Once upon a time…Arsene Wenger signed Petr Cech. The end. Football supporters love a good transfer story. It doesn’t matter whether the transfer story has a happy ending or sad, just so long as there is a dramatic exchange of money. Lots of money.
Everyone agrees that Arsenal’s Lucas Torreira is the transfer of the season. No other player has made as big and immediate impact as he has to the fortunes of his team. But what about the other positions on the pitch. Surely every position has a star player signed this season?
Well, sort of. Some positions were much weaker than others but there was at least one in each position, so let’s have a look.
Keeper, Alisson: as an Arsenal supporter, I wanted to pick Leno but even I have to admit that Alisson has been an excellent signing for Liverpool. He (and Leno) represent the new goalkeeper’s cadre. Required to be assured with the ball at feet and to get things started from the back, Alisson has completed 267 of 270 short passes this season. Leno actually has a snip on him there, he’s misplaced just the one short pass for a rate of 159/160 short passes.
But the edge goes to Alisson for the clean sheets he’s kept and the fact that Liverpool have only conceded 6 goals this season. I know that defense is a team thing but Alisson is doing his part individually as well: saving 67% of the big chances he’s faced this season. Again, this is similar to Leno (68%) and I would love to give it to him but the Arsenal man has 2 errors that led to goals while Alisson has just the one. Plus, Alisson has 10 clean sheets and Leno just 1. Arsenal supporters should take a bit of pleasure in the fact that it’s this close and that we didn’t have to pay 800m of whatever Liverpool paid.
Left back, Digne (Everton): 1 goal and 1 assist, 2 tackles per game, 1.6 interceptions, 80% passing, 2.6 accurate crosses per match. Scored a stunning free kick for his first Everton goal.
Right back, Pereira (Leicester): a bit of a controversial choice maybe but like Digne has all the stats to back him up. 1 goal and 1 assist, 4 tackles per game (2nd in the League), though he is dribbled past 2.3 times per game also (2nd most in the League). Averages 0.7 key passes per game and 1.3 successful dribbles per game. I’m totally happy to concede this to another player if you can come up with one whose name doesn’t rhyme with “dicksteiner”.
Center backs, Sokratis (Arsenal) and Willy Boly (Wolves): There was a time trial published earlier this season which listed Arsenal’s Sokratis as one of the fastest players at Arsenal. I scoffed at the data at the time but it turns out the more I watch him play the more impressed I am with both his speed and his willingness to use his body to straight up obstruct attackers. Center backs don’t typically put up good stats but both of these players are assured tacklers, decent in the air, and decent enough passers.
Right mid, Mahrez (Man City): yeah yeah yeah. City went from strength to strength and paid nearly £80m to land a top quality right-sided wide man. 5 goals, 2 assists. I really wanted to pick Brooks from Bournemouth but his contributions are just not as good as Mahrez. This highlights how difficult it is to get in a wide player right now.
Left mid, Felipe Anderson (Wham): 6 goals already making him one of the top goalscorers in the League. Also plays defense, 2.4 tackles and 1.3 interceptions per game. Creates almost 2 shots a game for his teammates and 1.5 successful dribbles per game for himself. He did cost £40m, though. Richarlison does make a case for himself here with 8 goals but Anderson is the better all-round player.
Center mids, Lucas Torreira and Matteo Guendouzi (Arsenal): sorry but you can’t convince me that there is a better two-man signing than Torreira and Guendouzi from this summer. Both players lead Arsenal in tackles and interceptions, and despite their relative young ages (Guendouzi is just 19) have slotted right in to the most physically imposing game in Europe where they take kicks week in and week out (they are two of the most fouled players in Europe). They are also the perfect foil for each other and I predict they will form the future midfield for the Gunners.
Attacking mid, Maddison (Leicester): you have to give Leicester credit, their scouting system is incredibly good. Maddison ticks all the boxes for a second-striker: 5 goals, 2 assists, 2.4 key passes (split evenly between set piece deliveries and open play), he makes throughball passes (0.3 per game), he can dribble (1.2 per game), and he’s not a ball hog or turnover machine. Leicester really have a knack for finding these whippet thin players who fit right in to their run and gun system.
