Although no deal has as yet been confirmed, Liverpool are clearly looking to bring in Danny Ings from Burnley in the summer when his contract expires. As usual, I thought I’d take a look at his stats, and having done so I can definitely see why he would appeal to Brendan Rodgers.
There are very few players who divide opinion as much as him. Capable of moments of madness and brilliance from minute-to-minute, his ability to entertain, infuriate and court controversy are largely unrivalled.
But enough about Luis Suárez. Liverpool need to move on from the Uruguayan and secure a replacement striker. What do the stats tell us that Balotelli can bring to Anfield?
When it became clear that Loïc Remy was likely to be signing for Liverpool, I took a quick look at his headline stats from 2013/14 and noticed how similar they were to Daniel Sturridge’s. Surely a look at a few other attacking metrics would reveal a major difference between the pair?
Oh, okay. So you’re telling me that Liverpool will have secured Sturridge and a very similar alternate option for around £21m in total? You are? Marvellous! I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t dig a little deeper though….
Dejan Lovren, Southampton’s Croatian centre-back who they purchased from Lyon twelve months ago, is the latest player to be strongly linked with a move to Liverpool.
As defensive stats are hard to make use of, as a lot of the important aspects of defending (e.g. positioning, anticipation, marking etc) aren’t measured (or at least, the data isn’t available in the public domain), I’ve looked at some stats in a slightly different way to try to get more useful information out of them.
As sure as night follows day, as soon as Liverpool are credibly linked to any player from across the globe, I get asked on Twitter if I’m going to write a piece on them! Benfica’s Lazar Markovic is the latest such transfer target, so I’ve had a look at his form.
Except that unfortunately detailed stats from the Portuguese league appear to be rarer than credible transfer rumours on Twitter (though if you know otherwise, please let me know in the comments), so all I have been able to source via Stats Zone is six games in the 2012/13 Europa League for Partizan Belgrade, and five in this year’s Champions League for Benfica. The limited nature of the information means that this is just a gentle introduction to the Serbian, and by no means an in-depth analysis. Continue reading
Whenever Liverpool get linked to a player, it’s usually the case that I haven’t seen them play too often. I’ll go to their page on Whoscored, see what their strengths and weaknesses are and have a look at the stats, and then delve a little deeper using StatsZone.
Normally, a quick look at a player’s numbers makes it clear why a team might be interested in signing them, but with Ryan Bertrand (who Liverpool are reportedly looking to sign) that doesn’t appear to be the case at all. What’s the attraction?
The latest Liverpool transfer rumour that refuses to die is that the Reds are looking to sign Divock Origi, a 6ft 2″ nineteen year-old who plays in France for Lille, and who recently scored a late winner for Belgium against Russia at the World Cup.
As I have recently assessed the stats of Lallana, Can, Lambert and Moreno, it’s now time to take a close look at Origi.
When news first broke that Liverpool were interested in Emre Can of Bayer Leverkusen, I wrote this piece looking at how his stats are very similar to those of Lucas Leiva. Now that the deal has been formally ‘agreed in principle’, I thought it would be interesting to look at some other numbers to see how he compares to his future teammates.
Having reviewed and assessed the stats of Adam Lallana, Suso, Emre Can and Rickie Lambert, it’s now time for the latest Liverpool transfer target, Alberto Moreno, to get the Bass Tuned To Red review treatment. Whilst Ricardo Rodriguez is equally, if not more highly, rated, due to time constraints I shall stick to players that the Reds are widely reported to have made offers for.
If Liverpool complete the signing of Southampton’s Rickie Lambert, then they will own three of the four players who hit double figures for both goals and assists in the Premier League last season (and we can safely assume that the fourth, Wayne Rooney, won’t be moving to Anfield any time soon).
It’s funny how you can have an impression of a player in your head that turns out to be off the mark when you look into his facts and figures, and Lambert certainly fits the bill on that front as far as I am concerned.
