Data Analysis: Four players who are similar to Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes

This is the fourth part in a series of articles looking at the use of data profiles in identifying potential recruitment targets within football.

You can read part one here part two here and part three here.

In part one we looked at potential matches for Trent Alexander-Arnold of Liverpool, in part two I looked at players who profile in a similar manner to Jack Grealish of Manchester City and in part three I looked at players who are similar to Marco Verratti of PSG. This time I will be looking to find players who are similar to Bruno Fernandes of Manchester United and Portugal.

Using data and more specifically data profiles as a part of the recruitment process is a very useful means of cutting through a lot of the noise that represents the sheer number of football players that there are in the world.

For Manchester United, for example, the pool of players that they can potentially sign is vast but there are filters on that pool with the main one being quality. A player in League Two of England for example are unlikely to be of interest to the Premier League club. If we take a lower-end Championship club as our example then the filter on quality of player skews the other way with the top tier of players becoming unavailable.

Instead, they will have a much larger choice of players down the talent pool. This is where data profiling comes in. Being able to take the profile of a top player and then judge exactly which data points are the most important. This then allows us to produce data profiles for other potential targets to see whether they are similar to the player that is likely to be out of our reach.

As a part of Total Football Analysis we offer clubs, players and agencies a consultancy service and a large part of that is built around the use of data and video scouting to provide shortlists of players that fit a specific profile. To do this we make use of a tool that we know as xGOLD. This has been custom-built in-house to streamline the use of data in the identification of talented players.

In order to create the shortlist for this article, I have used xGold to identify four players that best meet the profile of Bruno Fernandes.

From there I have created the profiles that you will see in this piece using my own bespoke dashboards in Tableau. Given that we are still at the early stage of the European season, we will be using data from the 2020/21 season with all data found in Wyscout.

Lets just get this out of the way first. I completely missed on Bruno Fernandes. When he moved to England to join Manchester United in 2020 I thought that United had vastly overpaid for a player who had looked dominant in the Portuguese league but would struggle to have such an incredible impact on the English game. I was absolutely wrong. Fernandes had an immediate impact on his new side and his outputs were nothing short of exceptional, although tiredness eventually slowed him down. As someone who works in talent identification within football, it is important to be able to not only recognise when you got it wrong but to be able to learn from that mistake. It would be easy for me to tell you all that I knew that Fernandes would immediately become a top player in the English game, but I didnt and that lesson has led to me thinking about players in a more measured way than I did before.

Indeed, I liked Bruno Fernandes when I first saw him play. First for Udinese and then for Sampdoria. I liked his positivity and aggression in possession but when he moved back to Portugal I thought it was a backwards step I got this very, very wrong.

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