Orta’s Power Five: Centre Backs

Greetings all, this is the 3rd article in my Power Five series exploring transfer targets potentially on Victor Orta’s list kept securely in a little notebook in a locked box somewhere at Elland Road or Thorpe Arch.

This article will explore the options we have at Centre back, I will look in detail at our own CB’s in comparison to the European “Big 5” league’s and show what their strengths are.

On the Ball Ability

It should be obvious to any Leeds fan that a CB in a Bielsa team needs totally different strengths to a CB in say a Sean Dyche or Sam Allardyce side. It’s not enough to just be good at tackling or dominant in the air, they need to have defensive qualities & be superb on the ball.

Bielsa’s system relies pretty heavily on being able to play out from the back and to be able to play a range of passes to a high standard, they need to be able to nail short passes & longer balls over the top. While Bielsa values possession he doesn’t put possession on a pedestal above creating chances and as such if a player see’s an option further up the field they will take the risk to progress the ball up the pitch and won’t always play short out of defence.

Below I have left a couple of visuals, firstly comparing our CB’s to the “Big 6” Premier League teams and secondly to the “Other 14” clubs.

As you can see our CB’s hold our own against the traditional big 6 sides, we don’t quite complete as many passes p90 as Chelsea or Man City’s CB’s but they complete similar numbers to Manchester Utd, Arsenal & Tottenham but we do compete with all clubs on progressive passes, the last metric is % of passes played long represented by the dot size, all of our CB’s have a similar share of passes played long between 20%-26% with Cooper playing the most long passes.

Here we can see how they compare against the “Other 14” clubs, We complete more passes p90 than the majority of the other clubs as well as being on the high end for progression with only players from Leicester, Brighton, Wolves & a few select better players in other clubs.

When it comes to overall volume of passing Cooper & Koch complete the most passes and they also complete the most progressive passes too, I’ve ignored Ayling’s numbers as they are heavily influenced by his games at Right back and can’t be used objectively.

Defending

Now defending in a Bielsa team looks different to 99% of other teams, in that we defend in a man orientated system rather than a zonal marking system, there is only one exception to this rule and that is the “Free Man” in defence, you may know that Bielsa likes to operate with a plus one superiority in defence which leaves a free man, this player is used to fight fires in my opinion, they actively have to be aware of which players are the biggest threats and be prepared to deal with them if they get past their man or their man needs additional help.

So all of our defenders need to be capable man markers and have strong defensive positioning. In addition the player playing the “Free man” role needs additional awareness to intercept passes, double up on dangerous players etc…

It can be difficult to find these kind of players just using stats but we can see which players show up well and then they can be looked at in more detail with the eye test.

So firstly in our players who shows up strong, on the below metric I have compared all the league’s CB’s for Aerial Duels & Aerial Duel win %.

You can see from this that our best CB when it comes to both volume of Aerials & Aerial duel success is Liam Cooper. Cooper completes the 3rd most aerials in the league with 6.5p90 and despite him having the best success of our squad with 66%, this is however some way short of the league leader Kurt Zouma with 79%.

You will notice that Llorente isn’t in the above, this is because he didn’t qualify for this graphic due to not attempting 30 or more aerials, so far though he looks good with a success rate of 66% however he completes significantly less than Cooper with 3p90.

The last visual looks at Tackles, Interceptions & Dribble Duels.

The above metrics are heavily influenced by the team they are a part of and don’t always show how good a defender is at the said metrics, but what this does do is show which of our CB’s does the most defensive work, since Llorente hasn’t played a lot of games I can discount how great he looks here to a degree, having only played 5 games we can’t fully judge him at this point, however his numbers are a very good sign thus far.

Liam Cooper has played the most games out of any of our CB’s with 20 games played, the next closest to him is Struijk with 15 games. Cooper has extraordinary numbers completing the most tackles & interceptions in the league with 5.2 p90 combined, in addition his dribble duel success is strong with 58% which barring Llorente is the best of our CB’s but still someway short of the joint leaders in Kurt Zouma & Antonio Rudiger with 71.4%

Narrowing down the Targets

Now it’s time to move on a bit to the actual targets now we have seen what the strength’s are of our CB’s. In the below visual the metrics on display are Tackles & Interceptions, Aerial Win(%) & Progressive passes. I have used all the top European League’s with Premier League taken away as I feel we will be targetting outside the Premier League.

