Transfer Profiles: Finding a press-resistant central midfielder
As the season comes to an end and the opening of the transfer window looms, I’m (Luke McCabe, Head of Grading at PFF FC) doing the work to start assembling a team. In this series, I’m going to be looking at how a club can find the perfect player that fits the role they're looking for by using a combination of PFF FC’s metrics and grades. I’m looking to create a squad for my newly promoted Premier League side and thankfully - money is no object, within reason. When looking for the striker that’s going to lead my line, understandably I may struggle to lure Erling Haaland away from Manchester City, but he’ll probably be on my wish list anyway.
Finding a Central Midfielder
The first position I’m looking to find is a centre-midfielder. When you look at the dominant Manchester City team that’s won four Premier League titles in a row, who stands out as the key player? Haaland? His predecessor Aguero? Soon to depart Kevin De Bruyne? I’d argue that Rodri has been the player Pep Guardiola built the team around, underlined by their atrocious run of form earlier this year after he was ruled out for most, if not all, of the season with an ACL injury. So, that’s where I’m going to start.
In terms of the attributes of the role I’m looking to fill, I want a centre-midfielder that’s good under pressure but is also going to look to progress the ball upfield, rather than just hold it and play it back into our own half.
Looking at the full list of every midfielder who’s played at least 100 passes this season, the average passing under pressure grade is 72.1 and the average percentage of line-breaking pass attempts is 13%. Here is a shortlist of all the players who are above average at both.
The standouts here are Youri Tielemans and Bruno Guimaraes. Both have exceptional passing grades when being put under pressure by the opposition and around one in five of their passes look to break a line in the opponent’s formation to move the ball forward. Adam Wharton is also an interesting name on the list. He still has an excellent under-pressure passing grade but looks to break a line 25% of the time. His Palace teammate Will Hughes is probably the other name that immediately jumps out with a 80.0 grade and 20% of his passes being attempted line-breaks.
Now I’ve got a good idea of the kind of player I’m looking for, I want to get more specific to narrow my shortlist down. My new team is going to try and play attacking possession football so I’m expecting us to come up against a lot of low-blocks from teams in the bottom half of the table. That means I’m expecting this player to be sitting 30-35 yards away from goal a lot of the time as we move the ball around in an attempt to find a way to break that block down. As I’m looking for a player who I want to be on the front foot more often rather than being passive I’m going to search for a player who has the ability and confidence to play incisive passes into the tight areas around and inside the box.
To do this I’m going to take the players I’ve previously shortlisted and look at how many times they’ve played passes into a dangerous area. We classify dangerous areas as passes just outside the top of the box, passes behind the defensive line or passes that create a clear chance. Essentially it’s passes that either create an opportunity or passes that are played into an area that has a high likelihood of the next action, be it a pass or dribble, creating an opportunity.
This immediately helps me narrow down the list into players I definitely want to consider and players that don’t exactly fit the mold of what I’m looking for. Wolves’ Andre originally looked like a promising target with his decent LB attempted % and excellent passing under pressure grade, but given only 2.3% of his passes are played into a dangerous area he’s not as aggressive a player as I’d want to fill the role in my team. 5% is the average percentage of passes played into a dangerous area by centre-midfielders. I’d probably set Tielemans as the cut off and end my pursuit of anybody below him in this table for now. Romeo Lavia and Carlos Soler only just sit above average but their passing grades don’t compare to some of the players above. However, they would make good back up options after I’ve been through my other targets.
This leaves me with a final shortlist of 9 players:
The Shortlist
Bruno Guimarães and Adam Wharton pull away as the two key targets, excelling in each of the criteria I’ve set for the perfect midfielder for my system. However, with Newcastle looking set for a return to the Champions League in 2025-2026 Guimarães looks set to stay. Adam Wharton’s meteoric rise since signing from Blackburn just twelve months ago would make him hard to pry away from Crystal Palace for anything other than an extremely large transfer fee, especially considering their £18m investment in him. The most interesting name for a realistic target might be Brighton’s Yasin Ayari. The Swedish international fits the criteria I’ve set, is only 21 years old and has possibly been outshone by his midfield colleague Carlos Baleba this season. Will Hughes is also a name I’d still be looking at given his grade and attempted LB%.
For one final check of the player I want to target, I want to make sure they’re a solid tackler. Even though we want to play a possession based style of football, I know as a newly promoted team we won’t be able to dominate 60%-70% of possession every week. I need my centre-midfielder to be able to do the dirty work in the middle to stop attacks and win the ball back. In 2022-2023 Rodri had a 75.0 tacking grade and in 2023-2024 had a 68.5 which put him in the 66th percentile last season, so that’s the type of standard I’m looking for.
Final Decision
As you can see Adam Wharton continues to be the standout player, in the 91st percentile of qualified midfielders (minimum 30 tackles). This also means I’ll probably stop my pursuit of Ryan Christie and Will Hughes as alternative targets who’ve had poor seasons in the tackling department, ranking in the bottom 15%. However, my main realistic target Yasin Ayari holds his own ranking in the 75th percentile of midfielders in this attribute and looks like he can do every job that I’m going to ask of him. He also has a 70.6 tackle resistance grade which puts him in the 63rd percentile of players there.
So, there we have it. Welcome to the club our new press-resistant, line-breaking, dogged centre-midfielder, Yasin Ayari.
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