Regardless of what happens from this point on, Oliver Glasner will undoubtedly and deservedly go down as one of the best managers in Crystal Palace history.
The Austrian coach ensured that’d be the case when he guided Palace to their first-ever piece of major silverware last season: the FA Cup.
Jean-Philippe Mateta’s rise to becoming one of the Premier League’s top strikers has been another of Glasner’s most impressive achievements as Eagles boss.
Glasner deserves immense credit not only for Mateta’s individual improvement but for constructing a cohesive attacking framework based on his strengths.
This Jean-Philippe Mateta scout report and player analysis examines Jean-Philippe Mateta’s thriving role in Oliver Glasner tactics, outlining how and why Glasner’s reign at Selhurst Park has been the making of the 28-year-old marksman.
Watch Jean-Philippe Mateta Tactical Analysis On YouTube
Jean-Philippe Mateta Style Of Play
In a nutshell, Jean-Philippe Mateta (190cm/6’3”, 84kg/185lbs) profiles as a target man.
He has a reliable first touch and thrives when receiving with his back to goal.
He is tasked with linking the midfield to attack and bringing teammates into play.
This is important to remember when evaluating Mateta’s game and evolution under Glasner.
The Austrian coach has played Mateta to his strengths and, around him, built an attack that’s arguably the best in England’s top-flight right now, with Palace boasting the highest xG in the league after eight games: 15.98.
Glasner perfectly identified Mateta’s profile and recognised how to get the best out of the Frenchman more than Roy Hodgson or Patrick Vieira, who had coached the striker at Crystal Palace before Glasner.
Great management, whether it’s in football or any other field, can at least in part be boiled down to the principles of making the best of the hand you’re dealt and always aiming to accentuate the strengths of your assets while masking the weaknesses.
Glasner has achieved this to a greater extent than other coaches Mateta has worked with at Selhurst Park.
Now, Crystal Palace are reaping the rewards.
Jean-Philippe Mateta Stats
Jean-Philippe Mateta Shooting Stats 2021-2025
With the caveat that minutes have obviously not been the same from season to season, nor have the teammates Mateta’s played with, Figure 1 goes some way to quantifying Glasner’s impact on Mateta’s game.
In 2021/2022 and 2022/2023, Mateta’s shot volume stayed roughly the same, but shot quality was not great, worsening from the first season on our table to the second.
The 2024/2025 campaign was Mateta’s first (and only, so far) full season playing under Oliver Glasner.
On our table, 2024/2025 is characterised by a notable drop in shot volume with marginally higher shot quality on average, as indicated by the slightly improved xG per shot.
Last season saw Glasner work with Mateta progressively over the course of the campaign.
As Glasner redesigned his attacking system and worked continuously with his players on the training ground, he refined their tactical understanding.
In Mateta’s case, the striker displayed a marked improvement in his positioning, movement, and shot locations over the course of the 2024/2025 campaign, with a whopping 69.7% of Mateta’s 10.65 Premier League xG last term coming in the second half of the campaign.
This reflects the striker’s adaptation under Oliver Glasner in 2024/2025, bringing us to the start of the 2025/2026 season.
So far this term, Mateta’s shooting more than ever and, crucially, availing of higher quality chances.
Glasner’s coaching, the attacking system that’s been put in place at Selhurst Park, and the forward’s confidence have all compounded, and Mateta is finding more opportunities in better positions.
Now, we’re working with quite a small sample size for the current season.
Therefore, sample bias is likely.
Still, even if Mateta’s xG per 90 regresses a little, it’ll still likely be in a far healthier position than it was pre-Glasner.
I’d say that’s likely, looking at the trend in his style of play and tactical role now compared to before.
Jean-Philippe Mateta Changes Under Oliver Glasner Tactics
Mateta’s vastly improved xG numbers point to him taking a greater proportion of shots from closer to goal.
This has come about due to an efficient attacking system, which is ‘funnelling’ chances to Mateta in high-value positions and better movement from the attacker himself.
That improved movement is somewhat due to Palace’s tactics and Mateta’s role within them.
This image, taken from a 2021/2022 Crystal Palace fixture, provides an example of the kinds of runs and positions Mateta used to frequently take up.
The forward was often tasked with making runs into the channels, which saw him positioning himself outside the width of the goal posts and looking to get played in behind.
