Naci Ünüvar 2019/20 – scout report

Ajax Amsterdam are famous for their approach towards youth development for several decades now. There are only a few academies all over the world where students get so much trust and attention as they do at the most successful club of the Netherlands. Every year, they manage to promote a couple of talents to the senior squad, and once they are there, they do not just warm the bench for the superstars  the Ajax philosophy dictates that the youngsters must be integrated into the team quickly so that they can experience what playing in the Eredivisie and the UEFA Champions League demands, and that they can learn their lessons as early as possible.

The latest to start climbing the ladder is 16 years old Naci Ünüvar who, despite not having played a minute in the first team yet, already has a 3,6 million EUR tag next to his name. In 2019, the youngster won the Abdelhak Nouri trophy  the annual award for the most promising Ajax academy player  and received 604 minutes in the Eerste Divisie, the second tier of Dutch football. With his physical attributes of 168 cm and 60 kg, many would doubt that he is ready to perform on the highest level but, in this scout report, we will demonstrate his real worth and let his statistics speak instead of anything else. For the most realistic tactical analysis, we will compare him to those Eerste Divisie forwards who had at least the same amount of minutes as Ünüvar in the season prior, and who played either as a winger or a wide attacking midfielder in the majority of the time.

General traits

As visible in his heatmap, Ünüvar spends most of his time in the left half-space, very close to the penalty box, where he can be involved in as many actions as possible. He is very comfortable on the feet and uses his body outstandingly, with small feints and quick changes of direction. He always seems to do just as many movements as necessary, without useless dribbles or running up and down on the flanks. The fact that he is most confident in the half-spaces makes him fit into the Ajax tactics flawlessly: as the striker often drifts out wide, or the full-back joins the offensive action by the sideline, Ünüvar often has at least one teammate in front of him who he can either find with a ball from behind or who can drag the defenders’ attention away from him so that he can attack himself.

Despite playing in the final third of the pitch, Ünüvar does his part in defending as well. From the next graph, it turns out that he was the most balanced winger of the 2019/20 Eerste Divisie campaign with 8,64 successful defensive actions and 7,45 successful attacking actions per 90 minutes. In the later parts of the analysis, we will investigate his defensive performance in more details as well.

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