Stat Scouting Christos Tzolis, Arsenal's £30m Lottery Ticket
A stats deep dive on Arsenal's incoming winger: elite creativity, a Belgian league discount, and why the expectations matter as much as the player.
Arsenal are closing in on their second signing of the summer and he is the perfect candidate for stats scouting to really illuminate a player that most people aren’t familiar with. If you’re like me you are probably not a dedicated watcher of the Belgian Pro League and thus you are not an expert… yet in the subject of today’s deep dive: Christos Tzolis.
If you have been a reader for a while this is a name that isn’t a surprise for you. Adam’s player rating formula identified him early and has been high on him for a while now.
He ranked 6th in the February update for wide attackers on the ADAM player rankings.
In the final rankings for the 2025/26 season he dropped back a bit but still came in ranked as the 8th best option.
In those posts, we don’t have the opportunity to go deep on all of the players so that gives us a good chance to take a deeper dive into this player.
I am also excited in a nerdy way, because this is a great chance to try and use the tools that I have built out to try and disentangle the large league and team effects that can skew numbers for players.
Let’s dig into this one starting where we always do looking at the high level radars and distributions.
Starting with the wide forward template (generally the role I imagine Arsenal’s wide attackers playing), Tzolis really fills things out. He put together an excellent end product season in Belgium, with excellent goals and otherworldly creative numbers.
Here are the other high level views for Tzolis looking at a few more templates.
One thing that we can’t go too much longer without mentioning is that he did this in the Belgian Pro League.
The Belgian League has gotten significantly stronger lately but there is still a massive gap between the average and top to bottom quality of this league compared to the regular “Big Five” leagues and especially the Premier League.
Here is the distribution of ratings for each team last season on my implementation of an Elo rating system.
The Premier League stands out for its strength and especially the quality of the teams outside of the top handful of teams. The other “Big Five” Leagues are all in a similar range to each other and then comes everyone else.
It is a similar but less drastic story looking at my Pi ratings for teams.
Regardless of the source, the difference in quality is a major factor and this is something that we spent a lot of energy on last season during the Gyökeres transfer but taking into account the competition he played against helped to temper the overall expectations to a realistic level for most smart fans.
When we talk about Tzolis, this is absolutely something we must keep in mind as well.
For the rest of the stats here, I am going to use his Belgian League stats plus his numbers from the Champions League. At the end here we will explore a bit more trying to adjust things for the level of competition as we sum up the final thoughts.
Tzolis for Brugge has played primarily off of the left-hand side as an inverted winger but has occasionally been flipped to play more central or as a strong side winger.
His touch and defensive actions heat map reflect this as well, with very classic left winger zones.
With Leandro Trossard who primarily played off of the left leaving for Besiktas, it doesn’t take a major leap to imagine that if Tzolis signs with Arsenal, it would be to backfill that position.