The next thing I did was filtered my dataset so I was only looking at CB’s who have played 5+ games this season, and were no older than 28, as I had already established we need our CB’s to have certain on ball characteristics I filtered the players, so all the players have completed more than 45 passes per90, more than 3 progressive passes p90 & they have a long pass completion of 70% or more given we noticed our CB’s play a reasonably high amount of long passes.

This brings us to the below visual.

Targets

The player who I like the most out of the above visual is Sven Botman, he plays for LOSC Lille in Ligue 1 and he ticks a number of boxes for me. Firstly he’s young being 21 and is a Dutch U21 international, he is a very strong passer completing 68 passes p90 with 4.5 of these being progressive, he has an overall pass completion of 87% and a long pass completion of 72%.

Not only is his passing good, but his ball carrying is very strong with 3.4 progressive carries per match. Of these carries he doesn’t often go by a man to make them only completing 7 take-ons in 29 Ligue 1 games however he has a take on completion of 100% so he is very smart when he chooses to dribble past a player.

In addition to the above on the ball ability Sven is big lad, standing at 6ft 4'. As a club we don’t have many tall players so a player with his physical attributes would be very useful. Also he uses his height to good effect winning 3 aerials duels per 90 with a 69.6% win rate.

Sven was bought by Lille quite recently for £7mil from Ajax. Looks like this is quite a good signing by Lille given he has slotted straight into their defence and looks pretty assured. Sven wouldn’t come cheap given they have only just signend him this season however with the difficulties French clubs have financially I think we may be able to sign him for between £20–30mil.

I watched a couple of games of Lille’s, firstly I watched them against PSG. Botman surprisingly didn’t really have a lot to do, PSG only mustered 8 shots in the entire game, Lille stayed pretty compact when they didn’t have the ball and PSG couldn’t break them down, the game ended 0–0, PSG had a very large amount of the ball in this game with 69% possession.

The next game I decided to watch was a Europa league game against Celtic, Lille had much more of the ball in this game and this is just what I wanted to see, how Botman did with more time on the ball.

This game showed his on ball ability very well, Botman was calm and composed and played all the simple passes well but he also made a lot of difficult passes to break lines and progress the ball faster, in this game he made 94 passes in total and his pass completion was 89.5%, 9 progressive passes(Joint most) and he made 16 final third passes(Most on pitch)

His movement with the ball was very good too, he had the most carries with 86, which included 7 progressive carries with two of these progressive carries being into the final 3rd which showed his desire to get the ball up the pitch from defence, Lille went behind to two pretty soft low xG efforts which Botman couldn’t have done anything about. The game ended 2–2 with Lille clawing back the goals in the 2nd half. Botman was a big part of this with how involved he was in the game.

Botman is a left footed player so if either Cooper or Struijk were to be sold I feel he could step in very well to fill in the LCB spot in the side.

As it is quite time consuming to watch a lot of players I will only go into this kind of detail on Botman as he is the player I like the most. Below is a few more players who I like and their values, I used Transfermarkt for their value indicator and looked over their previous record sales to make a judgement on how much they could cost.

As you can see from the above stats Edmond Tapsoba is the best across nearly every metric, however he is also the most expensive by a significant margin. I would love him in a Bielsa side but given his cost this is why I opted to focus on Botman as I feel he is more attainable.

Summary

Just want to clarify for this article that I don’t feel we need any new signings at CB but if someone was to buy one of our players then these are some players we could look at, there is on additional player I haven’t mentioned who will no doubt be on Orta’s list and that is a certain Brighton player Ben White, he would be the player I would like to sign, but given we know all about White I didn’t see a reason to go into detail about him.

We have quality CB’s at the club at both LCB & RCB, with two options in both positions it will be interesting to see how this position plays out over the next year. Personally I would like Liam Cooper to stay in his position on the Left of defence with Struijk filling in and deputising with the eventual goal of replacing Cooper.

On the right side I am unsure who I prefer, Koch impressed me in the opening games of the season. Now we have seen Llorente enter the side, he is a CB with different strengths and I would need to see more games from Llorente to determine who I would prefer. But either of them seem capable players without any massive flaws.