The idea behind the series of articles that will follow
Some days after having watched the EURO 2020 Final, I was contemplating what should be our farewell to the competition. I had already decided that I was not interested in writing an analysis of the Final and instead I believed that it would be more interesting to focus on the best performers. After a discussion with Bill, the idea of a series of articles focused on the players’ statistical breakdown was born. As per usual I will write the articles and Bill will provide the graphs.
The next step was to establish a means of categorizing the players and what best to do than focus on every position of the field. Every position? Well that is not easy and assigning players to all these different positions would become boring to the readers. Just imagine that we would have had to distinguish a inside forward from a winger and a full back from a wing back. We could even go further to separate a defensive midfielder focused on creation and playmaking to one focused on winning the ball and defending, or one dropping as a third defender to one that has a balanced repertoire and loves to advance forward with or without the ball resembling to a box to box midfielder while not being one.
For example, try to analyse Modric, Kante, Busquets, and Hojbjerg‘s takes on the defensive midfielder’s role and you will find out how easy it is to get lost in the countless positions in modern football.
Obviously we thought that no-one would like us to focus on these finer details that make every role available for a positional play so unique and necessary. Let alone the disagreements that could arise depending on where we stand tactically and the individual levels of knowledge of the game.
What I decided was that we have to go back to basics. Every single one of us would agree that there are some broad positions that engulf many different roles and styles of play. YES these are not just flavour and matter greatly as they have earned the right to be unique positions BUT they are still positioned in the same areas of the field at least on paper. Therefore, I will provide some necessary positional depth and analysis in every article but we will use definitions of positions that are broad and inclusive.
So buckle up and enjoy the ride, the following seven are the positions we will present to you.
- Goalkeepers
- Full Backs
- Central Defenders
- Central Midfielders
- Attacking Midfielders
- Wingers
- Strikers
These are the positions we will present in a series of seven articles full on easy to understand statistics, cool graphs, and sneaky comments.
Additional Content
We all love to watch young talent impress, who can resist to the idea of following a world class player on the making from a young age? Consequently, every article will have a section for the u21 player that impressed and more promising talents. We hope that you will like this idea as much as we did. Some of the players that you should expect to feature are Pedri, Saka, Damsgaard, Isak, and Doku among others.
But I won’t stop to that! What is even better than reflecting on young talents’ potential during summer? Everyone’s beloved TRANSFERS. It goes without saying that I love transfer speculations and every Football Manager game since it was not even named FM. Therefore, I will also have a section of my own speculative take on the players that could potentially be involved in a transfer following their EURO 2020 performance. Some of the players that could potentially feature are Maehle, Doku, Locatelli, Damsgaard, Guerreiro, Caleta-Car, and Malen among others.
I hope that you will enjoy what we have prepared for you and I would love to hear from you. Make comments about the players you liked, make suggestions for future articles, humour us, invite friends to the discussion and don’t forget to follow us in our social media accounts.
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