this season. For example, if only half of the games have been played and a player has played half of those games, then his VoF would be 25% of his overall compensation. This monetary figure allows us to compare players on bigger contracts playing fewer minutes, or players on lower contracts who are getting high minutes and therefore offer a large degree of value for money.

The graph below (made using Tableau, salary data from the MLS Players Union and minute data from Soccerway) shows these two fields used for Orlando City so far this season. I’ve removed Kaka from these as he completely ruins the axis (blame the wage disparity in MLS, not me).