Is comparing Myrto Uzuni to Emiliano Rigoni needlessly cruel, or is there something to it?

Emiliano Rigoni will not go down in Austin FC annals – even with just five years of history accumulated — as a fondly-remembered designated player.

He might not be the most disappointing DP in Verde history — after all, Tomas Pochettino, with two goals and two assists in 31 appearances, exists — but Rigoni was supposed to be the Robin to Sebastián Driussi's Batman, and ended up something lesser (perhaps Zan of the Wonder Twins, who could transform into any form of water he wanted, including steam and ice, though he also might just become water in a bucket carried by his sister who has just transformed into an eagle)[[1]].

In 51 appearances over three seasons, Rigoni managed six goals and zero assists, including a peak year in 2023 in which five of those goals came. He might have gotten more than 11 appearances (in which he managed one goal) in 2024, except that Austin FC sporting director Rodolfo Borrell discovered that a 12th appearance would have triggered an automatic contract extension, and instead of locking that in, Borrell worked furiously (and successfully) to find Rigoni a new home.

Let's just say that bringing in a designated player from another country to the U.S. to play in Major League Soccer doesn't mean that player will be successful, even if it takes a significant transfer fee. After all, Atlanta United brought in Emmanuel Latte Lath from Middlesbrough for a reported league-record fee of $22 million plus add-ons in February, and paid him more than $4 million in guaranteed compensation this season. He scored a brace in his first match, scored in three of his next five ... and then finished a very disappointing season for him and his team with seven goals and an assist, en route to just avoiding the Wooden Spoon on Decision Day.

I bring this all up because of Myrto Uzuni, who arrived as Austin FC's club-record signing in January and has had a similarly disappointing first season (albeit with a better team campaign), punctuated by a failed penalty kick and one other errant shot (with 29 touches total) in the team's season-ending 4-1 loss on Sunday against LAFC.

I specifically bring this up because my friend Andrew Urban shared an observation from his friend Rob Price — new subscriber Rob Price; thank you, Rob! — about Uzuni being Rigoni all over again.

I hear the frustration in invoking one underperforming DP of yore with another, but in covering both of them, I also see a gritty determination in Uzuni that I didn't see in the more, shall we say, carefree countenance of Rigoni. I can't imagine, for example, Uzuni dovetailing into music in the way that Rigoni did; I can't imagine Uzuni listening to music at all other than music specifically designated to pump him up before a match or to sufficiently wind down at night to get the optimal hours of sleep to reset him for the next day of training.

But maybe there's something to it? You know what that means, readers who know me.

To the charts!

We're going to compare 2023 Rigoni to 2025 Uzuni because it's Rigoni's best season vs. Uzuni's only season; remember that the hope for Rigoni going into 2023 was that he would benefit from a full offseason following his halting, hesitant 2022 seven-match debut. Uzuni didn't get the benefit of an offseason; remember that we learned at the mid-Februray Heartbeat Kit release party that he'd be arriving in town just a week before the home opener.

We're also using the attacking mid/winger numbers comparison numbers rather than the forward numbers (same stats, but different percentiles) because Rigoni primarily played on the wing in 2023, whereas Uzuni played both left wing and center forward. (But also, ostensibly, Denis Bouanga plays left wing and Son Heung-min plays center forward, and they tend to find each other in myriad spots in the box to score, so some teams can just do this in more fluid fashion than others.)

Okay, are you ready for some yipes?

Yipes.

While Uzuni is much better at passing completion and has a slight uptick in interceptions, they're extremely close in npxG + xAG (non-penalty expected goals and expected assisted goals), a key measure of how they're contributing offensively, and Uzuni's ahead in non-penalty goals and shots, but not so significantly. Rigoni's also far better in clearances and blocks, which is probably partially (but not entirely) a function of Rigoni playing more at the wing, on a more defense-challenged team than 2025 Austin FC was.

Looking at raw numbers, Rigoni had six goals in his time in Verde on 27 shots on target. Uzuni's already to six goals in his debut season on just 23 shots on target, so he's slightly more efficient. But Son (yes, him again) has nine goals on 20 shots on target in the regular season, and 10 on 23 if you fold in his playoff numbers against Verde.

Brandon Vázquez was actually slightly less efficient than Uzuni in 2025, getting five goals on 23 shots on target in 2025 regular-season matches, with one of those being a made penalty kick.

Weird penalty kick aside

Speaking of penalty kicks, Vázquez was two for three on the season, and Uzuni was one for three, with each making a PK in the Open Cup match against San Jose. Verde only got eight PKs (and two non-Uzuni, non-Vázquez attempts) all year; Osman Bukari made one against the Houston Dynamo in Open Cup play, and Dani Pereira made one Sunday. That means Verde went one-for-two in PKs in 34 regular-season matches. That's one PK awarded every half-season. Crimes.

It could be worse

As much as Uzuni's underperformed, he's on the relative DP bargain price of $2.25 million (though, as we calculated a few weeks back, that's $370,833 a goal).

Latte Lath scored seven goals on a salary that had Atlanta paying $575,792 a goal (which is worse than Uzuni, but better than $710,355 a goal from Vázquez, although he only played half a season and was on pace to be at $355,178 a goal had he not blown out his knee).

