Stat Scouting: Christian Nørgaard

Arsenal pivoted away from Thomas Partey and landed on Brentford's captain to fill out the defensive midfield depth

Arsenal’s midfield is undergoing a seismic shift with the departures of Thomas Partey and Jorginho as free agents, leaving a void in experience and depth.

Into this empty space steps, the former Brentford captain Christian Nørgaard.

As I do with every signing (and even some that don’t sign) we will dig into what the data is able to uncover and help give us the context about this player. I can’t help but start from the position with the opinion that while he wasn’t exactly on my radar a month ago but think that this is a player who should profile quite nicely as a cost-effective backup for Martin Zubimendi. Nørgaard’s defensive nous, set-piece threat, and Premier League experience offer Arsenal a reliable anchor to bolster Mikel Arteta’s Premier League aspirations.

Let’s get into it starting straight away with a radar and distribution chart. Here we place him on the Deep Playmaker template with the idea that he’d come in at the base of Arsenal’s team and that has been more often than not the role asked of the player in that position under Arteta.

The in-possession section of the graphic isn’t the prettiest here, but he does fill out the ball winning section quite nicely.

Here is what it looks like on the defensive midfielder radar and the more generic central midfielder radar as well.

Looking at the percentiles, it is a reminder that the green bars don’t pop but they also don’t have a lot of major areas that are not at least pretty good. I don’t worry too much about the upper right section of the chart for a defensive midfielder, focusing much more on the possession and defensive metrics.

Before we get too far into things, I would highly recommend looking at the clips that Adam put together. For a defensive midfield player this is a very important part of understanding the player and it really helped me get a feel for the player, even if this a player that being in the Premier League we are more familiar with.

Team Differences

This is an important section for getting an idea of how the team he played in could be effecting the numbers we are looking at here. The difference between Arsenal and Brentford is obviously pretty large.

Style wise Brentford played a pretty standard midtable type of style, lower possession mixed with very direct play. They looked to be solid at the back, even being willing to cede low quality shots in exchange for space that they could attack at speed when they won the ball back.

They played a game that featured tons of turnovers and stoppages as they tired to make it as start/stop and transition based as possible.

Norgaard did an excellent job for them in this role.

Arsenal of last season wouldn’t be described by many as an attacking juggernaut, but they look that way in comparison to Brentford and their willingness to play ugly.

The not great looking numbers continue looking at the defensive side of the game. Some of the weird style stuff really pops here, lots of shots allowed but they do a very good job of making sure that they are not high-quality shots. They do try and win the ball back but are fairly comfortable letting teams have the ball should the opportunity not present itself.

Overall while this is a tricky team to make direct comparisons to Arsenal with! These two teams are pretty close to polar opposite on the way they play and this will be an important factor to remember for the rest of the numbers that we dig into here.

Passing