As a football fan, there’s nothing quite so vexatious as when a player who has been out with an injury or on loan returns and is described as “like a new signing.” It’s almost always deployed in defence of an underwhelming transfer window. This cliche has been trotted out so often (by various Whitecaps regimes and clubs worldwide) that people were saying it sarcastically about Deiber Caicedo’s return. In fairness, I don’t think anybody associated with the Whitecaps has actually said Caicedo is “like a new signing” but the discussion online did get me curious about his loan spell in Colombia and what he can offer the team for the remainder of 2024. So, with the help of Alexandre Gangué-Ruzic I dived into the data. Here is what I found:

Right away we can see that, stylistically, Caicedo hasn’t changed much. He’s still a dribbly attacker who gets a lot of touches and whose outputs are about evenly split between shots for himself and chances for his teammates. He also obviously performed quite well compared to other attackers in the Colombian league at the stuff he does well. He was above the 90th percentile in xG, xA, and progressive runs. His 0.48 xG+xA/90 is very respectable and would be well clear of the MLS average for attacking midfielders if it translated perfectly.

But how can we project this performance to the MLS context? This, as it turns out, is a hard question to answer. The reason for this is that, although players frequently move from Colombia to MLS, it’s not that common for players to do so at a similar point in their career to Caicedo. Usually, MLS clubs buy players from Colombia before their peak (in their late teens or early 20s). So there are a ton of examples of Colombian attackers moving to MLS and having their production balloon. Examples include Jhon Duran, Michael Barrios, Santiago Moreno, and Carlos Gomez. But this sudden surge in production is because these players are developing and getting better, not because MLS is that much easier to score in than the Colombian league. There is one really positive example of a Colombian moving to MLS in his early prime years…

Colombian league non-penalty G+A/90 in age 23/24 season:

Chicho Arango: 0.52
Deiber Caicedo: 0.49#VWFC https://t.co/iFM8kI2Eh9

— Caleb Wilkins (@wilkins_caleb24) June 2, 2024

But that’s just one case. It would be a little overly optimistic to think Caicedo will be as successful in his second go-around in MLS as Arango. Other players who played in both Colombia and MLS in what could be classified as their prime years include Jader Obrian, Yimmi Chara, and former Whitecap Cristian Dájome. Obrian is also a bit of an odd case as he had a sudden explosion of production in his age-24 season after not scoring that many open-play goals previously. He’s been up and down in MLS on teams of varying quality, with his overall average non-penalty G+A/90 in MLS being about a 15% drop-off from his big season in Colombia. Chara is also a bit hard to judge as he made a stop in Brazil and he was very much on the downswing later in his MLS career. But in general, we can say that he saw a slight downward trend in his scoring. Dájome also made a stop in a 3rd country (Ecuador) and split time between the wing and wing-back. But his production in his winger seasons more or less held steady with what he was doing in Colombia.

In addition to league strength, there’s also Caicedo’s fit in the team to consider. Here, I think there’s a lot of reason for optimism. Fafa Picault, another ball-dominant dribbly winger, has more than doubled his previous season’s outputs, both in terms of expected goals and actual goals. This is something that’s almost unheard of for a player in his 30s. Moving to a stronger team was, no doubt, a factor in that but clearly the 3-4-3 system Vancouver has employed this season plays to the strength of that sort of profile. We saw a little preview of what Caicedo could potentially do in his cameo against F.C. Dallas. His off-the-ball movement created a breakaway, he got a shot inside the 6-yard box, and he generally combined well with Sam Adekugbe off the left.

So, in conclusion, I would say Caicedo will at the very least be a solid rotational option. For a team that has struggled mightily with offensive depth, that’s a great thing for the playoff run. There’s a small chance he could explode into an elite MLS scorer but it wouldn’t be realistic to rely on that.