MLS 2026: which teams flood the box on crosses

Every coach wants numbers in the box when the ball comes in from wide. It is one of the clearest attacking principles there is, and one of the hardest to actually measure. So we measured it across MLS this season.

When a cross is played, how many of your attackers are actually inside the opposition box, ready to meet it? Not how many crosses you hit, not how accurate they are, but how many bodies you commit to the area at the moment of delivery. Flooding the box turns a half-chance into a real one and forces defenders to pick up runners they would rather ignore. Starving it means even a perfect cross finds no one to attack it.

What the metric measures

Box occupation is the average number of attacking players inside the opposition box when their team plays an open-play cross, with the crosser and the goalkeeper excluded. A high number means a team consistently commits runners to the area from wide. A low number means it crosses into space no one is attacking.

Reading it is simple. Building it is not. You need event data to know the exact frame the cross is played, tracking data to know where every attacker is standing in that frame, and a box filter to count who is actually inside the area. Set-piece deliveries are stripped out, so this is open play only. Most providers can give you one piece of that. Very few combine all of it across a season.

What the numbers say

No team in MLS floods the box like Seattle Sounders. On the average open-play cross they get 3.48 attackers into the area, ahead of Minnesota United (3.44) and Chicago Fire (3.39). With a league average of 3.10, those three commit close to half an extra man to the box on every cross, and across a season that adds up to hundreds of extra bodies attacking deliveries.

The volume tells its own story. San Jose Earthquakes and Philadelphia Union both average 3.38, but they get there off very different workloads: San Jose have 409 box arrivals across 121 tracked crosses, Philadelphia 385 across 114. These are sides that cross often and still fill the area each time. At the other end of the top ten, LA Galaxy sit ninth on rate (3.17) despite crossing far less (40 tracked crosses), a reminder that box occupation and cross volume are separate choices a coach makes.

From top to bottom of this top ten is only a third of a player. But on every cross, over a full season, that gap is the difference between a box that is regularly outnumbered and one that is not.

How we built it

We did not write any code for this. The entire ranking came from asking MGPT, the AI assistant inside MyGamePlan, a single tactical question. It pulled the MLS matches this season with synced event and tracking data, found every open-play cross, counted the attackers inside the box at the frame of each delivery, and returned the league table above. The same question can be asked of any league we cover, and of any single opponent, in one click.

Build it to your own principles

The league table is not really the point. The point is that a specific tactical idea, "how many players do we get in the box when we cross," became a measurable number in minutes, on your own data, with every cross traceable back to the video.

Your version might be different. You might only want arrivals at the near post, or only from open-play switches, or only in the final fifteen minutes when games stretch. Because the metric is built from raw event and tracking data rather than a fixed provider stat, you can define it to your own game model and see it the same day, for your team and for every opponent.

See it for yourself

Ask MGPT your own question and get the ranking, the charts and the clips back in seconds. Or book a call, and we can set this up for you.