Rasmus Kristensen, No not the guy with a feather in his hair
Salutations and welcome to my article about our newest signing Rasmus Nissen Kristensen, the second signing of the Jesse Marsch era. We can clearly see a theme occuring so far with the transfers. Both are players from an Red Bull system and both have played under Jesse Marsch previously.
Also a theme we have so far is that we aren’t messing around with transfers, seems like we are trying to get as many bodies through the door as possible before pre season begins, which is something I wish we had done in prior seasons. The lessons of last seasons have been learn in the harshest way.
Rasmus is signing for a fee of around £8–10mil from RB Salzburg, which is a very low cost sum for a player of his ability, it is also quite low risk as if the signing doesn’t end up working we should still be able to recoup a lot of this fee due to his age.
Rasmus was a player with many admirers, clubs who were also trying to sign him include Brentford FC & Borussia Dortmund, both of these clubs are known to be smart clubs with an eye for talent, which bodes very well for this transfer.
History & Playing Career
Rasmus is 24 years old, and started his playing career with FC Midtjylland. Midtjylland are one of the bigger clubs in the Danish Superligaen winning the top flight trophy 3 times in their history. Rasmus received his senior debut in March 2016 when he was just 18, he ended that season playing 12 games and was an immediate first team regular following, playing 33 times in the following season.
He then moved to Ajax in January 2018 for a fee of just under £5mil, which is the 8th highest fee Midtjylland have ever received for a player and he was only 20 making his fee the highest they have received for a player of his age or younger.
Rasmus found game time harder to come by at Ajax starting only 10 times across the season and a half he was with Ajax. But he was behind Mazraoui in selection termsHe was then sold on to RB Salzburg for again a fee of £5mil in July 2019. Try to guess who was Salzburg’s manager at the time? I’ll give you a clue, he has a penchant for using quotes by Gandhi.
Nearly all of Rasmus’s games have come as a a RB with 183 of his 218 senior club appearances being at RB, he also has 16 games played in RM and 7 as a LB. However the appearances at RM could easily have been as a RWB with a back 3 behind. So it’s clear where his specialty position is.
Rasmus has played a lot throughout his short career so far, for the most part he has been injury free too which will be a big help. The only injury issue I’ve come across is a hamstring injury he suffered in 2020 in which he missed 16 games, however it looks like he recovered well from this as he was available for every minute of the season just gone and played 3788 minutes across all competitions.
Playing Style & Strengths
Athleticism
Quite early into watching Rasmus I discovered his speed, he’s a physical player and will offer something not a lot of players have in our backline which is recovery pace. In the below clip, pay attention to where Kristensen starts and where Serge Gnabry starts.
He starts a good distance away from Gnabry laterally but closes the lateral gap as well as keeping the same position as Gnabry vertically, which is a really good sign.
I could find other clips showing his recovery pace in action but they would in essence be quite similar to the above clip so I’ll move on to more juicier strengths.
High risk-High Reward aggressiveness
He’s quite a physical player and quite pro active in his defending, which is similar to Luke Ayling. He gets in quickly and tries to limit the space the attacker has when they receive the ball.
However sometimes this pro-active nature can lead to bad situations, like in the next few clips, in these clips he rushes in quite quickly to try to pressure the attackers and in both occasions it doesn’t pay off.
However his aggressiveness can pay off, in the next few clips you can see he does the same thing, quickly gets close to the attacker and in both these instances he manages to block the pass at the source and wins back possession, quickly winning back possession is key in a Marsch system.
One final clip to show, which is of a more direct 1 v 1 battle where he’s facing his opponent, he’s up against Yannick Carrasco who is know to be a very skilled dribbler and he handles this instance so nicely, stands up to him and uses a little strength to win the ball and plays the ball off to a teammate.
Positioning
In general I’ve noticed a good eye for positioning in possession, he takes up good areas where he can be an out ball for his team mates, in particular I noticed he likes to position himself quite high when Salzburg have been in a sustained attack.
The next clip is sped up to clarify, and focuses on his positioning. In a Marsch system the main width comes from fullbacks. So it can be useful to have your fullbacks push up very high, now obviously this comes with risks but as long as the below isn’t done too often it could be a dangerous weapon, if the final ball had been a little better then this could’ve been very dangerous.
Out of possession I have already noted some of his flaws in the previous section on his high risk aggressiveness, which can lead to him moving from his assigned area.
However I also noticed that he can be good at covering for his team mates, in the below clip you’ll see his CB partner Solet steps out to put pressure on Coman, he notices this and moves to mark Lewandowski.
Progression & Goal Contributions
Rasmus isn’t the style of fullback who likes to run with the ball very often, at least it isn’t something I’ve noticed him do a lot in the time I’ve watched him, but he is quite effective at progressing the ball with passing.
The below clip might seem quite simple, but it’s hugely important if we want to get the ball forward quickly, which Marsch likes to do. We won’t often use the wide spaces in this way under Marsch but it’s still good that he can do this kinda thing.
He is capable of passing the ball vertically into central areas which is another key ability a fullback needs under Marsch, if you watch the below clip he intercepts a ball firstly, then lays it back to a team-mate, then when he receives the ball back he scans for a second and then passes centrally to Daka who passes forward to Berisha and an attacking opportunity is created.
Below is another good example of him receiving the ball quite narrow and fashioning a pass inside the box, with his weaker foot too. Would love to see more of this with us.
One final clip on this area, we see him occupying a much wider position here, he quickly takes the ball ahead of his man and slots a ball into the box, it wasn’t accurate but it led to a pressing opportunity inside their box and anything can happen in that situation, so I still enjoyed this.
