Brooke Norton-Cuffy: Stats Scouting

Norton-Cuffy has gotten a ton of hype as a prospect, his stats on the other hand are not really that good. Let's take a deep dive into things to get a better view of things.

Last week I did the monthly Arsenal Loan report and one of the big questions that I had was about Brook Norton-Cuffy.

Arsenal Loan Watch: October

Norton-Cuffy is a very highly touted prospect but from my view, the hype is not matching the current production that he is doing in the Championship.

This leads to trying to understand what the difference is between his hype and his production and I think that is a good use of doing some detailed stats scouting.

The first place to start is by understanding what position he is playing.

With Rotherham, this season he is playing much further up the pitch than a standard full-back, playing primarily as the right-sided midfielder in a 3-1-4-2 formation. Looking at his touch and defensive action map however this looks a lot more like a standard wingback than a right wingerS.

So I think that is the first complication of looking at just his stats. He is playing in an interesting hybrid role that doesn’t really map effectively to either attacking midfielder nor full-back but I think ultimately he is more full-back than anything else. With that in mind, I will use full-back as the comparison going forward but everyone should understand that he isn’t a perfect positional fit in this category for what he has done this season.

Passing

Norton-Cuffy’s passing is not something that leaps off the page.

He is a low volume passer, he doesn’t complete a ton of the passes that he does attempt (60%), and doesn’t create a ton of value from those passes.

This is a bit of a worry for how his skills might translate at a team like Arsenal which wants a lot of the ball and players that can complete passes at a high level. This also again leads us to look at the team that he is playing with now. Rotherham are not really similar at all to Arsenal in how they play, they are a low-possession team (20th in the Championship), attempting the 3rd fewest passes with the third-lowest overall completion rate. They are also a team that plays the ball long often; this season, 24% of their passes are more than 30 yards which is the third highest rate in the Championship.

Within this context, it is not unusual to see passing numbers like this, a good example of this is Marc Cucurella. Cucurella, when he was with Getafe, completed passed at 71.5%, when he moved to Brighton the next season that increased to 78.8%, and his move to Chelsea this season and seen that increase to 82.3%.

This number is very team and role dependent.