There's something incredible happening in MLS right now, and the average World Cup watcher probably has no clue.
Seriously, think about all of the people you know who are "sports fans" but maybe not "soccer fans" -- the ones who root hard for the U.S. men's national team every four years and know the names of their four or five best players.
Sure, they probably still can't pronounce the last name of manager Mauricio Pochettino, but they watched tons of soccer this summer. The World Cup had so many games, and finally, it was all aligned with our time zones. These people now have opinions about VAR, England's prevent defense and the general moral fiber of the Argentina national team.
They're primed to care about soccer, especially American soccer, and especially a kind of greatness we've never seen before from a player of a certain age. No, I'm not talking about Lionel Messi, who somehow (1) might still be the greatest soccer player in the world, (2) is easily the greatest 39-year-old soccer player we've ever seen, and (3) continues to play soccer every week, across North America, without having any effect on North American sports discourse.
No, I'm talking about Cavan Sullivan, the 16-year-old phenom who, somehow, still feels as if he's being underhyped.
The history of American soccer is filled with players who were overpromised and couldn't do anything but underdeliver, but this is different. It's not just that we, Americans, have never seen someone like Sullivan. No, the wider soccer world -- the rest of the entire world -- rarely ever sees someone like Sullivan.
Here are some numbers for why you should get excited:
1,675 minutes
As I like to often say: The best predictor of future stardom is minutes players at a young age.
Take the three front-runners for this year's Ballon d'Or. Harry Kane was playing and scoring goals for Millwall in the Championship during his age-18 season. Lamine Yamal is 19 -- right now. And Kylian Mbappé broke out for Monaco during his age-17 season.
Sullivan is currently in his age-16 season (defined by your age at the start of the campaign). And so far, he has played 1,675 league minutes in MLS.
The site FBref has data for what they call the "Next 14" -- essentially, the most competitive leagues in the world after Europe's Big Five -- that goes back to the beginning of the current century, if not more. Only 21 outfield players have played more league minutes than Sullivan, who still has at least eight games left in his season. If we expand the dataset to include the Big Five, then only five other players -- Eduardo Camavinga, Alex Song, Gavi, Lamine Yamal, and Nuri Sahin -- have played more minutes than Sullivan before their age-17 season.
The leader, among all of these players? Freddy Adu had played 5,448 minutes by the end of his age-16 season.
€1.54 billion
Though we don't have much useful leaguewide data dating to 2006, when Adu was wrapping up his age-16 season, I do feel confident in saying the following: MLS is a lot better than it was 20 years ago.
Heck, it's a lot better than it was even 10 years ago. Per a recent analysis by Michael Caley: In 2016, the average combined transfer value of the median MLS team (as estimated by the site Transfermarkt) was significantly lower than the average team in the first divisions in Mexico, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. Since then, the league has essentially caught up to Belgium and Mexico in transfer value, and it has surpassed Portugal and the Netherlands.
Though the biggest teams in those European leagues are still way better and richer than any MLS side -- thanks to Champions League prize money -- the average match that Cavan Sullivan plays in MLS is probably tougher than what he'd face were he playing for Benfica, Porto or PSV.
All in all, the combined estimated transfer values of all 30 MLS clubs is €1.54 billion -- or about €51.3 million per team.
12 goals and assists
For the Big Five leagues, FBref has goal-and-assist data dating to at least the mid-1990s for Ligue 1, for the entirety of the Premier League since its breakaway from the English Football League in 1992, and the late 1980s for Italy, Germany and Spain.
Over that stretch, the record for goals+assists before a player's age-17 season comes from Bojan Krkic, who scored 10 goals and created three more in his early years -- right at the beginning of Pep Guardiola's dominance with Barcelona. Next after him is a tie between Yamal and Wayne Rooney's Everton years, at 10.
Sullivan currently has 12 -- a nearly even split between seven goals and five assists. If we expand the list out to the Next 14 leagues, then only four players have more. Chelsea's Estêvão registered 23 goal contributions with Palmeiras in Brazil's top flight -- a much tougher league than MLS. Normally, I'd remove penalties from the equation, but the fact that Estevao was chosen to take three penalties as a 16-year-old feels like useful information.
