A Midfield Shopping List for Arsenal

Stats scouting with my new midfield rating tool.

At the top of Edu's Arsenal summer, to-do list is signing a new striker, right below it should be finding a long-term replacement and hopefully an upgrade for Granit Xhaka at midfield.

Doing something like this for a striker will be the next task but today we are going to look at doing some stats scouting to create a shopping list for midfielders for Arsenal to target this summer.

To do this I have finished creating a flexible rating system that allows me to set some parameters and weights, in this case, to match the role that I am calling "attacking 8", and spits out a set of ratings for players. I have gone into more detail about how it works here if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of the system.

Midfield Rating System

This is something that I have been kicking around for a while starting with a pretty simple rating system that used the 13 stats from my radars, the z-scores for each to create an overall score. This system produces solid results at getting players that fill out radars but I

Crab StatsScott Willis

What we are going to do here is take some of the more interesting players, who are 1) 26 years old or younger, 2) have played at least 900 minutes in a "Big 5 League", and 3) have played 60% or more of their minutes at midfield.

My list gave me 54 total names and I am not going to go through each and every one of them because some are pretty obviously not going to be targeted by Arsenal for various reasons but will put them into four different tiers and look at the more interesting ones from within each group.

Tier 4 - The probably good players that are not perfect fits for the attacking 8 role tier