5 guys I didn't realize were balling like that

Sometimes I just don’t realize a player or team I’d stopped paying close attention to has quietly turned things around. This doesn’t happen to you of course, you have no job or classes or spouse or children or other hobbies, and you can mainline 80 hours of football matches per week directly into your veins.

But I am a mere mortal, and occasionally think “I don’t need to watch the whole Southampton game, the highlights and a match report are fine.” This laziness has cost me, as I now look at the next radar below and wonder what the hell I’ve been missing.

We’ll do that 4 more times after that too. All of the stats below are since January 1, since I wanted to look for guys who have performed better recently.

Taylor Harwood-Bellis, Southampton

While playing on perhaps the worst Premier League team of all time, Taylor Harwood-Bellis is putting up god mode stats. To be fair, he’s being given a ton of opportunities to make important defensive actions, on account of his team being under pressure all the time, but he’s making the plays. He’s also passing very well out of pressure.

Southampton’s probably going to be in a good position to yo-yo, because their handful of big sales will be good enough that they don’t need to accept cut price deals for anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Harwood-Bellis got flipped for more than the £20m they paid for him.

Kevin Schade, Brentford

Last season, Schade suffered an adductor injury that prevented him from making a big impact after becoming Brentford’s club record signing. He started a bit slow this year as well, but he’s starting to look like much more of an impact attacker now. He scored a hat trick against Leicester in November, and his shooting numbers have been slowly creeping up all year.

With Bryan Mbeumo likely on his way out this summer, Brentford will be counting on Schade to take another big step forward.

Lucas Bergvall, Tottenham Hotspur

Bergvall arrived from Sweden as a highly touted attacking midfielder, but Spurs’ injury issues have led to him trying out a deeper role recently. And it looks like Lucas might be a bit of a ball-winning monster?

He’ll need to a) do this consistently, b) improve his passing from deep by a lot to become Tottenham’s long-term solution in the No. 6 role, but the xDawg is off the charts here.

Dean Henderson, Crystal Palace

So I started this exercise by filtering for guys who were 25 and younger, and there were… no goalkeepers. That’s mildly alarming for the future of the English national team. But I kept bumping up the years, and hey, Dean Henderson!

Crystal Palace has been a much better team since the new year, and a big part of that is having one of the best performing goalkeepers in the league. Henderson doesn’t love coming off his line, but he also doesn’t do anything stupid, and his more conservative style is working well for Palace.

Jørgen Strand Larsen, Wolverhampton Wanderers

I had to really stretch to find a striker worth including in here, not gonna lie. The really good No. 9s in the Premier League are just the guys you think of off the top of your head. But Strand Larson has an equal amount of xG and xG assisted per 90 since January 1 (0.4), and he’s combining that with excellent pressing output and shot selection.

With Wolves likely staying up and Matheus Cunha likely requesting to be sold, I think it’s more likely than not that Strand Larson has his £25m purchase option executed.

—KM

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