Not many players managed to mark the 2019/20 La Liga season as much as Martin Odegaard had. With the young Norwegian prodigy topping the charts for Real Sociedad across the board, it was just a matter of time before Real Madrid decided to recall him early and for Zinedine Zidane to introduce him into his star-studded squad.
However, fast forward half a season and for one reason or the other, Ødegaard has become an outcast at the Santiago Bernabeu. Now, if recent reports are to be believed, he is on the verge of going on another loan, this time to London and Arsenal in the Premier League.
For that reason, this tactical analysis will be a scout report on Ødegaard and will tell you how Mikel Arteta can use the young midfielder in his tactics. The data analysis part of the piece will also aim to uncover his strengths and see how he stacks up against the rest of Arsenal’s current roster.
Let’s dive straight into it.
Player profile
The first part of this analysis will focus on Ødegaard’s player profile as we’ll try to decipher how he’s been used over the years and what exactly is his best position to date. During the early years of his career, the Norwegian talent has been largely used as a right-winger.
He was never really blessed with too much pace, which remains true to this day, but his technical ability and dribbling skills meant that he was deadly out wide. However, as the gained more experience and matured as a player, Ødegaard started drifting more towards the middle, occupying the right half-space and playing as a right midfielder or, at times, as the no.10, just behind the striker.
Below you can see his player dashboard that highlights some of his key attributes, namely creativity and progression. Note that the data for this analysis has been taken from Wyscout and includes all La Liga players from the 2019/20 season, when Ødegaard was at Real Sociedad, that have played at least 1000 minutes throughout the campaign.
The reason for taking the previous season as opposed to 2020/21 is because of a much larger sample. As mentioned earlier in the analysis, Zidane has opted against using the youngster often, partly due to injuries as well, so the current season sadly can’t offer much insight. Still, 2019/20 was an incredible year for Ødegaard as a whole.
As you can see from the graph above, the youngster excels at decisive passing and is also both a great creator and progressor of the ball. When looking at shot assists and key passes per 90, he ranks among the very best players in La Liga, especially in the former category. Barcelona’s Lionel Messi is the clear outlier in all examples but seeing how the Argentine is barely human in footballing terms, we can look past him in these graphs.
