Italy’s Rising Defenders: Scouting The Next Alessandro Bastoni – Data Analysis

For a number of years now, Alessandro Bastoni has been an established part of Inter Milan’s defensive unit and looks to remain a key player for the club for years to come.

Bastoni has garnered attention in recent months for his consistently high-quality performances for Inter and is regarded by many as one of the best central defenders in world football today.

At 25 years of age, it is highly likely that we have yet to see Bastoni’s prime, which is an exciting thought—he could still be playing elite-level football in 10 years!

Italy has been blessed with some truly iconic figures in central defence down the years – frankly, too many to name, and Bastoni has all the attributes to become the next one to join that illustrious group.

While the defender still has years to go before his career starts to wind down, Inter will undoubtedly be on the lookout for a replacement at some point, and other clubs will be scouting the market for a centre-back that fits a similar profile to that of Bastoni.

This data analysis aims to identify the ‘next Bastoni’, with that label being applied loosely.

The analysis utilizes TFA’s player similarity tool, xGold, to highlight players in Serie A and B who offer a similar style of play to Bastoni.

We then use that list of players as the basis for data analysis, utilizing various statistics to identify who may be destined to become an elite-level defender in the future.

Alessandro Bastoni Player Profile

For this analysis, we searched for defenders who statistically resembled Alessandro Bastonis style of play.

Every player in the analysis meets the criteria below:

• Have an xGold similarity rating of 70 (on the xGold scale, 100 would mean the player is extremely similar to Bastoni).
• Be a centre-back, right centre-back, or left centre-back, primarily.
• Be contracted to a Serie A or B club as of right now – players who belong to a club in Serie A or B but who are currently on loan elsewhere have been included.
• Be aged 25 and under at the time of writing.
• Played a minimum of 1200 minutes of league football in the last calendar year.

This search yielded 22 defenders to include in the analysis, and we have utilized data that spans a calendar year.

But who is Alessandro Bastoni, and what is his style of play?

Alessandro Bastoni Radar Map

Lets examine Italys international style of play for those unfamiliar with it.

Defensively, Bastoni may not be as involved as teams further down the league or teams with less possession on average, but when called on, he is more than reliable, as we’ll explore later.

In possession,