This is part of our 2025 Midterm Reports for the New York City FC squad. You'll find past midterm reports and final grades here.
At age 38 and in his ninth season with New York City FC, Maxi Moralez remained an every-match starter through the first half of the MLS season.
The midfielder started all 17 of the team's MLS matches and was out there for 89.4% of the available 1,530 league minutes. With Santiago Rodríguez sold to Botafogo in Brazil on the season's first day, the attacking midfield role in Pascal Jansen's team has been dominated by Moralez.
That he's been available and durable and played as much as he has is impressive, certainly while knowing the length of his career to date, and that he's not far removed from major knee surgery following the serious injury he suffered September 2023 at Yankee Stadium early into his second tenure with the team.
That injury limited his availability during the 2024 campaign, with Moralez only playing 29% of the team's available MLS minutes. This season, he's been a much more consistent part of the attack under Pascal Jansen, yet Moralez has also not produced the kinds of attacking numbers followers of the player and his New York City team grew accustomed to seeing during his previous seasons.
Still influential
Moralez got an assist in the season's opening game, the 2-2 draw at Inter Miami CF, though his assist came after an unforced error in possession from Miami gifted New York City the ball in an extremely dangerous area. Still, caveats like that don't apply when it's matters of clear-cut goals or assists, and it appeared that Moralez was off and running en route to another strong season featuring assists and influential attacking midfield play.
That's happened, to an extent. Among his positional peers in MLS across these first 17 games, Moralez is in the 99th percentile for passes completed into the final attacking third per 90 minutes, the 98th percentile for passes completed into the 18-yard box per 90 minutes, and the 97th percentile for total touches of the ball per 90 minutes, all per FBref.com's scouting report for the Argentine.
Moralez is still the player largely responsible for being on the ball and trying to break down New York City's opponents with his passing, and he's done some of that work with success this season. The stats show it, but so too does the classic "eye test," as the team seems to function far less coherently in the few instances this season when Moralez has left the pitch for a substitute.
He just hasn't produced the killer final pass or scored challenged for more goals of his own, though did manage to extend his career-long history of Red Bull New York torment by scoring in a home NYCFC Hudson River Derby win last month.
MAXI HAD THEM LEANINGGG 🪄 pic.twitter.com/D41TBAYJKP
— New York City FC (@newyorkcityfc) May 17, 2025
Goal creation lacking
His continued importance to New York City's possession and passing game is undeniable, but an issue with Moralez's play in 2025 has been the sharp dropoff in his shot- and goal-creating actions.
A goal-creating action is what FBref.com defines as "the two offensive actions directly leading to a goal," which can include passes, take-ons, fouls drawn, shots attempted, defensive actions, and dead-ball deliveries. Shot-creating actions have a similar definition, "the two offensive actions leading directly to a shot," like passes, take-ons, and fouls drawn.
Moralez's 0.33 goal-creating actions per 90 minutes would be the lowest number he's recorded in a full season in MLS since 2018 and would represent a significant drop from the 1.20 goal-creating actions per 90 that Moralez produced just in 2024. It's a similar drop in shot-creating actions, as Moralez is generating 4.76 SCA per 90 this season – down from 6.30 a season ago, and lower than all his previous MLS campaigns that featured per-90 shot-creating action numbers in the high 5s and low 6s.
After getting that assist on Matchday 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Moralez went 12 straight appearances without a goal contribution of any kind, until he scored that goal against the Red Bulls. He's not been able to replicate or come close to the production lost when Santi left and took his 12 goals and six assists during the 2024 MLS season with him.
Andrew Leigh
Rest-of-season outlook
Pascal Jansen still considers Maxi a hugely important part of his midfield, but he's also seemed to try to help give Moralez some more help by overloading the midfield around him. Other midfield players like Justin Haak and Andrés Perea, usually seen in deeper-lying midfield positions or even, in Haak's case, in central defense, have more often this season occupied or stepped up into advanced midfield spaces and tried to assist with the team's playmaking needs.
Some formation and strategy shifts in the midfield have yet to result in more production from Moralez. The questions that linger over the rest of his season seem to be: Will New York City FC sign a new player to challenge for some of his minutes as the starting No 10, and will the team's continued reliance on the 38-year-old come back to bite them when the natural complications of an aging athlete – injuries, fatigue – rear their heads during the season's second half?
It's not ideal for Maxi Moralez to still carry the burden of being the main creative midfield presence for New York City FC. The team has not been able to hold its goalscoring level from a season ago with Maxi handed back the keys to the proverbial car – NYCFC's 1.18 goals per game through 17 played would be the second-lowest goals per game number in the team's history, ahead of only the 2023 season when they scored 1.03 goals per game.
That season, Maxi was brought back in part to help reignite a struggling attack. In 2025, Moralez has had his moments, but he hasn't been able to make up for what the team has missed since Santi's departure.
His legacy at NYCFC is untouchable, and his influence is still felt whenever he steps on the field, but Maxi Moralez so far in 2025 hasn't authored enough of the incisive attacking moves that made him a legend across his earlier years in New York City.
