Marco Di Vaio’s 21-year professional career, which included a Scudetto, two Canadian Club Championships, a UEFA Super Cup and 251 goals, came to an end this weekend in Montreal.
Many will remember the clever Italian striker for his stints at Juventus, Parma, Bologna and Valencia. Maybe even for his brief time with Italy’s national team leading up to and culminating with Euro 2004. However, what Di Vaio was able to accomplish in MLS from age 36 onward was just as impressive, if not more so, than any of his accomplishments in Europe.
Di Vaio leaves the Montreal Impact tied as MLS’ 72nd all-time leading scorer with 34 goals. Twenty of these goals came during his phenomenal 2013 season when he was nominated for the league’s MVP award, missing out to the Chicago Fire’s Mike Magee.
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Looking in isolation at the 2013 season Di Vaio was scoring at an incredible pace. Di Vaio’s 20 goals placed him second among that season’s leading goal scorers, trailing only the Vancouver Whitecaps’ Camilo who finished with 22. When adjusted for minutes played Di Vaio’s scoring record was 0.66 goals per 90 minutes, the fifth highest rate in the league (amongst players who played in at least half of their team’s games), with Camilo still leading the league on 0.82 goals per 90 minutes.
Despite Camilo’s superior raw goals tally and goals per 90 minutes rate, there is still a very good argument to be made that Di Vaio had the better goalscoring season in 2013—the simple reason being that unlike Camilo, Di Vaio was not his team’s designated penalty taker.
Penalties are converted at a rate of approximately 76 percent across the world, excluding penalty shootouts. This number is unsurprising, considering how regularly we see penalties converted. Some players may be slightly better than others at taking penalties, but given the small sample sizes it is hard to make any real judgement calls about a player based on his penalty conversion rate.
Scoring penalties is also a vastly different skill than scoring goals from open play, and many argue that the act of winning a penalty deserves more merit than converting the penalty itself. Regardless, penalty goals are a very different beast, so in looking at goal scoring ability it makes sense to exclude them from the analysis.
In 2013 Di Vaio didn’t take any penalties, whereas Camilo took five and scored all of them. If we look at non-penalty goal scoring leaders from 2013, Di Vaio led the league with 20, Camilo followed on 17 and the next closest player only had 13 non-penalty goals. Adjusting for minutes played puts Camilo at 0.63 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes and Marco Di Vaio still at 0.66 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes.
Another statistic that is useful for attacking players is called Weighted Chances Created Plus, or (wCC+). Weighted Chances Created Plus looks at a player’s attacking contribution in terms of shots, key passes (passes that directly lead to a shot), assists and goals, and then compares his contribution to the rest of the players in his position. A player whose attacking contribution is at the league average for his position will have a wCC+ of 100.
A more in depth explanation of the methodology and effectiveness of Weighted Chances Created Plus can be found here. Di Vaio’s wCC+ in 2013 was 119.63, which means that he was 20 percent more productive than the average striker in MLS (league MVP Mike Magee had the highest wCC+ in 2013 of 167.58). This is an important statistic because it reflects not only Di Vaio’s ability to score goals, but also his ability to create chances for his team.
Now that we’ve established just how good Marco Di Vaio was in 2013 we can look at the broader scale of where he fits in among MLS’s all-time greatest strikers.
As previously mentioned Di Vaio finished his career as the 72nd top goal scorer in MLS history, despite only playing in the league for three seasons. If we consider only non-penalty goals Di Vaio jumps to 66th on the all-time goal scoring charts, having never scored a penalty in his MLS career. Interestingly, taking out penalty goals also puts Jeff Cunningham back on top of MLS’s all-time goal scorers ahead of Landon Donovan.
If we compare the top 100 goals scorers in MLS’s history Di Vaio’s accomplishments look even more impressive. Over his three seasons with the Montreal Impact Di Vaio posted a scoring rate of 0.52 goals per 90 minutes (and non-penalty goals per 90 minutes). This puts him 16th out of the top 100 goal scorers in terms of goals per 90 minutes and 11th in terms of non-penalty goals per 90 minutes. Perhaps equally staggering is his record of 3.7 shots per 90 minutes, which puts him 5th among the top 100 goal scorers in MLS.
It may be that some of Marco Di Vaio’s performances were overshadowed by the fact he played on a mediocre Montreal Impact team in two of his three seasons in MLS and a dreadful one in his final campaign. However, when looking at his overall numbers it is clear that despite only joining the league at age 36 he is one of the elite strikers in MLS history.
As Marco Di Vaio’s career comes to a conclusion much of the talk surrounding his legacy will be about his successful years in Europe, but the mark he left on MLS should not be forgotten.
Sam Gregory is soccer analytics writer based in Montreal. Follow him on Twitter