When it comes to directly contributing with goals & assists Rasmus has done a lot of this at club level for Salzburg, just this season he has 7 goals & 4 assists. He hasn’t been quite as prolific in the Champions League though. But I did find this delightful assist, it was close to being offside but VAR cleared it.
Below is a few examples of his finishing, looks like he could be a capable threat both aerially and with his feet. Obviously standard of opposition will be much higher in Premier League so we may not see it as often but we’ll see how things go.
Playing style summary
In closing on his playing style, Rasmus is an athletic fullback with good recovery pace, out of possession he is aggressive in trying to win the ball back and this can be high risk and high reward, I’ve noticed times when this aggressiveness paid off, and others where it doesn’t. This depends on the skill of the player he is up against.
In possession he is tidy with his possession, has good timing in picking his passes generally and can progress the ball quickly when needed. He isn’t your typical fullback who hugs the line constantly and likes to mix things up by entering the box via the halfspaces.
The above also extends to his pass selection around the box, he likes to play diagonal passes into the box through the middle as well as your typical crosses and driven passes which are more familiar from a fullback.
He strikes a ball cleanly when shooting and could be an unexpected danger mans for opposition to be aware of, on top of this he shows himself to be an aerial threat from set pieces and in general from open play he wins a lot of aerial battles.
Data
Now we move onto the more analytical section, where we look at what the data tells us about Rasmus. As with my article on Brenden Aaronson, any data should be taken with a pinch of salt due to the strength of opposition he faces in the Austrian Bundesliga and how clearly dominant RB Salzburg are in the league.
Firstly I want to have a look at his heatmap for the season, as expected he is very active in the wide area’s but his heatmap extends quite a portion into the middle of the pitch, which like we saw earlier in the playing style section shows that he moves inside a lot and doesn’t restrict himself to the wide areas.
Defensive Stats
Firstly when it comes to defensive stats, there is only so much you can read from a lot of defensive stats as they usually tell you more about the style and status of the team rather than a lot about the player, so bare this in mind when reading some of these stats.
As you can see in the above, there is an expected drop in win % for Rasmus in UCL compared to Aus Bundesliga in both Defensive Duels & Aerials Duels. Rasmus is better aerially than Ayling but his defensive duel win rate is lower for his UCL appearances.
Interestingly Rasmus keeps similar levels of defensive output for both interceptions & ball recoveries. There is a drastic increase in the amount of defensive duels he attempts in UCL which is to be expected.
Ball Carrying & Dribbling
Here we have some pretty drastic differences, with everything dropping a fair bit with dribble success taking the worst hit. This is only natural as he’s facing better opposition in general.
There isn’t much difference between Luke & Rasmus for progressive runs but Luke does do more. Rasmus completes more dribbles than Luke but has a much lower success rate for his dribble success, so he seems to attempt more but at a lower success rate.
Passing & Crossing
Firstly we’ll look at basic pass success rates before moving on to passes in and around the penalty area.
You can see from the below firstly that Rasmus attempts a lot less passes overall in the UCL than in the Aus Bundesliga, but the good sign is that his success rate doesn’t lower too much, in fact it increases slightly overall in the UCL.
Secondly Ayling attempts more passes overall than Rasmus does and with a higher success rate, although the success rates we see here from Rasmus aren’t bad in my opinion. It also should be noted that the general team style could have an impact here as most of Luke’s time has been under Bielsa and in general Bielsa’s Leeds United played a lot more passes than Jesse Marsch’s sides do.
There’s a lot more to breakdown in the above but in general you can see that the success of a pass or cross has fallen across the board, in addition the total volume has fallen quite dramatically.
Then when you compare the stats directly to Ayling there is generally more accuracy from Luke when comparing against Rasmus’s UCL stats. But interestingly Rasmus attempts more passes into the penalty area than Luke which is something I had noticed while watching him play.
Data Conclusions
The data is hard to judge, and even harder to predict how it will translate in a totally different league. But in general I can see Rasmus is a less attacking player in the UCL than he is in the Austrian Bundesliga.
It has also told me that the issues raised in the playing style relating to defensive duels and aggressiveness may be worse than initially feared. However this isn’t absolute and surrounded by different players we could see differences in Rasmus’s game.
Things are complicated even more when we try to directly compare Rasmus to Luke Ayling, we are working with two different sets of data’s for Rasmus so which figure do you use to compare?
But I feel if you use a point somewhere in between Rasmus’s UCL appearances & his Bundesliga ones you get a set of data which is generally slightly better than Ayling’s has been in the Premier League thus far, but this is largely speculative in nature.
Closing Thoughts
We’ve gone over a lot of information in this article and I’m sure you’re finding it as hard as I am to analyse but I’ll do my best to do just that.
I am not less enthused by this signing after I’ve considered what the data has told me about Rasmus in comparison to before I’d started looking over it. I feel this has all the makings of a successful transfer for us and one which I’m really excited to see play out.
There is a lot of parallels between Luke & Rasmus when comparing them directly, however Luke as a player is unfortunately on the decline. He is the wrong side of 30 now and won’t be ready to start the current season due to the operation he has recently undergone.
The price we are paying for Rasmus is in my opinion low and as I said before is low risk, he’s at a good age being 25 by the time the season gets underway and should he be successful we have a lot of years left for him to be our starting rightback.
In addition he has room to improve, being younger than the “prime” age of 28–30, so with plenty of gametime in what most people would call the best league in the world we could have a real gem on our hands, which we found hidden in the shadows of the Austrian Bundesliga(I’m truly sorry for that tired pun but I couldn’t resist.
Thanks for Reading
Martin
PS — If you’re feeling kind, give me a follow on Twitter. https://twitter.com/MartinCBMRiley
NB — Below is a useful website for any definitions you need on any of the data terminologies used in this article.
