Is Charlie Patino ready for the next step?

Taking a look at Patino's stats and performance in the Championship

A couple of weeks ago I had a poll asking who between Florian Balogun and Charlie Patino people were more interested in seeing a detailed loan report on and the winner was Patino.

I am here now to deliver on that with a deep dive into the stats for Patino.

Let’s start at the high level, looking at the radar.

I will have to admit, this is not the prettiest radar I have ever seen (and this is not a comment on the colors from Blackpool, which I do like). One of the things that is hard with stats, is that it is incredibly hard to disentangle what a player is doing, from his team and what he is asked to do. This will be a theme of this post I am sure going forward.

Patino has primarily played as the left midfielder as part of a double pivot in Blackpool’s 4-4-2. There has been a bit of a single pivot in there but that has happened less as it is not a preferred formation.

I think before we get any further let’s talk about Blackpool some more. Blackpool are a very young team (third youngest in the Championship) and are currently in the relegation fight (sitting 22nd as I write this). Their style is also very different than that of Arsenal, they manage just 43% of the ball compared to 57% for Arsenal. They have even less of the final third possession with a field tilt of 42% compared 65% for Arsenal.

Just on this, it will certainly make trying to make a comp hard but there is more that complicates it. Blackpool also play a very direct style that certainly bleeds into the player stats. Blackpool love to play the ball forward quickly and long, they go long on 23% of their attempts. This leads to a lower overall completion percentage (67.9%, 4th lowest) and with low efficiency compared to expected.

So now that we have this caveat out of the way, lets see how Patino looks so far this season (all stats are through January 2nd).