Recruiting a central defender for Arsenal: Part two: scouting Adam Webster

Last week I posted an article to the site looking at using data to identify a new central defender for Arsenal. You can find the piece in question here but after comparing different data sets I ended up with a shortlist of two central defenders that I would be targetting if I was a part of the recruitment department at Arsenal. Data is an essential tool for any smart football club whether assessing and benchmarking their own performance or identifying potential targets, as we have done here, but it is not enough on its own to drive recruitment. There remains an important role within a recruitment department for a scout to watch a player play, whether live or via a video platform, with a view to adding context to the data.

This is the purpose of this follow-up article of the tactical analysis/data analysis, and the last which will be posted later in the week. We will use video to flesh out the picture that we have of Adam Webster of Brighton and Hove Albion before giving a recommendation at the end of the report. 

When writing a scout report on a player there tend to be four sections that I would consider. These are tactical, physical, technical and mental. For the purposes of a written report on a website, I will leave out mental. This would include speaking to people who know or who have worked with the player and checking for primary sources that may lead to potential red flags about their character. Instead, we will concentrate on the tactical, physical and technical sections in order to build on what we already know about Adam Webster.

First, though, let’s remind ourselves of the metrics that made Webster stand out from the rest.

The metrics that stood out from a tactical perspective were fairly self-evident from the bar chart above. Webster scores highly in his success rate in defensive duels, aerial duels and passes played into the final third. He also plays a reasonable amount of progressive passes that allow his side to progress the ball and play in areas that are more dangerous to the opposition. How though does this analysis apply to the way that Arsenal plays under Mikel Arteta and how is this important?

Tactical

First of all, we have to understand What Arteta wants from a defender in his system. The only thing that we know for certain from a tactical perspective is that Arteta wants his central defenders to hold the ball longer in the possession phase before looking to play forward into more attacking teammates. This is a simple concept designed to pull the opposition towards the ball before releasing the ball behind them. The further out that Arsenal can tempt the opposition to move the better as it creates space in the opposition defensive structure that can be exposed.