Soft-launch of the podcast.
Members can view all the prediction data mentioned on the main data page here.
I expect Saka to take another step forward in his production this year. It's a relatively hard first 6 for Arsenal but he still comes up 3rd in my predicted goal involvement tables.
I am throwing Solanke in here as I was quite disappointed to see a lot of the negative takes on him after he was linked to Tottenham. In my opinion, they ignore his most valuable trait: he plays a *lot* of football. People often leave this out when discussing good/great strikers. A ‘good’ striker who is on the pitch the whole season is then a ‘great’ striker (see also Ollie Watkins). The above radar is based on 3325 minutes played. He has played 13,614 minutes over the past 4 seasons.
Mildly hot take? The Füllkrug deal is overall quite a bad bit of business. ~29m Euro fee + multi-year contract for a 31-year-old is the obvious part, but I'm also not convinced his attacking output (particularly goals) will transfer well to the PL. I do think his link-up play will benefit those around him and I can perhaps get on board with some of the team-specific production arguments (e.g. set-pieces)… but overall Fullkrug produces very average output and is an average finisher. Markets are projecting 11-12.5 goals for him this season in the PL. I would probably be happy taking that under on that as it probably requires a combination of 3000+ minutes with very little production level drop and/or loadsa penalties.
@SnakeFpl on Twitter watched a lot of Zirkzee last year at Bologna and said that he is more of a creative type forward than a goalscoring forward, someone who likes to drop deep, and his quality of link-up play and creative intelligence should make everyone around him better.
I have two thoughts on this signing: (1) I don’t think Man United need another forward who doesn’t shoot much (it seems United are banking on Hojlund upping his shot numbers)… that seems to be the case:
Ten Hag: “Joshua Zirkzee has skills that we didn't have yet in this team. Such as his hold up play, creativity, dribbling. We didn't have this skillset yet in the striker position. Joshua Zirkzee & Rasmus Hojlund can play together. They compliment each other.”
A small counter-argument is that even though he does not shoot much, he does seem to be an above-average finisher (despite the small sample size because he doesn’t shoot much!).
(2) I agree that he will make those around him better, but conversely, he seems like the kind of player who is only worth it if he is already surrounded by a minimum-viable level of quality (which I am not sure he is at United).
