2026-07-18, 11:44 AM - Word count:
(This post was last modified: 2026-07-18, 11:59 AM by Mafx. Edited 1 time in total.)
It's been 4 seasons and a half since the best class to ever grace the SSL started their journey to the top and because of that I wanted to look at the past and do a piece of analysis of the S23 draft.
Here's the data in a neat table that I definitely didn't spend 30 minutes figuring out how to properly format. The scope of this analysis is of 29 players considering their standings in the portal as of July 18 of 2026, this is due to almost every player starting from #30 being inactive so I think that's a good ending point. Also, the Gain/Loss column is the value that you get after resolving [Pick # - Current Position in the Class by TPE] a Positive value meaning that the player has exceeded their initial draft valuation while a negative one its the opposite.
A couple of interesting points to make, let's start with the Organizations that were most active in the Draft, there's one that invested heavy in this class and that was Liffeyside having a grand total of 6 picks, 4 of them still being in their minors teams Rova. Kaspars Kalinins, their first pick (and overall top pick of the draft) already making the jump to the Majors team and one pick (Bad Wolf) that went over to Kaapstad, however they also got themselves another player for Rova down the line in this class, initially drafted for Schwarzwälder FV Hans Grudnar (who has gone IA now) is also a member of their minors team, overall it feels like Liffey is going to start reaping the fruits of their diligence in this draft sooner rather than later as their picks are currently in the 880-1300 TPE range.
Then there's 3 Organizations tied for second place in draft activity, however their stories are vastly different from each other. Let's start with the most successful out of them in my opinion, that being the Shanghai Dragons. They were able to grab the current top earner of the class Arsène N'Goussou with their second pick and a solid third pick in Dr Squid for Magyar while their first pick and top 10 earner its already seeing Majors action in Lan Mandragoran (Good to see a fellow Medellin graduate doing well).
So now comes the other two orgs that had 3 picks each, CA Buenos Aires and Xelajú Cósmico FC. I assume there were some trades going on between them (I did not consider nor look up any trades or specific transfers for this analysis). CABA had Nico Grimes automatically assigned to them as an OM but now he currently resides in Xelaju, while top 6 earner Seth Mcneil was initially drafted to eventually play for Xelaju now finds himself in the Argentinian org alongside their other original picks Sky Scraper and Jonathan Muñoz (at their minors team, Athenai). That's not all for Xelaju though as they would also trade/transfer top 4 earner of the class Luke Walker over to Catalunya/Seoul walking away with two picks when all cards were on the table, the aforementioned Grimes and Nico Lam currently in their minors team, Masque Sacres.
Now let's focus on the players themselves and how they stand against their original valuation, the biggest jumps goes to Freddy Adu who was the 25th pick of the draft and now sits as the class 3rd TPE earner, Hollywood (in total movie fashion) got away with an absolute steal, but they weren't the only ones that did some good business late into the draft, Tokyo's Billy Bobby (Pick #31), Catalunya's Scott MacLeod (Pick #38) and Luke Walker (Pick #19) all saw double digit jumps in the Gain/Loss category, honorable mention to yours truly (Caroni Riveras) completing that particular top 5.
Out of the 29 players considered 12 (41.37%) of them are already playing for a majors teams, two of them doing so since their very first season out of the academy. Tokyo's No Face/Connor Reed (Sorry for dead naming you but you don't know the confusion I went through when I wasn't able to Ctrl+F No Face in the draft post), who had a very brief stint at Cairo before being promoted to the Japanese team later down the season and me at Romana.
Speaking of Romana, they've got the only initially undrafted player among their ranks, Tumelo Letsie is now the teams main keeper after the retirement of their previous one. Finally as a bit of a fun fact, there's 3 players that were seemingly perfectly valuated in the draft, those being USP's Bob Berendsen & Jay Cue Jr. and Hans Grudnar from Liffey/Rova whose position in the draft is exactly the same as their current position as TPE Earners... congrats?
PS: I'm very bad with tables and I'm only fond of Statistical Analysis (read, numbers and statistics cool idk what the theory behind everything is) so take all this info with a grain of salt, it was fun writing this all up and hopefully I'll make a part two in the future when we're all in the retirement house.