Forward, Mitrovic (Fulham): yes, Fulham are awful but all the more reason to give props to their forward Aleksandar Mitrovic. 7 goals and 2 assists on a team that only has 16 goals. He is really not that great of a player all around so I’m solely basing this off the fact that he was one of the only forwards signed this summer and he’s scored a lot of goals.
Flops of the season: Fred, Man United splurged on a player that they didn’t need then didn’t sign players that they did need and their manager somehow thinks what they actually need is a center back! Fred cost them £60m and doesn’t even play. Tottenham, signed no one. They also don’t have a home. Kepa, £80m for a Keeper who can’t really keep. Ouch. Burnley, the symbol of Brexit. They signed some people. I really hope they get relegated this season.
I really like Leicester’s Maddison. Glad you included him. Superb player, who’s going to get circled by big sharks.
I watched Guendouzi play for France’s U-21 (or U-23), and was startled by how good he was. He was the best player on the pitch by miles, way ahead of his group of peers. Something we have yet to see is his attacking side, and when he’s in a group he can dominate, he is a very good box to box.
Maybe the Ramsey replacement is right under our noses, with the added bonus that he can pass, tackle and play D better. His shooting would have to improve a lot, but man, his ceiling is ridiculous high, I feel.
I’ve said enough about Torreira on this blog. Love the guy madly. Apart from his fight, his tenacity, his reading of the game, and his bite, he’s got goals in him. The hit from distance that brought a great save out of the Huddersfield keeper to my mind had more quality than the actual bicycle kick.
About Fred, he’s a better player than Jose Mourinho makes him look. You can see a football brain in him whenever he’s on the field.
While you’d be a fool to bet against the power of money, the added bonus with Guendouzi is he seems to be an Arsenal-lover, not just an Arsenal player.
On one of the popular YouTube Arsenal supporting channels, one of the standout comments for me came from one of the more thoughtful Manchester United supporters, who was having his first proper look at Guendouzi. Arsenal should protect him, he said, because he looks a proper baller. That said something.
We should protect him and hopefully we are in a position squad strength wise that we can afford to protect him. In the Wenger days, players like him came along frequently but they were often maimed or bullied into submission.
They can try. He’s a spiky bugger. Not going to take a step back, I can tell you.
Sounds like we’ve finally done good business on the transfer market and it keeps a good thing going following the captures of Lacazette and Aubameyang. I really like the look of Lucas Digne as well, I know he just signed for them but I say we could do worse than making it Lucas Squared at Arsenal and trying to snap him up from Everton next summer. Emery already has familiarity with him from his PSG days and the eye test backs up the strong statistical output. A truly two way player in any position is huge. I was a lot less impressed with Pereira. I felt like he was a force going forward but didn’t really like to defend, so a lot like Kolasinac.
Agreed on Sokratis’ speed. Not an asset I thought he’d have coming into the club but together with Torreira he has finally added some much needed speed through the middle.
Just out of curiosity: Any thoughts on Liverpool’s absurdly good defensive record? Six goals conceded seems like an outlier at this point in the season, and one of them was Allison basically kicking it to a striker and inviting him to score.
VVD is what makes the Liverpool defense what they are.
If I’m putting together a starting 11 for all the marbles he’s my first pick.
I remember people ( not necessarily on here) saying Sven Mislintat better up his game because there’s only so many players he can poach from BDortmund, but if he’s solely responsible for scouting both LT and MG then he needs a raise.
Agree with Tim about both being impact players of the season thus far.
Agree.
In a game in which Torreira was very, very good, van Dijk was even better. There was a passage of play where Mhki had some yards on him from a good pass and run in behind, but he put on the turbo and calmly got back and dispossessed him, like a kid playing with a toy.
That was apart from his offensive threat in the game.
Strong, fast and technically sound, he is an even better player than Invincibles Sol Campbell was. He’s frightening good, and is also helping to drag the Netherlands back as a footballing force. One of the best central defenders in the world, up there with Ramos and Varane.
