Karin Lundin has recently moved to Fiorentina Women for the second time in her career after having passed the 2021-2022 season with The Violets. Lundin started her footballing career in Sweden — specifically, Mossens in 2013 — before moving to Kungsbacka DFF for three seasons, Kopparbergs/Göteborg, which is known as BK Häcken for one season, KIF Örebro for one season as well, before heading to Italy for her first experience in Serie A Women with Fiorentina and then returned to Sweden one year after to join Rosengård for a single season.
She will now use all of this experience to give her best at Fiorentina once again and perform more convincingly in order to remain at the club for a more extended period and move to an even bigger club after succeeding at Fiorentina. This success, however, will require hard work and determination since most of the team has been reinforced compared to 2021, and the level of the league itself has been constantly improving.
Beating teams like Inter, Juventus, Milan, Roma, or Sassuolo is never easy, especially considering that Fiorentina’s performances deteriorated significantly during the past few seasons. Lundin will undoubtedly strive to help Fiorentina be more clinical upfront and aim for a UWCL qualifying spot this season. To succeed in this mission, she must show convincing performances to guarantee a starting place and be a valuable player throughout the season.
In this tactical analysis and scout report, we will explore Lundin’s attacking traits, goalscoring abilities and playmaking skills while comparing her numbers to those of her rivals for the starting striker position. The analysis will, therefore, be based on footage and statistics while not neglecting Fiorentina’s tactics and their possible impact on Lundin.
Goalscoring abilities
Lundin is considered a convincing striker with some fairly good goalscoring skills. Excellent headers, quick and effective movements with and without the ball, good dribbling skills and varied shooting abilities mainly characterise her. In addition to these traits, Lundin is an unselfish striker. She plays primarily as a team player and provides passes instead of shooting whenever she finds better-positioned teammates in the final third.
Lundin scores many goals with headers and can be considered a reliable option for scoring during set-pieces and even in open play when crossing from the wings; therefore, using her as the team’s main striker is never a bad choice.
This example showcases Lundin’s ability to jump high and resist the disturbance of two markers while succeeding in putting the impact she wanted on the ball to score a beautiful header by orienting it towards the bottom left corner.
In addition to powerful headers, Lundin can shoot from distance with power and precision and often chooses her shooting timing with intelligence. Exploiting this ability a bit further at Fiorentina and instructing Lundin to aim for shots from distance more often would probably help the team create more danger and score more goals per game, as the Swedish player can be extremely dangerous in shooting.
The following example highlights this shooting ability and shows one of her best goals regarding technique and difficulty so far. She was able to score this goal while being outside the box and by shooting from a difficult angle to still succeed in lobbing the ball past the goalkeeper with an accurate yet powerful shot towards the far post.
Lundin is never afraid to go for similar shots and does not hesitate when attempting such shots from a distance. She proved numerous times that she has confidence in her ability to disturb opponents with her shots and why not score them, too.
This picture clearly shows that Lundin has the personality to aim for such attempts, and all that will be needed at Fiorentina is to encourage her to try this type of initiative more regularly. By taking the initiative in this example despite being distant from the box, Lundin hit the crossbar, created a big chance out of nothing, and was very close to scoring a beautiful goal. She shoots with a 49.7% average in terms of accuracy per game, and this rate can be improved at Fiorentina if the player finds the needed support and playing time to do better.
Moreover, Lundin has excellent physical resistance and uses her body well to protect the ball inside the box and avoid losing it to her direct markers. We saw her protecting the ball on numerous occasions and during very complicated situations, and she still knows how to get away from such situations without losing the ball. In some cases, she even succeeds in scoring goals while resisting the continuous disturbance from defenders, such as in this action when Lundin received the ball under pressure and kept resisting the defender’s attempt to intercept the ball from behind as well as the defender attempting a sliding tackle to get the ball.
She was able to go for the best possible option to avoid these defenders while scoring. The best solution in such situations was to score with the exterior part of her foot since she did not have the time to prepare for a regular shot. She succeeded in surprising the goalkeeper with an accurate “exterior shot” while avoiding both defenders’ attempts to stop her. This highlights Lundin’s excellent physical strength and ability to resist Serie A Women’s defenders’ marking and disturbance.
Lundin can also deal well with one-on-one situations with goalkeepers as she diversifies her solutions by dribbling past goalkeepers at times and going for shots at other times. This allows her to remain unpredictable and change depending on the situation while remaining very dangerous inside the box.
Playmaking skills
In terms of playmaking, Lundin is a player who has a good vision despite being a striker and not a player required to provide passes or be responsible for playmaking. Nevertheless, Lundin’s unselfishness and her tactical awareness allow her to play a crucial part in playmaking, especially inside the final third, where she often provides assists and plays as a stationary striker to help give time to her teammates to join the attack and exchange passes with them. With 71.1% passing accuracy, Lundin can be very useful for Fiorentina in terms of passing as she has already been helpful before regarding assists.
This picture shows one of Lundin’s numerous assists, and this particular one was chosen because it was executed using the left foot. Yet, Lundin could still provide this pass accurately and towards her teammate, who was coming from behind.
Lundin can also be crucial using her accurate headers, as she proved on numerous occasions that she masters headers and knows how to provide assists with “header passes” like the one shown below. These passes using headers can always surprise defences and have an impactful result, as defences do not always expect headers to be destined for a specific player, especially when knowing that Lundin didn’t have much time to orient her header and wasn’t even looking at the destined player at first. Using these headers in a more extensive way can surely help Fiorentina have more goalscoring chances in the future.
Apart from headers and passes with the weaker foot, Lundin usually finds the best timing to provide through passes even when being tightly marked or when defenders try to surround her, like in this example. And based on such assists, it is fair to say that Lundin perfectly fits the idea of playing with two strikers upfront. She can be instrumental when playing in an attacking duo and having the stationary striker role while still providing assists to her teammate and being crucial in terms of goalscoring as well.
Comparison with Mijatović, Kaján and Longo
In comparison with Milica Mijatović, Zsanett Kaján and Miriam Longo, we should say that Lundin has a big chance to succeed despite the existence of these players within the squad, mainly because Lundin is already familiar with Fiorentina and Serie A. In addition, she can play with any of the three players as an attacking duo and perform convincingly. Mijatović might indeed have more experience than Lundin in front of goal and, therefore, have a little bit of an advantage over her in terms of playing time. Yet, both players can still work well as an attacking duo.
Kaján, however, might be the fourth choice for Patrizia Panico as she has less experience than the other three strikers. This being said, Lundin and Longo can be considered an up-and-coming duo since Longo is a dynamic player who can move a lot, while Lundin would play the stationary striker role. This Lundin-Longo duo might guarantee more complementarity, while the Mijatović-Lundin duo would guarantee more goalscoring potential.
Conclusion
Karin Lundin will add a lot to Fiorentina this season from a goalscoring and a playmaking perspective as she is one of the players with talent, experience and determination always to take the initiative intelligently. Giving her the needed playing time would greatly help Fiorentina get the desired spot in the standings, and why not get a UWCL qualification for next season?