As play moves on, we see the result: Mateta takes a shot from a poor location, which fails to trouble the opposition goalkeeper.
The following example from the same season leads to a similar outcome.
We still sometimes see Mateta on the receiving end of these kinds of chances, but it happens much less now than in the past.
These kinds of chances do not suit Mateta at all.
Firstly, he’s more efficient in front of goal off first-touch finishes.
He’s better when the finish is instinctive and the decision has to be immediate, rather than when he has too much time to think or too far to travel with the ball.
Furthermore, he is not physically explosive enough to make the most of these chances coming from balls over the top and/or in behind the defensive line.
Mateta’s strengths lie in tight spaces, contact duels, and drifting away from defenders in the box to find a yard of space from where he can hurt you if his teammates can see him, at which they’re getting better and better the more they refine the Oliver Glasner attacking system.
Figure 5, from this past weekend’s 3-3 thriller with Bournemouth, shows Mateta in a far more comfortable position: receiving with his back to goal centrally.
The striker is extremely comfortable holding off the challenging defender, controls the ball well with his first touch, and lays it off nicely to Ismaïla Sarr.
Mateta’s work is not done there, however.
What comes next is as if not more important.
Mateta spins around the defender on his back and continues his run on that defender’s blind side in relation to where the ball has ended up.
He gets into a high-value goalscoring position, and when the ball is played towards him, he takes an excellent chance.
In Figure 8, above, taken from just a few minutes later in the same game, we find Mateta positioned centrally, just inside the box, with his back to goal and a defender on his back once more.
This time, Mateta doesn’t get involved directly as Palace progress to the right wing.
Still, when the ball is played out wide, he spins off the defender behind him like before and drifts into a valuable goalscoring position on the defender’s blind side.
Again, Mateta is positioned perfectly to take advantage of an excellent goalscoring opportunity when the ball is drilled across goal towards the back post.
These two examples show how Mateta’s intelligent movement dragged his team back into the game against Bournemouth last weekend.
Blind side runs have become an instinctive trademark of Mateta’s game under Oliver Glasner, but they haven’t always been his go-to.
Take this example above from 2021/2022, for instance.
Here, Mateta aims his run to the front of the defender, with the cross coming to meet him there.
This attack fails to produce anything of substance.
This is a run I don’t think Mateta would make today.
I think his instinct would be to attack the defender’s blind side.
Mateta’s Palace teammates, knowing this, would also automatically aim that cross to the far post, anticipating their striker’s run going there on the defender’s blind side rather than to the front post, where the defender can keep both Mateta and the crosser in his field of view at all times.
During the most recent international break, Mateta’s growth under Oliver Glasner saw the attacker earn his first two caps for France.
At 28 years old, the striker has put himself on the radar of one of the strongest national teams in the world, just under a year away from the FIFA World Cup.
This is a testament to his and Glasner’s work at Palace.
If Mateta does make the final French World Cup squad, Didier Deschamps will benefit from the development in Mateta’s game that we’ve seen under Oliver Glasner.
The very same instinctive blind side run discussed above helped Mateta to score his first goal for France against Iceland.
Figure 12 above shows the striker beginning his run.
This leads to a finish very similar to the one we saw Mateta pull off at the other post against Bournemouth this past weekend to direct the ball towards an inviting net.
Conclusion
To conclude our Jean-Philippe Mateta scout report, he’s become far more effective at Crystal Palace under Oliver Glasner coaching in part due to the coach’s work with him on an individual level, but more so thanks to the change in role Glasner’s tactics have inspired, which sees Mateta operating almost exclusively between the width of the posts as a pure central reference for the attack.
This suits his strengths down to the ground.
In the past, it felt like Mateta was forced to chase the game and go looking for opportunities even if that meant leaving strong positions and going wider.
Now, Crystal Palace’s system is designed to feed him as a central reference point.
Attacks frequently run through Mateta, who will have runners positioned close by and looking to play off him through Palace’s vertical bounce passes, as we analysed in Figures 5-7 above.
This emphasises Mateta’s link-up ability and places him at the very centre of his team’s attacks.
His movement instincts have also been refined to an optimal level, resulting in excellent opportunities for Mateta and his team.
Crucially, all of this will have boosted Mateta’s confidence to no end, which will naturally make him a more assertive centre-forward option for Palace and, potentially, France.