Virgil is a terrific defender, probably the best in the world right now that I’ve watched recently. I tend to think that a defensive record that strong though begins further forward with the denial of the ball (through suffocating possession) or the denial of space (through suffocating pressing or a compact deep block), or in the case of Guardiola’s best teams, both. When we played Liverpool I didn’t get the sense that they either possessed the ball that much or that they were that good at pressing, so I wonder if there is a healthy slice of good fortune in there somewhere as well?
Understat.com tells me they have modestly outperformed their xG by about 2 goals, but they have greatly outperformed their xGoals Against by about 7. So xGA backs up my hunch that they have been good but also kind of lucky.
Ramos was one of the best. No more. Varane looks great, sometimes.
Hey Doc, I must applaud you for your thoughtful contributions to the last comment thread. Where better than a comment thread about Raheem Sterling’s terrace battle against hardcore racists to tell us how much you hate racism…
…no? It’s not the racism you hate?
It’s your fellow white people who speak out against racism? Oh.
Ah well. As Beto O’Rourke said to Ted Cruz, “true to form”.
Less contentiously perhaps 🙂I disagree that Poles do not take offence with that particular British caricature of them, as was confidently stated on the last thread. I lived in London long enough (20+ years) to know that many of them do. Tom doesn’t, but others do. So, not entirely true.
And as I said, if baseball fans used to chant “Alex Rodriguez cleans my room”, I doubt that folks would find that to be okay.
Yeah, and I also think one of the cool things about London is the unexpected cross-cultural solidarity. Like black people not letting anyone get away with calling Asians “pakis” or Asians not letting their mates throw the N-word around. Even if the targets of those epithets are out of earshot!
The idea that you can’t take offence or take a stand against anti-Polish bigotry unless it’s specifically directed at you is just primitive. That’s now how it works at all.
Kaius, I suspect we will never see eye to eye on these issues. Unfortunately you choose to take the least charitable view of what I have to say each time.
Let me try again to frame it for you in terms of a question and let you answer it: who gets to decide what is racist? Because I’ve heard from different people now that racism isn’t a question of intent and now from you that it’s backward to think that the group in question should get to determine whether they are offended by something or not. So tell me, who gets to make the rules here? It’s obviously not people who think as I do that each case deserves to be evaluated objectively on its own merit and apparently it’s not even the group who is being stereotyped. So who is the grand arbiter of what passes for racism??
I’ve also heard from you that any means to the morally justified end of the fight against racism are acceptable. I wonder how far you think it’s ok to take that? Is violence justified in the fight against racism? If so, to what extent? Is it ok to besmirch innocents along the way to justify the grand purpose? If so, how many? I await your response.
Doc, you know I respect your football insights. Your football-related comments are a big part of what ups the quality of the content here. Can’t answer all your questions though – this isn’t that type of forum.
Let me put it this way for you. The phony but also annoyingly concrete construct of “race” is like a pyramid with ‘whiteness’ at the top and those with darker skin at the bottom. Actually the top position means you don’t get classed as having a “race” at all. It’s like a default! So Irish and Jewish folks and Eastern Europeans can assimilate into whiteness and not be identified by their ethnicity at all. Folks of different shades don’t have that luxury.
I digress but you know how the saying goes – ‘The money flows up, the sh*t runs downhill’?
If anyone gets to decide what is racist, logically it won’t be the people least affected by it – those at the upper ends of the pyramid. And hey, none of this absolute. I mean, folks like Tim and Jeremy have a solid grasp on what it is, and their views align with the folks further down the ‘pyramid’.
They seem to be in the minority though, and lots of white folks favour an ahistorical racial structure that’s flat, with racism being directed at all sides.
And whew, just look at the vitriol white allies face from folks like you for identifying with marginalised people. That’s been a disturbing theme running through the violent history of racism. You calling out white sympathisers in class terms like “spoiled upper class white people whining” is funny because we read that white supporters in the Civil Rights era faced similar attacks from their peers. Often deadly attacks.
