Super Saletros: Sarpsborg’s interesting deep-lying playmaker – scout report

Scandinavia has long been one of the most interesting and fruitful markets from a recruitment perspective within football. There is talent throughout the region with the Danish Superliga, the Norwegian Eliteserien and the Swedish Allsvenskan, in particular, being hotbeds of talent.

With that said, however, we should not ignore the raw talent playing in the top tiers of Finland and Iceland. While the styles differ between each league, and indeed there are many different styles of play on a team level within each league, there is one common theme throughout all Scandinavian leagues which is the trust and use of younger players at first-team level. The Scandinavian leagues are a genuine hotbed of talent with young players offered extensive exposure to football at the first-team level, providing they are good enough of course.

For the most part, when we produce a scout report for this site on players from Scandinavia we are concentrating on those younger players. In this instance, however, the focus of this article will be the 26-year-old Swedish central midfielder Anton Saletros, who is currently contracted to Sarpsborg 08 in the Eliteserien. Saletros is an interesting case as he is actually coming to an end of his contract with the Norwegian side and, at the time of writing, it looks likely that he will be moving on this coming winter.

Lets start by getting an idea of who Saletros is, both from his data profile and in terms of how he came to be playing for Sarpsborg 08, using tactical analysis to identify his role in the side.

Player profile

Anton Saletros is a 26-year-old central midfielder who is capable of playing either as a 6 or an 8 in the middle of the park. He is a ball progressor who has the capacity to access all areas of the field with his passing range but he also has the touch and vision to break vertical lines when passing the ball in central areas. Saletros is naturally left-footed.

He is a product of the youth academy of AIK in his native Sweden but he has had an interesting career path away from his home country. He spent time on loan with Ujpest FC of Hungary in 2017 before moving to Russia to sign for FC Rostov on a permanent transfer. The Russian side allowed the midfielder to spend the 2019 season on loan with AIK but he then also moved out for the 2020 Norwegian season, where he was on loan to Sarpsborg 08. He then made this transfer permanent in October 2020 for a fee reported to be in the region of ??315k.

This reported price is a steal given the impact that Saletros has had in the Eliteserien, as you will see from his data this season.

So, lets examine the data using the pizza chart above. A quick note on the data and the sources. All data is from Wyscout and the necessary data is run through a code in Python that first converts the data into percentiles rankings before producing the above visual.

The percentiles are based on performance against all other midfielders in the Eliteserien this season so far.

As you can see Saletros has prod