Replacing Duvan
Replacing a key player on Football Manager might be one of my most exciting but also least favourite times in a save. Especially when that player is your top goal scorer, with over double the goals of the next best scorer in your squad.
However, as we waltzed into the January transfer window with almost 0 money in the bank, 2nd in the league, and unbeaten in 12, Real Madrid were sniffing around our talismanic striker Duvan Zapata, who had led the way for us all season, scoring 15 goals in 12 games. Predictably, his dynamic, powerful profile is one I’d have loved to keep around the club; especially with Ruslan Malinovskyi out with a long-term knee injury, but when Real Madrid offer you £47m for a man with 1 year left on his contract, and who was ‘considering his options’, it becomes a deal to good to turn down.
However, the issue is two-fold for me. Luis Muriel is our next best striker and goalscorer, with 7 goals in 13 games, and is also considering his options when his contract expires, so that means we’re going to need at least two strikers before summer. Muriel’s deal is up in June, so it’s unlikely we get any money for him, since clubs can approach him directly on a free transfer.
So, in summary, we’re losing our entire front line! The first thing I wanted to look at was whether we could replace either of them from within the club, and then pick up a younger player to build up into a starter. To do this, I had a quick delve through the data, to see where our current players stacked up against Muriel (I sold Zapata before I could check the data so we’re flying blind there)
The first thing I looked at was their overall attacking output: Muriel sits neatly around the averages for non-penalty xG + xA per 90, while Lookman and Hojlund are on different sides of the spectrum:
For me, that rules either of them out from being a direct replacement for what Muriel does — however, Rasmus Hojlund does sit similarly to where I feel Zapata would have been, based on the final-product we saw from him. Zapata had 15 goals and 0 assists, functioning almost exclusively as a finisher, while Muriel offers a bit more creatively with 3 assists to go alongside his goalscoring.
In terms of work rate and physicality, Ademola Lookman is undoubtedly our hardest worker up front. When I look at his work rate alongside his creative output, it does indicate to me that he’s a hard-working creator, rather than being an out and out striker.
The problem for Ademola comes when you realise that he has only scored in non-competitive matches so far this season. His two-footedness and willingness to put in hard yards for the team actually make me inclined to use him in midfield more than in the attack, as pushing him into either Muriel or Zapata’s roles would (in my view) blunt the attacking edge we have there in favour of greater creativity.
Indeed, the more I dug through the data, the more I felt Lookman’s best role for us is as an Advanced Playmaker in the middle of our midfield 3; pushing forward with 3rd-man runs, and causing issues around the box for defenders while our strikers push beyond them.
That left me with one key question before we hit the transfer market: is Rasmus Hojland ready for a starting role?
The 6ft3 Dane has played a role off the bench so far this season, scoring 3 and assisting once in 3 starts + 5 sub appearances. What stands out to me is that he’s over-performing both his xG (1.81) and xA (0.18) so far this season, and overall has a solid profile as a finisher: two-footed, relatively composed, quick…genuinely he’s everything I adore in a footballer, but at the moment, he doesn’t feel like he stands out in the way Zapata did for us.
That said, my next step was to dip into the market and see who was available: I used the amazing views from FMStag (Grab them here), and looked for strikers <27 years old, playing in the Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga, Eredivisie or Liga NOS, with >1000 minutes so far this season (roughly 11 games by January felt like a decent benchmark)
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I started off by looking at a very basic xG Overperformance, which threw up some very interesting names:
Che Adams is a player that I keep seeing pop up in my searches this year, across network saves, various offline saves and even in draft prep: He’s significantly shorter than Duvan was, but overall actually feels like he’s got quite a similar attribute profile:
He comes out top or top-3 in almost every metric I look at: he’s over-performing his xG by a mammoth 7.94, scores 30% of his shots (the highest in the pool), and is 2nd for Goals/90 within the search.
There were two other players who stood out (not counting Alexander Sorloth because he’s not obtainable right now, and also skipping Vitinha who was already halfway to Munich): Stephy Mavididi from Montpellier, and Goncalo Ramos from Benfica.
So, following our narrowing-down process, we had 3 targets, all of whom I felt could do a good job of replacing the outgoing Zapata and soon-to-be-outgoing Muriel:
Targets identified, it was time to start talking to agents. Interestingly, Mavididi’s agent was really co-operative, and set out a price of between £4.9m and £9.2m for a deal, which to me, stunk to high heaven of absolutely underpriced: turns out, i’m looking at buying two strikers! However, we can’t register another Non-EU player this year, so he’ll be returned to Montpellier for the rest of the season on loan, and then registered next season.
This non-EU restriction also ruled out the Che Adams signing, as Scotland are also a non-EU nation, so really, my hands were sort of tied into the Ramos deal; adding Ramos to Hojlund and Muriel for the remainder of the season, and then swapping Muriel for Mavididi feels like solid business that sets us up for the next few years in attack.
In the end, Southampton were looking for £42m for Adams, and we’ve picked up both Ramos and Mavididi for less than that!
I have to say, It’s interesting taking a new approach to finding players — in past years I would have whipped out a wonderkids shortlist from somewhere and just picked someone at random, and granted, this time, the results were largely the same, but there were some other great players on the ‘big list’ that, if I had more time for them to adapt (say over a summer window) or was replacing a squad player, were genuine options that I would never normally have found.
It’s a process that was replicated another twice in the window, to replace a full-back and a centre-back, and I’ve got to say, a more realistic, data-driven approach to scouting has been something i’ve really enjoyed:
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