Two excellent articles were written in the past few days that both featured a facet of the game that’s becoming increasingly integral to how MLS plays: verticality. Matthew Doyle looked at verticality as it applies to teams, and Will Parchman touched on about verticality in the context of a specific player, Alphonso Davies. It’s a topic I approached tangentially here, but I don’t think verticality and pace, or directness and pace, are perfect substitutes.

There are a number of metrics already in the public sphere to measure this verticality, and I think looking at them can better inform the current conversation. One of the most intuitive, especially for individual players, is yards run forward while on the ball. Michael Caley was, I think, the first person I’d seen use it widely, and he occasionally looks at these numbers for the Big 5 leagues. I’m doing a bit of interpolation to calculate it here, by inferring forward distance based on the end location of a pass to the recipient, and the starting location of his next pass.

Here are the top ten players so far this season, in yards progressed forward while on the ball, per 90 (data is prior to the New England - San Jose game, and I’ve filtered it down to only those players who have played more than 180 minutes):