Here's the data in a neat table that I definitely didn't spend 30 minutes figuring out how to properly format. The scope of this analysis is of 29 players considering their standings in the portal as of July 18 of 2026, this is due to almost every player starting from #30 being inactive so I think that's a good ending point. Also, the Gain/Loss column is the value that you get after resolving [Pick # - Current Position in the Class by TPE] a Positive value meaning that the player has exceeded their initial draft valuation while a negative one its the opposite.
| Current TPE | # | Player Name | Drafted by | Current Team | Pick # | Gain/Loss | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1353 | 1 | Arsène N'Goussou | Shanghai Dragons FC | Rapid Magyar SC | 4 | 3 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 1324 | 2 | Lucas Peioxoto | Hollywood FC | Hollywood FC | 6 | 4 | Promoted |
| 1324 | 3 | Freddy Adu | Hollywood FC | Hollywood FC | 25 | 22 | Promoted |
| 1313 | 4 | Luke Walker | Xelajú Cósmico FC | Seoul MFC | 19 | 15 | Changed Orgs/Not Promoted Yet |
| 1311 | 5 | Caroni Riveras | A.C. Romana | A.C. Romana | 11 | 6 | Promoted |
| 1310 | 6 | Seth McNeil | Xelajú Cósmico FC | CA Buenos Aires | 5 | -1 | Promoted/Changed Orgs |
| 1306 | 7 | Kaspars Kalinins | Liffeyside Celtic FC | Liffeyside Celtic FC | 1 | -6 | Promoted |
| 1282 | 8 | Bob Berendsen | União São Paulo | AS Paris | 8 | 0 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 1280 | 9 | Dwayne Pruney | Reykjavik United | Reykjavik United | 10 | 1 | Promoted |
| 1271 | 10 | Lan Mandragoran | Shanghai Dragons FC | Shanghai Dragons FC | 2 | -8 | Promoted |
| 1257 | 11 | No Face | Tokyo S.C. | Tokyo S.C. | 9 | -2 | Promoted |
| 1216 | 12 | Billy Bobby | Tokyo S.C. | Tokyo S.C. | 31 | 19 | Promoted |
| 1184 | 13 | Weston McNuggie | CD Tenochtitlan | Krung Thep FC | 12 | -1 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 1094 | 14 | Sky Scraper | CA Buenos Aires | CA Buenos Aires | 7 | -7 | Promoted |
| 1094 | 15 | Jay Cue Jr. | Liffeyside Celtic FC | CS Rova Mpanjaka | 15 | 0 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 1064 | 16 | Nico Grimes | CA Buenos Aires | Xelajú Cósmico FC | - | - | Promoted/Auto Drafted as OM/Changed Orgs |
| 1037 | 17 | Hans Grudnar | Schwarzwälder FV | CS Rova Mpanjaka | 17 | 0 | Inactive/Changed Orgs/Not Promoted |
| 1028 | 18 | Nico Lam | Xelajú Cósmico FC | AF Masques Sacrés | 14 | -4 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 983 | 19 | Thomas Schwarte | Liffeyside Celtic FC | CS Rova Mpanjaka | 13 | -6 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 967 | 20 | Pardner Magool | CD Tenochtitlan | Krung Thep FC | 22 | 2 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 964 | 21 | Dr Squid | Shanghai Dragons FC | Rapid Magyar SC | 18 | -3 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 918 | 22 | Scott MacLeod | CF Catalunya | Seoul MFC | 38 | 16 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 913 | 23 | Jiang You | Tokyo S.C. | Cairo City | 16 | -7 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 902 | 24 | Matt Oopsie Wrongsport Turk | Liffeyside Celtic FC | CS Rova Mpanjaka | 20 | -4 | Inactive/Not Promoted |
| 891 | 25 | Monkey Buccaneer | Schwarzwälder FV | Montréal United | 23 | -2 | Not Promoted Yet |
| 880 | 26 | Tumelo Letsie | - | A.C. Romana | - | - | Promoted/Undrafted |
| 874 | 27 | Robbie Schuurmans | Liffeyside Celtic FC | CS Rova Mpanjaka | 26 | -1 | Inactive/Not Promoted |
| 818 | 28 | Bad Wolf | Liffeyside Celtic FC | F.C. Kaapstad | 33 | 5 | Changed Orgs/Not Promoted Yet |
| 775 | 29 | Jonathan Muñoz | CA Buenos Aires | Athênai F.C. | 24 | -5 | Not Promoted Yet |
A couple of interesting points to make, let's start with the Organizations that were most active in the Draft, there's one that invested heavy in this class and that was Liffeyside having a grand total of 6 picks, 4 of them still being in their minors teams Rova. Kaspars Kalinins, their first pick (and overall top pick of the draft) already making the jump to the Majors team and one pick (Bad Wolf) that went over to Kaapstad, however they also got themselves another player for Rova down the line in this class, initially drafted for Schwarzwälder FV Hans Grudnar (who has gone IA now) is also a member of their minors team, overall it feels like Liffey is going to start reaping the fruits of their diligence in this draft sooner rather than later as their picks are currently in the 880-1300 TPE range.
