PLAYER ANALYSIS: Donny van de Beek Scouting Report

September 17, 2020 Dev Opinion 0

Scouting Report: Analyzing our new central midfielder – the blonde Dutch Donny van de Beek!

Analytical Approach

I analyzed him using data from Wyscout, watching videos and visualized his underlying numbers radar charts to get a good understanding of him.

Through this analysis, we will be able to analyze van de Beek’s style of play, the quality of player he is, and how he can fit into our team.

First, I compared him to Pogba & Bruno to get an idea of his style & how he compares to them. I calculated the percentiles considering all central midfielders who played at least 1000 minutes in the Eredivisie + Big 5 Leagues.

Player Overview

Donny van de Beek is a versatile player who’s played as a #6, #8 and #10. However, he’s a player who’s more offensive/attacking adept at finding pockets of space, especially high up the pitch. He’s not really a #6 and his stats seem to pass the eye test & back this up.

He’s more like Bruno than Pogba but is quite different from Bruno, too. He excels more at finding space for himself and making smart movements off-the-ball.

Donny van de Beek operates heavily on the right side of the pitch whereas Pogba does not. This could be another added benefit in terms of squad depth & flexible options. This heat map from Wyscout shows the area that van de Beek covers:

Then- as I’ve also watched him play a bit, gone through some analysis pieces & clips I felt he is quite similar to David Silva. So, I compared him to David Silva & can see that they indeed are fairly similar players.

By this I mean to say & show that he is stylistically similar to David Silva, not that he’s as good as him. However, one area where Donny isn’t similar to Silva is putting in through balls & passing between the lines.