3 different kinds of fun players to watch in Europa League today

This is the club where the cool people hang out. The UEFA Europa League, the competition all the real football sickos know is the most interesting one around. It combines easy accessibility with a bunch of cool players that most of your friends don’t know about yet.

I’ll be watching games for players I think could make a move to bigger leagues or richer clubs come this summer… or who absolutely won’t, but deserve some love anyway. Here are a bunch of them, put into 3 different categories:

Category 1: No Shit, Sherlock

If you read this newsletter or just generally follow European football, you already know that these guys are very good players who are likely to make transfers to richer clubs this summer. I am not pretending to be the smartest person in the room by mentioning these names, but we should still talk about them.

Victor Osimhen, Galatasaray

Personally, I think the best way that Napoli could have handled Victor Osimhen would have been not pissing him off by posting racist memes about him. But the second best way they could have handled him is what they did, loaning him out to pump his numbers instead of accepting a cut-rate bid at the last minute.

A rich club is going to pay €70m+ in the summer and be very happy to do so.

Rayan Cherki, Lyon

Another instance where it was pretty easy to avoid any problems. If you are the owner of a football club, simply do not send other people text messages where you call your own players nasty names.

Cherki has been supposedly close to transfers that were cancelled last minute two windows in a row. But he’s having the best season of his career, and Lyon are in serious financial peril, so it’s almost certain to happen for real this coming summer.

He does absolutely no work defensively and is rumoured to have a crummy attitude, but there aren’t a bunch of 21-year-olds who are this productive at both dribbling and passing just lying around. I hope he goes somewhere fun.

Brian Brobbey, Ajax

Brobbey was linked to West Ham this window, but they ultimately picked up Evan Ferguson from Brighton. Ajax strikers are always huge stat farmers, so buyer beware, but Brobbey has a physical profile that suggests he can still be productive in a team that has less of the ball and plays more direct. I think West Ham would have been a perfect landing spot for him, actually.

Category 2: No one’s buying, but deserving of acknowledgement

These guys are older or have already made the move to a big European league, then returned to a less wealthy club. They’re not going to be big transfer targets in the summer. But they’re having great Europa League campaigns that I wanted to mention.

Ayoub El Kaabi, Olympiacos

The competition’s top scorer is a 31-year-old who’s bounced around China, Qatar and Turkey, as well as his home country, before landing in Greece. He’s doing that despite missing two penalties. Yeah, he’s overperforming xG due to scoring a couple 20-yard bangers, but this is still a very nice shot chart. What a great late career surge.

Barnabás Varga, Ferencváros

Speaking of late career surges, Barnabás Varga was playing amateur ball until his mid-20s, and didn’t establish himself as one of the top strikers in Hungary until he hit 30 years old.
He’s a monster in the air despite being just 5’11” (181cm). A guy who nearly gave up on football is now a star in the Europa League and playing regularly for his national team, that rocks!

Patrick Berg, Bodø/Glimt

Basically the entire Bodø/Glimt squad is guys who went abroad for one year, decided it sucked, and returned home. The result is this club from fairly far northern Norway has a bunch of prime age guys with big league experience. Their captain Patrick Berg is one of them, and he’s been one of the best players in the competition. He’s been an elite defensive holding midfielder, and he’s got 3 assists too.

Category 3: This is what you came for

OK, here are the younger guys who have not yet made a big move in their careers and who will be on the radars of richer clubs. All of them have put in big performances in the Europa League, but have some kind of minor red flag that will give teams pause.

Daan Rots, FC Twente

Rots is a Twente youth product who had a breakout season during the last campaign, and has taken a step forward in the Eredivisie this year. He’s actually not been anywhere near as consistent of a shooter or passer in the Europa League as he is domestically, but a much more productive dribbler.

At 23, and after 4 seasons as a first team regular for Twente, he and the club might feel like it’s the right time for him to make a big move. If I was a sporting director and my scout liked him, I’d ask why they think his numbers are so variable between Eredivise and Europa League.

Charles Vanhoutte, Union Saint-Gilloise

USG have a bunch of weird profile dudes. If you’re not familiar with the club, they were promoted to the first division of Belgian football for the first time in about 50 years a couple seasons ago, and quickly rocketed their way into European competition despite having a 9,400 seat stadium and a fairly limited budget. Though they have different owners for UEFA regulatory purposes, USG and Brighton share some investors, and presumably quite a bit of information and club philosophy.

Vanhoutte isn’t exactly young at 26, but as we have noted several times on this newsletter, the DM market is extremely jacked up. There are not a lot of them who can win the ball at high rates and pass well, so he’s going to be on a lot of clubs’ radars.

Aral Şimşir, FC Midtjylland

Midtjylland mentioned! I promise we’re not contractually obligated. Anyway, Şimşir is putting up some nutty passing numbers both in the Europa League and domestically. The big red flag is that he’s not beating guys on the dribble at EL level the same way he is in Denmark, so that’s a big thing to keep an eye out for.

Ruben van Bommel, AZ Alkmaar

Small sample size alert 🚨 weewoo weewoo. But you see that kind of shot value and go “hmm, that’s interesting.” Putting up numbers like that in limited minutes does not necessarily mean a player is good, but it probably means you should play him more to see if he can do that all the time. Sub effects are crazy, but the only way to find out if a guy is farming stats from sub effects or if he’s actually good is to start him.

Speaking of…

Orri Óskarsson, Real Sociedad

Holy sub effects, Batman. Óskarsson has been coming off the bench a lot and tired center backs do not enjoy facing this super athletic dude who can just run his face off for 30 minutes.

But he started really slow at Real Sociedad after making a €20m move from Copenhagen, and has recently gotten hot. They’ll probably want to ramp up his playing time over the next season to see if they can extract maximum value for him rather than cashing out this coming summer, but richer clubs will be keeping an eye on him.

Moussa N'Diaye, Anderlecht

Young left back who can dribble, wins a lot of interceptions, and progresses the ball into the final third? Yeah, I’d be asking a scout to take a closer look. N'Diaye spent some time at Barca B before making the move to Anderlecht, and looks like that progression has been very good for his career.

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