Mostly I think writing one sentence in support of Raheem Sterling and another fifty railing against everyone but racists is a very pure form of white identity politics, where the bigger concern is the plight of those society deems racist and not the victims of said racism. Like Raheem Sterling.
I would very much like to not talk about these points on here but I feel I must because it’s so important to have a conversation about the various shapes this can take and how different people respond to it. The Sterling incident doesn’t require dissection: Those “fans” were so clearly and obviously in the wrong for abusing him. The train incident in Paris was the same way. There are lots of examples of egregious racist offenses in football that should be and in general are punished. The Chelsea “fan” who pushed that man off the train and then sang about being racist went to jail and justice was served. We can and do all agree on these things. But the issue is so much bigger than that particularly in politically charged places where outright discrimination like that really doesn’t happen but “woke” hyper-vigilance is rampant, like US college campuses or 99% of social media platforms where thought leaders exchange ideas, like twitter. There are multiple documented incidents of people whose lives were ruined because of a poorly thought out “off color” tweet that went viral or speakers who were run out of their own presentations because they represent views that competed with the prevailing leftist rhetoric. One professor resigned after being accosted by students because he thought students shouldn’t have to double check whether their Halloween costume would be considered “safe” from triggers by all the other students. Yes I’m aware that there are also certain reddit threads and accounts that attract the scum of the earth from the Trump camp and beyond. They speak for nobody but themselves. The prevailing discussion in mainstream media and popular social media platforms is very left leaning if not outright leftist, I don’t think there is much debate about that, and most of that is overseen and owned by high powered white folks. So I don’t get the whole “we few against the many” narrative of the left or that you are just a few good souls standing up with people of color. You are in fact the majority at least in terms of exposure if not in total number. Twitter started out as this great thing where, among other things, we could quickly identify and deal with people guilty of hate crimes by circulating their tweets rapidly. Now it’s more of a vehicle to suppress competing points of view or a way for people to pile on someone for making a mistake as the scope for for perceived demographic infractions continues to broaden. I think all forms of absolutism are dangerous but moral absolutism is particularly toxic because it shuts down any dialogue.
I’ve expressed in great detail my points of view earlier so I won’t re-hash them here except to say that the interpretation of more subtle aspects of race require interpretation and interpretations will differ along not only cultural but educational and other lines as well; that’s why it’s so important to talk about it to each other even if we don’t agree, without resorting to smearing. How else can we ever reach an accord? It’s such a divisive issue and in my view the solution isn’t to ridicule or smear those whose views are different but to foster a spirit of understanding and that can only happen if we talk to each other with an open mind. Sometimes I think the left is so busy trumpeting their virtues that they lose sight of the fact that they are only driving the wedge between them and others farther apart, and that ends up being counter productive because it drives the “other” camp into the arms of radicals. I feel I must point this out because very few people speak up about this. So yes, I’ll gladly add my voice to that especially in incidents like the Sterling case, but on the other hand I can see how destructive race politics are and there are more insidious aspects of it that need to be talked about as well.
Here’s why I find it kinda funny Claude.
In the subdivision my father built the house I grew up in there were about 11 other houses built and none of the home owners who built their homes were actual builders.
Of course we are talking early seventies here where building codes in Poland were almost none existent and something like an occupancy permit was not needed, and if you wanted to move into a house without central heat installed or any other major component required nowadays, you just moved in and that was that.
Fast forward to the present day and here where I live in Chicago most of my friends who built their homes, and some of them are doctors, lawyers and other types of professionals, also tried and in some cases did it themselves without a GC license ( where municipalities allowed it).
So it’s kinda more then just a caricature and that’s why it’s so funny
But I do understand why some get offended by it.
Or maybe it’s because I have a thick skin 🙂
But I did enjoy the debate from all the smart folk on here.
Maybe someone brought this up yesterday, but I would categorize derogatory comments about Polish people as evidence of prejudice against foreigners rather than racism. I mean, what race is Polish?
VVD and Gomez are a great pair. But the cliché about the best defense being a great offense also applies – teams do not push on Liverpool because of the counter-attacking. You almost never see opposition teams flooding forward and it reduces the offensive threat.