So how did their 2025 charts compare?

Offensively, in key metrics, they're not so far off. Uzuni's better at connecting teammates, bests Latte Lath in shots (who got seven goals on 18 shots on target), and came close in assists and npxG + xAG.

But then Latte Lath is better with shot-creating actions and goals, and all of his defensive numbers and most of his possession numbers are better.

Looking at 2025 numbers, Uzuni might be closer to a DP on a team that failed to make the playoffs in 2025: the Dynamo's Ezequiel Ponce.

Ponce got 10 goals on 24 shots on target, making him almost as efficient as Son, but it was arguably one of the most anonymous double-digit goal campaigns of the 37 2025 MLS players reaching that tier.

And it's eerie how their tackles and pass completion ratings are virtually identical, with Uzuni shifted more toward defensive work and assists, which likely reflects Uzuni's time on the wing vs. Ponce being deployed strictly as a center forward.

Should they keep him?

Whether Austin FC retains Uzuni is one of the core questions heading into the 2026 season. Consider:

• He'd be the starting center forward to start the season, but as Vázquez works back from his ACL injury and into the lineup — and the sooner the better from head coach Nico Estévez's perspective — the consuming 2025 question of how to best have Uzuni and Vázquez play off one another (if that is indeed possible) comes back into play;
• His last signature action of 2025 was taking a penalty kick so perplexing that Estévez told media that it wasn't like Uzuni to appear so scared to shoot the ball — with the chance to get his team within a goal before halftime in a playoff elimination game; and
• As with Rigoni, there's a growing cynicism about his abilities and his fit on the team from the fan base. That can certainly be tuned out, or that can be used as fuel, and Uzuni certainly cares about performance and hasn't given the impression that he's here to mail in his shifts and pick up checks, but he's registered so much on-field frustration in his first year here that you have to at least question whether he'd be happier back in Europe than in this weird situation where the team's best playmaker is a 20-year-old midfielder who got shifted out to the position where you were supposed to be playing, and the second-best playmaker is a designated player courting his own expectations-vs-reality reckoning. (And though the numbers don't quite show it, you could say the third-best playmaker is a 32-year-old veteran on a supplemental contract who finished the season injured.)

I can (and have) talked myself into a scenario in which Borrell finds a soft Spanish landing spot for Uzuni, uses that DP spot for a true midfield playmaker, Vázquez comes back relatively early (and CJ Fodrey and perhaps Rubio do well enough at striker in the first few matches to keep Verde in the playoff contention mix), and the team functions more like FC Cincinnati in Vázquez's goal-scoring 2022 heyday (when Luciano Acosta was the main facilitator, back before last year's FC Dallas experience likely soured every MLS front office from even considering him).

But that's a tall task in an offseason in which Borrell has relatively little roster flexibility. He gets more if he moves Owen Wolff for enough GAM to begin embarking on LAFC-level roster moves, but then, also, you're losing your best playmaker as he's moving into the All-Star-capable zone, and there's no guarantee you'll get a player of his caliber in return regardless of what's spent.

We could, fast-forwarding to the end of 2026, look back on 2025 as a hard transitional year for Uzuni and appreciate his leap in 2026, just as FCD fans got to do with Petar Musa this year — and the parallels between '24 Musa and '25 Uzuni, between moving to a new country and becoming a new father, make that comparison all the more relevant.

But as Austin fans, we've also seen the turn from '23 to '24 with Rigoni, in which a disappointing season segued into a disastrous start to a season, followed by a buyout that made Rigoni the poster boy for All That Was Wrong in the Claudio Reyna Era.

We're at a definite crossroads with Uzuni heading into next season. If he stays, he has the chance to transcend the disappointment hovering over past DPs (and, for that matter, past No. 10 jersey wearers[[2]]), or he could cement himself into a sad pantheon of players who did far less in Verde and Black than they were expected to do. After all, even Driussi, the best DP in Austin history to date, left quietly in an offseason exit after a season just one goal better than Uzuni's 2025.

Rigoni, Driussi, Uzuni: They all reinforce that it's hard to find a DP who will contribute at the level needed to elevate a team to true MLS contender, and the sporting directors who do it are highly regarded as a result.

Given that, what happens with the Uzuni saga certainly reflects on Uzuni, but it also reflects on Borrell. With Rigoni, Borrell was able to tut at the Reyna-gifted contract (and rightfully so), move him to a willing buyer, and take the feeble W in light of the cards dealt him.

With Uzuni, he has to either cut losses and swap him out for a DP that does work, help Uzuni find the level of play that made him attractive to begin with, or have part of his legacy intertwined with whatever type of game Uzuni brings to the league in his sophomore season — which is also his first full season in his 30s.

Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. For more coverage, check out Emergency Podcast! (an Austin FC Podcast) wherever you get your podcasts.

[[1]]: Super Friends in the '70s and '80s was a Saturday morning must-watch, and it was wild.

[[2]]: For Austin FC's first-ever No. 10, the disappointment was on two distinct levels. Come to think of it, future Austin FC signings should regard either the No. 7 or No. 10 jersey with some degree of caution.