In this post, I present another way to visualize Front-Office Efficiency in Major League Soccer’s Designated Player era, which also gives me a reason to try out D3 functionality on WordPress.

I start with a basic scatter plot of league points versus standard win cost for all MLS teams who played during the 2007-2015 regular seasons.  More information about each team’s season is communicated by manipulating the color and size of the dots.

The color of each dot represents the points-per-game of each team in a single season.  Red dots represent low PPG, while green dots represent high PPG (no team has exceeded 2.0 points per game in the DP era).

The size and opacity of the dot represent the utilization factor of each team in a single season.

Each dot has a tooltip with information about the team’s (usable) payroll, utilization factor, and total points in a given season.

Again, it’s my first attempt at D3, so the graphics aren’t polished, and if you are viewing them on a mobile device it’s best to view them in wide-screen mode.  Nevertheless, they do communicate the differences in expenditures and use of resources between a select group of MLS teams and the rest of the league.  I’ll post the data in the Project Data repository a little later.