Good list. Surprised by the lack of striker signings. Probably too many in the previous season. The lack of defenders signings is also strange. Expected some younger defender to feature here in place of Sokratis.
Which defender would you have picked?
how about the kid at west ham diop, thought he was decent. dont know the stats but seems to have settled in.
Nothing against picking Sokratis. But I thought some other defender with probably more minutes that him would have featured here.
Don’t watch enough Premier League football outside of Arsenal to know how everyone’s doing to be honest. But I had Felipe Anderson down to be the signing of the season – a great pick-up by the Western Hammers. Also a big fan of their coach Pellegrini who always reminded me of Wenger (or maybe that’s just a superficial thing). He always seemed like a good guy to me.
I do remember Pereira had some good moments against us in the Ozil Leicester game. By the end of that match though, he had this look like “wow this Premier League stuff is no joke”.
Effing Burnley man. The modern football gods are frowning on you.
Hey Tim, isn’t Richarlison in with a shout?
He got a little shout-out in the Felipe Anderson para.
One of those two should really be playing for us. But which would you prefer?
Anderson destroyed us when we played them. Both useful but I’ll have him.
Sorry, I missed that.
Anderson.
A hard-working wide man with good defensive ability, who can dribble and will give you 15 goals a season? He’s better than both Iwobi and Mhki, and I’d have him in a heartbeat. If Mhki’s transfer value of 30m is correct, I’d personally drive him to the airport.
Yes I agree. We probably should have gone for him instead of Mkhi when it was clear Alexis was leaving .
I’ve been out of touch with football for the past few days, and catching up now with respect to Sterling (btw, Squires’ cartoon today is good…and terribly sad at the same time). But what’s the issue with Burnley right now?
Richarlison a great signing for Everton but I also want to give a shout out to Xherdan Shaqiri who’s been a very good addition to an already excellent side.
How must Shaqiri feel? Going from relagated Stoke City to competing for the Premier League trophy.
From Sqauwka: Shaqiri has averaged a goal every 180 minutes for Liverpool this season, a better rate than Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino.
Mourinho third year syndrome, Ginger or otherwise 🙂
That was to Bun re Burnley
I’m sure a lot of 7 am readers have seen this already but there really are no words are there? All you can do is watch and marvel and enjoy the Being From Another Planet:
It’s not just that he does once but twice. The 2nd time in the opposite corner.
Barca at it again. Mr. Dembele just showed S^&rs how it’s done. Not even 8 minutes in.
Doc, why did you in your last comment on the subject repeatedly blame “the left” for the poor state of the dialogue on race? I find that rather telling, and frankly troubling. You seem likeable and thoughtful, and then you start to talk about race, and You show us someone different. All that grievance mongering, and railing against political correctness, the left, mainstream media and poor, put-upon white people who have been victimised by other folks too touchy about race and identity. Why can’t they say stuff and operate like they did 50 years ago? You try to distance yourself from Trump folks, but frankly you sound exactly like them.
Ridiculous overreactions like those by thought police on campus shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath as Raheem Stirling, but you it do anyway. “Yes, but….” Those ridiculous overreactions should not happen, you are right, but there is no equivalence.
If a group, be it Black, Chinese, Arab, Muslim, Polish or Hungarian advises you that something is hurtful or offensive, the smart and empathetic thing to do is modify. Even if you think they’re being touchy, the fact is that you’re not in their shoes. It’s why we don’t sit at the dinner table of our hosts and tell them to their face that their lamb casserole came out tasteless.
Some folks, it seems, have always had impunity. Rhetorical impunity, and impunity of action; and they can’t deal with a new and changing world where people call them out on it. Repeat, some of it goes to ridiculous extremes, but those are not the cases that anyone was talking about last thread, or here. Lobbing crude stereotypes at groups of people is classic racism, even if those groups are themselves white.
I suppose the common ideal is that everyone’s viewpoint needs to be heard and what Doc outlines are legit feelings about how modern society might ‘discriminate’ against people with his viewpoints. “Facts having a liberal bias”, that type of thing.
But appending those grievances to the Raheem Sterling issue disrespects both topics imo.