It is still unclear just how busy the January transfer window is going to be. With COVID-19 still continuing to have an impact on club finances through the cancellation of games and the limiting of spectators clubs across Europe will be walking a very fine line between balancing their books and pushing their chips on to the table in the belief that one more signing will make the difference between success and failure over the course of the rest of the season. There are more drawbacks to recruiting in January than just COVID of course. The January transfer window has long provided a difficult market as clubs are generally unwilling to let their better players leave unless the buying club are willing to spend a premium and even then players may not be willing to move in the middle of the season if they are currently getting reasonable game time at their current clubs.
Although we are still a few days (at the time of writing) from the opening of the window there looks to have been one big deal agreed already with Barcelona having agreed to pay Manchester City a reported €55M for the services of the Spanish international. There are, of course, still questions around the deal given the financial predicament that Barcelona are still in although they are reported to have taken out a bank loan that will enable them to pay the fee for Torres. The bigger question will be around whether Barcelona will be able to register Torres to play for them. La Liga and the Spanish Federation operate a financial fair play system and it is this that prevented Lionel Messi from being re-registered to play for Barcelona in the summer. Have Barcelona found a way around this system or will they have to sell players who are registered in the first instance in order to make this possible?
In this article, we will provide four young attacking players who may have been seen as viable alternatives to Barcelona within the market. These players have similar profiles to Ferran Torres and may provide interesting options for any club who are looking to recruit young attacking players.
In this data analysis, we have used our exclusive xGOLD tool to identify four young attackers who profile in a similar way to Ferran Torres from a statistical perspective. In this article, I will provide a brief analysis of these four players along with showing their data profile. All of the bar charts in this data analysis show the percentiles comparing each player to the rest of the wide attackers in their league. For example, a higher value on shots per 90 doesn’t mean that player takes more shots, it means he takes more shots than a higher percentage of wide attackers in his league.
The data that is used throughout this piece is from Wyscout and the player dashboards that are used are custom built using Tableau.
#1 Yari Verschaeren, 20-years-old, Anderlecht and Belgium
The first player on our list is the 20-year-old Belgian attacker Yari Verschaeren. He is a product of the youth academy at Anderlecht and has never even been out on loan, this is a sign of how highly he is rated by staff at the Belgian side. At the time of writing this article Verschaeren has also been capped six times by the Belgian national team, having worked his way through the various youth team levels, and given the depth of quality that they can choose from this is another sign of the youngsters quality. He is listed at 172cm | 573 and he is predominantly right-footed. Vershcaeren prefers to play from the left-hand side of the attack where he can cut inside and threaten the half-spaces and central areas of the pitch although he is also capable of playing on the opposite side.
So far this season we have seen Verschaeren play 1209 minutes in the Belgian top-flight. He is averaging 3.57 dribbles per 90 with a success rate of 41.67%. He is not necessarily a volume dribbler and instead is a wide player who looks to occupy space and then receive the ball before looking for opportunities to connect the ball with teammates as Anderlecht look to access the penalty area. So far this season he has scored 0.15 goals per 90 although his xG per 90 of 0.33 suggests that we can expect this output to improve over the course of the rest of the season. This is from 1.79 shots per 90 and 3.72 touches in the opposition area per 90.
So far i