Then there's Adu with 22, Romelu Lukaku with 19 for Anderlecht, and Endrick's 15 with Palmeiras before he moved to Real Madrid.
The smart money is on Sullivan moving up the list over the next month as MLS wraps up its regular season. In his eight games since the World Cup, he has scored six goals and added four assists.
132 passes into the attacking third
Sullivan is the rare attacking prospect whose attacking production actually underrates his track record.
Of course, the production at this point in his career is fantastic -- bested only by a collection of some of the best attacking prospects of the past 30 years. But that production is backed up by a sustainable drumbeat of quality shots and chances created, plus a bedrock of excellent ball progression and off-ball movement.
To dig into some more advanced numbers, we need to move beyond FBref's historical database. Stats Perform doesn't have numbers that extend to the 1990s, but we're able to look at the Big Five in Europe, MLS, Liga MX, the Dutch Eredivisie, the English second division, a number of cup competitions in Europe and South America, plus the first divisions in Portugal, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. The data dates to at least the mid-2010s.
Among all of the players who fall within there, Sullivan ranks third and second, respectively, in the two most important and predictive attacking metrics: expected goals and expected assists. The other players I've highlighted in the below chart, which only looks at minutes played at age 16 or earlier, mostly played in more difficult leagues, but across the modern era of the sport almost no one has done what Sullivan is currently doing, still eight years away from the start of his prime:
He's also not just standing up near the goal and waiting for things to happen. Among this same cohort, Sullivan leads all players in passes played into the attacking third, with 132. The only other players with more than 100 are Jude Bellingham (104) and Gilberto Mora (109), both of whom are midfielders, not attackers.
That's clear when we look at passes played into the penalty area. Both Mora and Bellingham landed right around 100; Sullivan is all the way up at 202. Only Yamal, at 254, played more.
Scoring goals, creating chances, moving the ball into the attacking third, moving the ball into the box -- that's all there. The only thing missing is an ability to find space off of the ball, and it's only missing because I haven't mentioned it yet.
Sullivan has taken 142 touches inside the box. Among this cohort, Yamal, again, is the only player with more.
78 rating
The best players in modern soccer are the wide attackers who score goals, create chances, move the ball into attacking positions and find space inside the box. The best attacking prospects -- players in their late teens and early 20s -- tend to be able to score and create goals at a young age, but that's it. They usually can't aid in buildup play -- outside of slowing things down with a succession of head-down dribbles that sometimes move the ball upfield but often kill attacks by allowing the defense to recover. And they rarely have an advanced enough understanding of space and ball movement to be patient and savvy enough to receive passes in dangerous positions.
This all-conquering winger is a new prototype of player -- so new that the two best examples, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, are still playing. And so we haven't seen many young players develop with this idea in mind. That is, until Yamal -- and yes, now Sullivan.
The just-turned-17-year-old doesn't just have good-for-a-16-year-old numbers in his first real professional season. No, he genuinely has been one of the best players in MLS.
The player-rating model from the stats app Futi looks at how much every touch increases or decreases his team's chances of scoring and conceding a goal. Then it adjusts for the player's role and how well his team plays when he's on and off the field. And finally, they convert it all into an easy-to-understand 0-to-100 scale.
Among players with at least 1,500 minutes played this season, Sullivan currently ranks in the top 10 for the Futi model. The average age of the players ahead of him is nearly twice his: 31. And that's all for the full season; if we looked only at the post-World-Cup stretch, he probably would be even higher:
There are still plenty of questions.
Will he grow? What happens when he has moved beyond Philadelphia's relatively chaotic system? How might he handle moving and living in Europe? Those questions -- and more -- would hold true for any 16-year-old soccer player.
But while it probably won't happen because it's an unlikely outcome for everyone who has ever lived, Sullivan's early-career excellence means that he is more likely to become a superstar than any American who has come before him.
Just consider this. Futi also rates each individual area of a player's in-possession performance: shooting, creating, receiving, dribbling and linking (or buildup play). There are two players in the league who rate above a 60 in all five.
The two: Cavan Sullivan and Lionel Messi.