The Vancouver Whitecaps have signed 21-year-old Ecuadorian winger Bruno Caicedo from S.C Barcelona (not that one). It is said to be a 1.5 million dollar transfer with Caicedo signing a 4.5 year contract. He has made 30 appearances in the Ecuadorian first division and 4 appearances for Ecuador at U-20 level. He spent the most recent season on loan at Orense. What you are here to find out is simple: Is this good? Let’s get into it.

Stats:

Boy, that sure is…something. Let’s start with the big red flag. 0.29 xG+xA/90 is just not very good. For a bit of scale, a similarly productive Whitecap in 2025 would have been J.C Ngando. But Ngando played in a deeper role and also provided elite ball progression. Low outputs like this could be hand-waved away if Caicedo were a teenager or if he played on a bad team. But Caicedo is 21, still young but an established professional at this point, and Orense finished 5th out of 16 teams last season.

Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. Caicedo does score well in stats that generally precede offensive juice but are not juice in and of themselves. For one, he does a lot of progressive carries or running the ball closer to the opposition goal. I have argued that with the departures of Ali Ahmed and Jayden Nelson, this was a skill set the Whitecaps were lacking in. It seems this was also the prevailing opinion internally. Caicedo also gets a lot of touches in the box. So, he is getting to where he needs to be, he just isn’t doing anything once he gets there. His shot volume is also not terrible, which can be an early sign of a bigger offensive breakout.

He Can’t Keep Getting Away With This…Can He?

Now, you might read that previous section and think to yourself, “I feel like I have read this sort of commentary on the Third Sub before.” You would be correct! I said exactly the same thing about the signings of Jayden Nelson, Kenji Cabrera, and, to a lesser extent, Emanuel Sabbi. You could also say very similar things about Ali Ahmed who was already on the squad heading into 2025. All of these players massively, and in most cases immediately, saw huge growth in their offensive outputs last season. So maybe Jesper Sørensen and his coaching staff are player development geniuses who can turn any attacker with a baseline level of skill into a goal-scoring machine.

If that is the case, then deals like this make a certain sort of sense. In the sensible transfers article looking at winger targets, I noted that players who were doing a lot of ball carrying and scoring a lot of goals tended to be prohibitively expensive. If Caicedo had put up 10 goals and 10 assists last season he would cost a lot more than 1.5 million and probably be beyond the reach of any MLS club. If you are confident your coaching staff can elevate this sort of player, it makes sense to buy them before the breakout happens.

But I find myself not fully convinced by this line of thinking. Really, it comes back to how we started this article, those outputs are very low considering Caicedo’s position, age, and strength of his team relative to the league. Let’s say that Sørensen’s magic dust fails this time, as surely it must eventually. Is the player you are left with that much better than signing Jonny Selemani or Antoine Coupland to a first-team deal?

True, he’s likely the 4th choice winger to start out with, behind Gauld, Cabrera, and Sabbi. But this signing fills up Vancouver’s U-22 slots (unless the mystical Cubas buy-down happens). So if someone who is a bit more of a sure thing or who has this profile but is a bit younger becomes available, you are SOL. The flop potential is a little too high for that opportunity cost, in my opinion.

Video Analysis:

Nobody had uploaded a highlights package for Caicedo. But fortunately I was passed some footage by my fellow Target Scouting contributor Jamie Ramia (@JaimeRamia). I have edited that footage down to about 6 minutes worth of clips and recorded some commentary. So, if you want to see what all the stats look like in practice you can do so below: