Is Ricardo Pepi already the best striker in MLS?

Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports With FC Dallas out of contention to win MLS Cup in 2020, I have been aimlessly pottering around the various public stats providers for MLS trying to get a handle on who performed well for FCD this season. In that effort, one name kept popping up, again and again, as an outlier to an astonishing degree: 17-year-old homegrown striker Ricardo Pepi.

In this post, I will try to illustrate how effective Pepi has been for FCD in the minutes he has played by sharing some of the more shocking metrics that describe his performance over the past two seasons.

The punchline in the end is no less shocking than any individual factoid: on a per minute basis, the body of statistical…