Data Analysis: Identifying 5 central midfield targets for Aston Villa

We are now a matter of days away from the end of the winter transfer window and there are some sides who are still actively looking for opportunities to strengthen their squad. One of the most active teams in the top flight of English football over the next few days are Aston Villa who are looking to strengthen their group of central midfielders before looking to push up the Premier League table. The winter transfer window is typically a difficult market in which to recruit as teams do not want to lose their better players when there is so much left to play for, this is of course combined with the fact that signing a replacement player once you sell a first-team player is difficult at this time.

Typically clubs will want to concentrate their business in the summer when there is more time for squad building and to assimilate players into your squad. There are though specific exceptions to this general rule and one of the main exceptions comes when a club has changed manager and therefore need to change the structure of their squad in order to add players that are better suited to the new mans preferred style of play. At this point, we should add that this difficulty in terms of having to change focus in terms of recruitment can be avoided by clubs having a clear succession plan in terms of appointing managers who fit a specific template in terms of style of play that is controlled at board (or sporting director) level. That is not quite the case for Aston Villa, however, as they have moved on from Dean Smith to Steven Gerrard. This, of course, goes some way to explaining why the club have already added Lucas Digne and Phillipe Coutinho in this window.

Value

The other issue that surrounds recruitment in the January transfer window is, of course, value. The general belief is that it is difficult to find value in the market at this time of the year but in truth that is not quite true. Value within football tends to be based on the valuations on transfermarkt and I would wager that a lot of people reading this do not quite understand just how much trust is put on these valuations by clubs and agents across the world. In truth though the concept of value in the market is more nuanced than that single figure. Value is very much based on the economic principle of supply and demand and with the short time frame of the January transfer window those principles are enhanced and the emphasis is on the buying club having to pay a premium in order to get a player who has been playing regular football so far this season. The selling club on the other hand have to factor in whether they can replace those minutes within their squad or whether they would then have to enter the market themselves. That process alone pushes the price of a player up.

CM options for Aston Villa

Moving on to the core of this article now we are going to consider central midfield options for Villa with a number of criteria in place to filter down our data set. We are considering players from the top 5 European leagues along with the top flights of Austria, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. We are concentrating on younger players with a maximum age of 24 and on players who have played at least 600 minutes so far this season. All data is from Wyscout.

Recruiting a central midfielder is actually one of the most difficult things to do in football because there are so many different roles within that area of the pitch. As such we will take a balanced approach and recommend a set of players that could fit different roles for the club.

First of all, we will consider goal threat from midfielders by using a combination metric of goal contributions per 90 compared to expected goal contributions per 90. This is a metric that is simply created by the combination of goals per 90 and assists per 90 (for goal contributions per 90) and expected goals per 90 and expected assists per 90 (for expected goal contributions per 90).

This allows us to build a picture in terms of which players are most effective in the final third and when we look at the data set that we are using we can see that the likes of Lovro Majer, who has been impressing in his first season at Rennes, are standouts in this regard.

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