Using xGold to identify four potential replacements for Chelsea-bound Marc Cucurella – data analysis

At the time of writing, the 25-year-old Spanish international left-back, Marc Cucurella has left Brighton and agreed to move to fellow Premier League side, Chelsea. The Spaniard moves having spent a single season at the South Coast club, having joined from the La Liga side Getafe in August of last year. Indeed, this follows a pattern of sorts as Cucurella had only spent a single season at Getafe having previously played for Barcelona.

When he moved to Brighton there was some surprise from those who did not quite see the stylistic fit given that Cucurella had spent the 2020/21 season playing for a Getafe side that were extremely effective but also very difficult to watch given their defensive outlook on the game.

Brighton, however, have developed one of the most effective and interesting recruitment networks within football with extensive use of data and the ability to adjust their views on players by taking into account the style of play of their current team. This allowed Brighton to look beyond the skewed defensive overview on Cucurella as his data showed a player with relatively low volume and performance in the attacking and ball progression phases and a large output in the defensive phases.

With the benefit of hindsight, which is always interesting in recruitment, we now know that Brighton made the right call in believing that Cucurellas attacking and ball progression numbers would improve when playing in a side that were more open and attacking in their approach to the game. Now, after initial interest from Manchester City, Cucurella will be playing his football at Stamford Bridge for Chelsea next season. How the Spaniard fits into a squad that already has the England international Ben Chilwell remains to be seen, however.

Brighton will now turn their attention to finding a suitable option to replace the output of Cucurella. To be clear at this point though, we do not doubt that Brighton already have a short list of alternatives to the Spaniard that would have been worked on for some period of time. They are, after all, a team that believes in succession planning.

In this data analysis piece, we will use our exclusive xGold tool to identify four potential replacements for Cucurella at Brighton. XGold is a custom-build tool that allows us to find players who perform in a similar manner, from a data perspective, to any player in the world. In order to visualise the data of our players for this analysis, we use statistics from Wyscout which will be run through Python in order to create pizza charts that then show a set of metrics we use to assess fullbacks. The data will also be converted into percentile rankings, with each player compared to fullbacks in their own leagues.

Firstly though, we will need to understand how Marc Cucurella played last season for Brighton

Marc Cucurella, 24 years old, Brighton and Spain

We should start by understanding how Brighton tend to play. The favoured system of play from their coach, Graham Potter, is a 3-5-2 and as such Cucurella tended to be used as a left-sided wingback in that system. Brighton are possession-orientated and ended the 2021/22 Premier League season ranked fourth in the league for possession with an average of 54.8%.

They are also a team who like to play progressively through the thirds of the pitch and, although the central defenders in Brightons system tend to be volume passers in this regard, we also saw Cucurella contribute. Brighton ended the season with an average of 63 progressive passes per 90, which ranked 8th in the Premier League, and 50.16 passes to the final third per 90, which ranked 6th in the Premier League.

Cucurell