Then there's 3 Organizations tied for second place in draft activity, however their stories are vastly different from each other. Let's start with the most successful out of them in my opinion, that being the Shanghai Dragons. They were able to grab the current top earner of the class Arsène N'Goussou with their second pick and a solid third pick in Dr Squid for Magyar while their first pick and top 10 earner its already seeing Majors action in Lan Mandragoran (Good to see a fellow Medellin graduate doing well).
So now comes the other two orgs that had 3 picks each, CA Buenos Aires and Xelajú Cósmico FC. I assume there were some trades going on between them (I did not consider nor look up any trades or specific transfers for this analysis). CABA had Nico Grimes automatically assigned to them as an OM but now he currently resides in Xelaju, while top 6 earner Seth Mcneil was initially drafted to eventually play for Xelaju now finds himself in the Argentinian org alongside their other original picks Sky Scraper and Jonathan Muñoz (at their minors team, Athenai). That's not all for Xelaju though as they would also trade/transfer top 4 earner of the class Luke Walker over to Catalunya/Seoul walking away with two picks when all cards were on the table, the aforementioned Grimes and Nico Lam currently in their minors team, Masque Sacres.
Now let's focus on the players themselves and how they stand against their original valuation, the biggest jumps goes to Freddy Adu who was the 25th pick of the draft and now sits as the class 3rd TPE earner, Hollywood (in total movie fashion) got away with an absolute steal, but they weren't the only ones that did some good business late into the draft, Tokyo's Billy Bobby (Pick #31), Catalunya's Scott MacLeod (Pick #38) and Luke Walker (Pick #19) all saw double digit jumps in the Gain/Loss category, honorable mention to yours truly (Caroni Riveras) completing that particular top 5.
Out of the 29 players considered 12 (41.37%) of them are already playing for a majors teams, two of them doing so since their very first season out of the academy. Tokyo's No Face/Connor Reed (Sorry for dead naming you but you don't know the confusion I went through when I wasn't able to Ctrl+F No Face in the draft post), who had a very brief stint at Cairo before being promoted to the Japanese team later down the season and me at Romana.
Speaking of Romana, they've got the only initially undrafted player among their ranks, Tumelo Letsie is now the teams main keeper after the retirement of their previous one. Finally as a bit of a fun fact, there's 3 players that were seemingly perfectly valuated in the draft, those being USP's Bob Berendsen & Jay Cue Jr. and Hans Grudnar from Liffey/Rova whose position in the draft is exactly the same as their current position as TPE Earners... congrats?
PS: I'm very bad with tables and I'm only fond of Statistical Analysis (read, numbers and statistics cool idk what the theory behind everything is) so take all this info with a grain of salt, it was fun writing this all up and hopefully I'll make a part two in the future when we're all in the retirement house.
![[Image: vAvEIS8.png]](https://i.imgur.com/vAvEIS8.png)
