There was little precedent for Clint Dempsey’s season-opening pace back in March even for a player like, well, Clint Dempsey. It almost belied reality.
Over the first eight games of the season, Dempsey compiled an astonishing seven goals and five assists during Sounders FC’s rocket-boosted start to the season. In little more than two months’ worth of work, Dempsey put himself on pace to obliterate both the MLS single-season goal-scoring and assists totals. In the same year.
Then the summer happened.
Dempsey left the Sounders in good stead in mid-June following a 3-0 win over FC Dallas. The club was 9-4-2 when Dempsey left for U.S. national team duty and the CONCACAF Gold Cup, but he spent much of the next three months either with the USMNT or recovering from injury. Back in Seattle, meanwhile, the Sounders promptly dropped eight of their next nine league games and tried to stave off a run that would keep them out of the playoffs at season’s end. They’re almost across that finish line, but one final hurdle remains against Real Salt Lake on Sunday (4:30 p.m. PT; JoeTV/KIRO 97.3 FM/El Rey 1360 AM).
Dempsey returned to the lineup full time at the beginning of September, but his sizzling form from earlier in the season didn’t follow him back. Since coming back, Dempsey has one goal and three assists in his last seven league games. He’s still contributing in other ways, but they aren’t necessarily showing up on the scoresheet.
What’s changed is a complex amalgam of team form, Dempsey’s liquid role in the final third and perhaps how he sees himself as one cog in part of that attack. Things about Dempsey’s game are different - not necessarily better or worse, just different - than they’ve ever been. And to understand what that looks like, we have to dive into Dempsey’s season compared to those in his past.
Historically, wherever he’s been deployed, Dempsey has been a self-starting shot creator. He dances back into the interlocking play of the midfield only to abruptly reverse course to run at his unsuspecting marker. Which way will his run dovetail? When Dempsey’s clicking, the beauty is in the not knowing. This almost inevitably leads him into a free pasture, from where he can launch an arrow at goal.
Simply put, there has never been a better American player at creating his own space for a shot.
The most potent danger in the Dempsey-Obafemi Martins pairing has always been in the potential and the stored energy, not in the kinetic. Martins may get you with his speed, but there is a bevy of fast defenders in MLS. It’s the stuttering imbalance he pops off like flares before launching off on some mazy run that makes him different. The same goes for Dempsey, who doesn’t have the speed but certainly has the phone booth quicks. Watch his feet before he frees space. It’s like watching someone set the table, carefully placing down the pewter before serving up the prime rib.
Dempsey hasn’t been different in the first regard over the second half of the season, even though his goals have been harder to find. He’s still dropping in, still looking for avenues, still setting the table. The problem is that he isn’t dropping the meat onto the plate.
The value of the overall shot metric in soccer analytics circles is dubious. A player can snap off a speculative 35-yard bomb that sails 20 yards wide of the bar, but he’s credited with a tick mark in the shot column the same as if he’d fired a dangerous free kick inches over the bar. There was no intrinsic value in that moment, so using that number to definitively state anything is troublesome.
That’s why it helps to cross-analyze that number with shots on target, arguably the most crucial number to monitor for a goal-scorer. As the oft-chirped British refrain goes, you can’t win the raffle if you don’t first purchase a ticket. And this is where things get interesting.
Last year, Dempsey was fourth in MLS in shots on target. He’s played fewer minutes in 2015, so the fact that he’s tied for 21st this season comes with that caveat, but on average he wouldn’t be on pace to match last year anyway. He’s testing goalkeepers less, and that number has fallen off over the second half of the season, when he’s chosen to be a more active participant in the midfield rather than fill a definitive role as a striker, where he’s nominally deployed next to Martins as part of Sigi Schmid’s favored XI in a 4-4-2.
Refocus your lens from before/after summer to games in which he’s scored/games in which he hasn’t. In terms of total shots, Dempsey’s averaging 3.07 in the 13 games he’s played and hasn’t scored. He’s averaging 3.0 shots even in the six games in which he has. No discernible difference there, right?
Now look deeper. In that 13-game sample, Dempsey averaged 0.8 shots on target in the games when he didn’t score. Not good. In the six games he did? The number shoots up to a whopping 2.5. Remember, that’s shots on target.
And it’s an MVP caliber number.
