To start this week’s column, you and I, dear reader, will run a common statistical experiment: the A/B test.

You may think this is a strange idea and to that I say… yes, it is. However, please bear with me. 

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Which of the following young players do you think has received more hype? 

Player A: made her National Women’s Soccer League debut as a 17 year old, has 12 professional goal contributions (goals plus assists) in 23 starts and two goals in four U.S. women’s national soccer team appearances. Player B: debuted at 18 years old, posted six goal contributions in 20 appearances and has scored zero national team goals.

Admittedly, the difference is not enormous. Player A has an excellent resume and Player B has a just slightly less-excellent resume. But their identities may surprise you.

Player B is Alyssa Thompson, a former No. 1 overall pick in the NWSL Draft and World Cup debutant last summer in Australia and New Zealand. Coming out of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, she became the first player ever drafted out of high school and a hometown hero for Angel City.

Yet, on a statistical basis, Jaedyn Shaw — Player A — has outperformed Thompson so far at the professional level. That’s not to say Shaw has the higher ceiling or that Thompson doesn’t deserve the excitement around her, but the relative lack of Jaedyn Shaw conversations in mainstream American soccer media confounds me. 

Shaw is a women’s soccer prodigy in the classical sense. At just 14 years old, she committed to the Tar Heels, a perennial soccer powerhouse that just this year had six players selected in the NWSL Draft, including the top two picks. Given Shaw’s age, she would have been just a freshman on that squad had she stayed committed. 

Except Shaw proved to be too good even for the U.S.’ premier soccer finishing school that gave us the likes of World Cup winners Mia Hamm and Crystal Dunn. Instead, Shaw trained as a guest with the Paris Saint-Germain women’s team at 15 and played for F.C. Dallas’ Girls Academy, another of the U.S.’ top development destinations. 

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that Shaw was chasing the fastest route to the pro level. But her precociousness should not hide the hurdles she had to jump to arrive at this station.

Behind trailblazer Olivia Moultrie, whose lawsuit against the NWSL changed the rules about minimum player age, Shaw became part of the first wave of U.S. women’s players to skip college soccer entirely via a discovery process. 

And so far, her career moves have paid off. She became a contributor from day one with the Wave, making four starts in her debut season. She made the most of those opportunities, too, scoring three goals, including the only goal in a 1-0 victory over the Chicago Red Stars that saw her smartly cut around a defender and fire past the goalkeeper on a breakaway. That goal made Shaw the youngest NWSL player to ever score in a debut. 

Crucially, Shaw is not an out-and-out, goalscoring forward. She can play on the wing or as an attacking midfielder, where the Wave relies on her creativity and ball progression as well as her reliable shot. 

Those traits explode off the page when you look at the stats that lie underneath her goals and assists. Shaw ranks in the 97th percentile for both shot-creating actions and the volume of passes she attempts per match, with 4.33 and 30.90 per match, respectively, according to FBref. 

Shaw’s pass completion percentage provides even better insight into the type of passes she attempts. Her 60% passing success rate — whether or not Shaw’s pass reaches a teammate’s feet — places her in just the 20th percentile among her positional peers. That might be the first time I’ve ever mentioned a stat that ranks below the top 25% of players, but in Shaw’s case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

Her combination of high volume and lower completion rate suggests Shaw attempts lots of risky passes, the kind that, when successful, result in goalscoring opportunities — hence her high shot creation. That’s why the pass completion rate, or number of passes completed, has mostly fallen away among soccer analysts as a relevant stat. What a player actually accomplishes with a pass and where it took place on the pitch matters more than just checking a box for one more pass. Just think about it: A five-yard pass between the centerbacks doesn’t achieve as much as Shaw playing a through ball on the break to Alex Morgan. 

Speaking of Morgan, Shaw only recently made her USWNT breakthrough, earning her first senior call-up this past September and scoring her first international goal against Colombia in her home Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. With a new regime taking over the U.S. team ahead of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, now is the perfect time for Shaw to start making her mark in red, white and blue.

Jack Hallinan is a junior writing about the top wunderkinds in men’s and women’s soccer in his column, “Rising Ballers,” which runs every other Thursday. He is also the Talkin’ Troy Podcast Editor at the Daily Trojan