Liverpool are currently heavily linked with a move for Bayer Leverkusen’s twenty year old German midfielder Emre Can. A quick glance at his stats on WhoScored revealed a very similar level of output to Lucas Leiva, and as the Brazilian is currently the Reds’ last choice midfielder, it seems logical to me that Can may be his replacement. I have therefore taken a closer look at the figures to see how they compare.
As the deal for Lallana appears to be close to completion, I thought I’d better move this recent piece back to the homepage.
With Liverpool hotly tipped to sign Southampton’s England international Adam Lallana, I thought I’d review his creativity stats via my chance quality system, to see if his raw numbers warrant the £20m+ transfer fee that he is likely to command. I’ve also tried to pick the bones out of a couple of other important statistics too…
One of the top ten most read articles on this website is a look at the difference in transfer spending between Liverpool and Manchester City.
Written in May 2012, I have proceeded to add a postscript every time the teams have met since, to measure what has happened in the intervening transfer windows.
As Liverpool are currently deeply involved in a title race with a pair of financially doped teams who they have to play in the next three weeks, I thought I’d post a quick new piece to compare the transfer spending of all three championship challengers.
Liverpool have signed Valencia left-back Aly Cissokho on loan for 2013/14, and so I have taken a look at his statistics compared to those for his direct competitor for a first team berth, Jose Enrique.
From what I’ve seen, the twenty-five year old Frenchman could well walk straight into the Reds’ first team.
With Stewart Downing having packed his Anfield bags and joined Liverpool Mk II with Joe Cole and Andy Carroll at West Ham, attention turns to who Liverpool might bring in to replace him.
Whilst fans may be dreaming about the likes of Willian joining as the Reds potentially profit from Anzhi’s financial crisis, the far more likely option is Scott Sinclair signing from Manchester City. The bookmakers have drastically cut their odds with regards to this transfer happening, and of course he worked with Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers in his former life at Swansea City.
I personally hope that the Reds are NOT in the market for Sinclair, and here’s why.
I recently wrote that Gareth Bale is not worth £100m (read more here), and so it seems only fair to run the rule over Liverpool’s Luis Suárez.
John W Henry has made it clear that the Uruguayan will not be allowed to leave easily, but in my opinion if a team were to offer £50m, then Liverpool should probably rip their arms clean off and bid Suárez adieu.
It’s the question that’s on everybody’s lips right now, and a brief review of his key stats suggests to me that the answer is a resounding “no”.
I generally pay very little attention to transfer speculation, as very little of it ever comes to fruition. However, when Inside Futbol reported that “Liverpool have stepped up their search for another striker by requesting information about the availability of Alessandro Matri” I thought I’d check out his record seeing as there’s a very real chance that he’ll be leaving Juventus; as Tevez and Llorente have been brought in by the Italian champions this summer, Matri’s chances to play will surely be pretty scarce in 2013/14.
Having checked out some brief scoring stats, I’m beginning to think he should perhaps be on Brendan Rodgers’ shopping list.
I’ll be clear before we start: this is essentially two short blog posts bolted together. But not just for the sake of it; both things I’ll talk about here have been floating around my mind for a couple of weeks, and I realised that I have a similar message to preach for both things.
Update: I don’t get too much right on here, so it’s probably worth pointing out when I do! In this piece from July 2013, I calculated that Henrikh Mkhitaryan would score around nine goals per season in England. Using the same system would’ve suggested that he would score eight (well, 7.86) in Germany, and he scored nine in his first season with Dortmund. Coincidence? Maybe, it is a small figure after all. But this mightn’t be the worst system to use when seeing what a high scoring player from a minor European league might do in one of the big leagues.
In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I have tried to learn a bit more about Liverpool target Henrikh Mkhitaryan by looking at his stats from the Champions League.
Although the numbers aren’t too impressive, I have had several comments advising me that they don’t matter as he scored twenty-five goals from midfield this season, which renders everything else irrelevant.
But my issue with that idea is that I don’t know how strong the Ukrainian league is, so I have devised a system to try to establish how good Mkhitaryan’s goal tally is in the context of the Premier League.
Bass Tuned To Red 