After 29 long months, Brek Shea will lace up his cleats for Orlando City SC and, barring some unlikely circumstances, play in an MLS game against New York City FC on March 8.
Since leaving FC Dallas for Stoke City in January 2013, Shea has played just 1,183 minutes in league or US national team matches. That number probably won't change until March, and if it does, it won't be by much – maybe two full USMNT games at most.
Here's the context: In the 29 months preceding the ill-fated Stoke move, Shea played in 7,276 minutes for FC Dallas in MLS and for the USMNT.
That kind of dropoff in minutes will challenge anyone's sharpness, and Shea will have to combat that rustiness as he returns to MLS. Compounding that, in the limited minutes he has seen over the past few years, Shea’s production has dropped off – in most cases only slightly, but in one instance quite sharply. We'll get to that in a minute.
Comparing Shea's production from his time in MLS to his time since leaving the League is, of course, tricky. To do so, all of Shea’s production in England and for the USMNT has been combined into one column while his MLS seasons (since 2010) have been split up into each of their own.
Obviously Shea faced differing levels of competition in England and for the national team, but in order to get the sample size as large as possible, these differing levels had to be bundled. The relevant statistics were aso accrued over a vast amount of time, which is a big grain of salt to take with everything below.
First his passing statistics. You will notice that this was never one of Shea’s top attributes and that truth hasn't changed much:
Shea Passing Stats
And he’s never been a great chance creator, either – though his numbers there are actually a bit encouraging:
Shea Chances Created Per 90
What set Shea apart during his MLS years, then, was his ability on the dribble. He's a gazelle out there, and once he gets a head of steam he's able to blow past back-footed defenders.
So here's the really worrying part: Shea has not successfully completed dribbles at the rate he did while in MLS despite attempting them at a similar rate over the past two years:
Shea Dribble Completion %
Shea Dribbles Attempted Per 90
Total shots (excluding blocks) has fallen off a bit, but his conversion rate and accuracy have not. It’s also important to note that his only two goals since leaving MLS came in the 2013 Gold Cup.
Shea Shots (ex. blocks) Per 90
Shea Shooting Stats
There's no silver bullet in these numbers, no one stat that says Shea is or isn't capable of reproducing his Best XI form of 2011. The dribble completion number is the biggest worry, though that may speak more to teams scouting him than any real deterioration of his skills.
And that swings the discussion back toward playing time. MLS teams will continue to scout him, and bend their gameplans toward making sure he doesn't have space to charge forward into the attack. At that point, Shea's challenge will be to use the minutes he gets to not just be productive, but also to add new tricks and countermoves. That's the development curve that stalled out for him over the past two seasons, and one Orlando City are implicitly betting upon by signing him.