If he averaged that over the course of his 19 games played, he’d have 47.5 shots on target this season. Even with his lengthy absence, that’d be good for fifth in the league, about where he was last year. If he played as many games as Toronto’s MVP frontrunner Sebastian Giovinco has this season with that average, he’d lead the entire league by nine shots on goal. And that’s a virtual ocean, especially when you consider how good Giovinco’s been this season.
The reason for the disparity is an amalgam of team selection, opposition tactics and mentality. The numbers can’t provide answers as to why Dempsey is so prolifically switched on in front of net in some games and a larger part of the buildup in others. But the difference is stark, and it’s real, and Dempsey has never spent more time trying to be all things to one team than he has late on this season.
As for his dedication to being part of that buildup, Dempsey is breaking new personal ground this season.
Dempsey probably hit peak form for Fulham around 2009. That December, leading Italian publication La Gazzetta dello Sport named Dempsey one of the 11 best players in the English Premier League. A couple months later, his famous chip against Juventus in the Europa League became what may well be considered the best goal for an American abroad in history. On May 12, 2010, Dempsey played the final 35 minutes of Fulham’s Europa League final against Atletico Madrid, making him the first American to play in a major European final.
That season, Dempsey averaged 31.4 passes per game, with a completion rate of 72.3 percent. His role was borne out through the numbers: Dive into dangerous spaces, press back lines and take shots. That was his primary role until he came back to MLS. Whether part of the design or simply Dempsey’s desire to prod the midfield more, he’s gradually upped his passes-per-game totals since he started with the Sounders in 2013.
But they’ve never been higher than this year.
Dempsey’s highest passing average per game during his time in Europe was the 35.3 he averaged for Fulham in the 2011-12 season. This year? He’s up to a cool 43.1 passes per game, and he’s averaging an impressive 83 percent completion ratio. This isn’t just the first time he’s crested 40 in a season. It’s also an average of five passes per game more than the previous highest season-long total of his career.
So what does that mean? An extra five passes per game don’t seem like that many, do they? Spread those out over the course of an entire season, though, and you’d be surprised.
Dempsey often drops deep into the midfield, folding between the central midfielders to create when he’s pressed out of the attacking third and the service isn’t there. Since Seattle plays without a dedicated central attacking playmaker, that’s fairly understandable, especially considering Seattle’s propensity to play it along the ground. But when Dempsey drops too deep to recover, his shots suffer and his lateral passes skyrocket. It’s no secret why his successful passes are higher now than they were four or five years ago. They’re less dangerous.
In essence, the game is too complex for any one player to do both things at once, to be both a prolific shot-taker and a fountain for creative possession. Dempsey can be a deep-lying playmaker or a goal-scoring second striker, but he can’t be both. That’s been borne out this year in his performances.
Take Seattle’s season-opening 3-0 win over the New England Revolution in March. Vintage Dempsey. He scored twice and was generally the most dangerous player on the field, and look at his average positioning map; tucked next to Martins.
This is traditional Dempsey (2), especially when paired with Martins (9). The two need to be connected enough to scare back lines into opening pockets for exploration. Lop one of the heads off and the danger in and around the box decreases exponentially. Dempsey had 34 passes in this game, 10 below his season average, and that’s the chirping canary that lets us know he was considerably higher thanks in part to his midfield pushing him forward and giving him less reason to drop.
Now look at Dempsey’s pass map from the same game. Pay special attention to how his passes fan up and out toward the attacking third like a bubble.
Vintage Dempsey. Ideal Dempsey. This is right where you want him. It just isn’t always where he’s been.
When Dempsey’s passing volume drops, the danger of those passes almost invariably increases. He only even attempted nine passes in his own half against the Revolution. When things change - when Dempsey is deeper and his passes per game number spikes - he tends to peel back from the attacking third. And that’s hurt his contribution to the scoresheet.
He’s still generating assists - watch his effortless helper to set up Martins in Seattle’s 3-0 win over the Whitecaps earlier this year - just not at the same clip as earlier in the season.
At his best, Dempsey is still one of the top three most devastatingly effective attacking talents in MLS. He can do things and go places few others in MLS history can or have. But like with any player, there are limitations. Perhaps a half decade ago, Dempsey could have been more of a box-running trequartista, dropping back to ping one-twos with Osvaldo Alonso and Gonzalo Pineda while also running of Martins’ hip as his shadow striker.
But that’s not the reality now. What’s more accurate? Dempsey is at a crossroads. Does he become part of the midfield or a dedicated, full-time striker? Just as the start of the season hinged on Dempsey’s positioning, so too will the end.
