Kobbie Mainoo: Stats scouting the young prospect

He has obvious promise and potential but the hype growing around him is probably too much too soon.

I stirred up a bit of an internet storm the other day on Twitter.

I had seen a lot of what I thought was over-the-top comments on Manchester United’s Kobbie Mainoo and during a break from sunshine while on vacation I created a visualization comparing Mainoo to what I thought was an interesting and apt player in Matteo Guendouzi.

I was a little flippant in the initial tweet with the comment that “sometimes a young player playing for a dysfunctional big team at a young age just isn’t all that great.” What I was aiming for was better spelled out in the second tweet, “Mainoo has a ton of promise but he hasn’t exactly been great yet either. Absolutley has shown flashes of great promise and the reasons to be excited about him are plenty but I’d hold the horses some are projecting on him.” but that doesn’t help when the first tweet goes viral and gets nearly 600k views compared to just 77k for the second tweet.

This spurred a discussion about how to do analysis and that this wasn’t it.

I agree with that, this tweet was not an attempt at serious analysis, just a quick thought and an idea to compare him to another player that I had personally gotten a bit ahead on when he was first breaking out.

So now let’s do a bit more serious analysis on Mainoo, that is longer than a tweet.

The first big thing is that Manchester United are to put it mildly, a mess right now. You can’t really separate team effects from a player’s performance so that is important to understand how the team plays and the player inside of the system.

United this season are in 6th place but they look like a team that would be more comfortable lower down the table. In the team tiers that power my simulation model, they currently rank 9th and with a rating that would be more typical of a midtable team than one that is challenging for European spots.

Looking a bit more at the in-possession style also illustrates that this team is pretty different than the standard “big team”. Here is what they look like in the Premier League this year with the average of the Big 6 teams highlighted.

They are much more of a direct team, with less possession, more speed towards goal, and more long passes. This isn’t exactly a surprise because they are a team that does look best when they can get their forwards running into space and having Bruno Fernandes playing his favorite home run passes.

For midfielders, this almost certainly depresses their in-possession numbers. They are going to get on the ball less, play more risky passes (or simple ones to find Fernandes to play them), and generally have fewer chances to play the ball. This isn’t like Stoke City under Tony Pulis or anything and plenty of midfielders on teams with similar numbers can still shine through statistically but it is a factor to take into consideration.

I think a good place to start here is looking at Mainoo compared to the other midfielders that Manchester United have played. Not all have been in the same role all the time but this does eliminate some of the team-specific issues from the original Guendouzi comparison.

On this Mainoo has been a bit behind his peers but not massively so, especially considering that the other players are all 27+ years old with more experience at the top level.