Is Hojlund actually worth it for Man Utd?

foreign it's no secret that Manchester United are in the market for a number nine and when you're trying to compete at the elite level that means you're going to end up spending more than 100 million pounds on a player but they clearly don't have the money available right now and so in the meantime they've been linked with Rasmus hoyland of Atalanta for fees between 50 and 70 million pounds now that is still a lot of money which raises the question is hoyland actually worth it for Man United but in order to talk about the worth of a play we have to think about what they would offer on the pitch so let's have a think about what Rasmus Holland brings to Manchester United Eric tenha wants his number nine to do a few very specific things the first thing is pinning center-backs so on the ball in front of me this is a hypothetical Manchester United 11. this is how they set up under Eric tanhaag here is the striker now what he wants the striker to do is to operate around the center-backs and actually manipulate the position that they're in that's what I mean when I say pinning the center-backs now there's a number of different ways that you can do that one way that you can do that is by playing off the shoulder of the last man so if the opposition back line is quite High you want your Striker to be in this sort of area ready for the ball over the top and Holland is perfect in these scenarios because he has a load of pace he's able to get in behind and get into these 1v1 situations with goalkeepers but of course pinning isn't just about exploiting space in behind it's also about creating space for your teammates or what Eric tenhog will want from his number nine is for them to get into the box drag center backs with them and then you're opening up a huge amount of space here on the edge of the D and when you have players like Erickson Mason Mount Bruno Fernandez in these spaces they can be really productive there as well now at Atalanta hoyland has been a bit of a channel Runner that means that he likes to get into these sorts of areas that's because Atalanta require a direct attacking team so it often means that he can be quite isolated around the opposition goal so he will often find the spaces out wide hold the ball up then wait for his teammates to get into the box to be able to play them in for Manchester United this would be a bit of a problem because he is the focal point of this attack so if he does move into these wide areas there's no one in the Box to hit but it's important to remember that that's probably a team playstyle issue because although Manchester United are also quite a direct attacking team they have really Elite Wingers you can play in those wide areas and do a lot of that work me meaning that hoyland can focus his attention in the central spaces and that's important because the second thing that Eric ten hog wants from his Striker is the ability to do Hold Up play now this can happen in a number of different ways last season we saw man united using the striker as a hold of option from the back so if they were having trouble in build up they could get the ball long and if you have a player like that vague host in that instance who can bring your teammates into play then you've been able to progress the ball down the field quite nicely but it's also important for the man united Striker to do Hold Up play in settled possession so if the midfielders have the ball the ability to play the ball to the striker who could be maybe really tightly marked by a center-back but who can then play these little passes into teammates so that they can progress the ball through the holes in the defense that's really important too and again Highlander would be perfect for this because he has the physicality to be able to hold up opposition players and also has the technical ability to be able to bring his teammates in now he is sometimes a little bit too reliant on his physicality and he can sometimes lack a bit of the technicality as well but these are things that you would hope that a player as young as Holland is only 20 years old remember will be able to develop in time which brings us to the final aspect of what Eric 10 Hogg wants from his number nine and that is for his number nine to be a gold threat Manchester United need a striker who's going to operate around the Box he's going to get a lot of chances and is going to score a lot of goals now we've already said that hoyland is really good at getting in behind defenses and scoring goals in that way so the transitional side of the game is no problem whatsoever but when you're a team like Manchester United you do come up against a lot of teams who are going to sit deep in a low block and just make it really really hard for Manchester United to do anything around the box they're going to try and overload in these areas and that does mean that if you have players like Bruno Fernandez or Christian Erickson playing sitting in these half spaces and looking to flight the ball in that you need to have a striker who is going to be clinical in these situations and that is a question with hoyland because he hasn't played for a team where that's really been an issue but the most important thing here is goal scoring Manchester United need a number nine who is going to get a lot of shots and a lot of gold so let's dig into the data to see what hoyland offers so this is hoyland's shop map in Syria last season for Atalanta and it's worth noting from the off that this is only 1800 minutes worth of playing time before hoyland that's around 20 games in total so if you extended these figures across a full 38 Game season you'd be expecting hoyland to get closer to 16 goals in total that just by way of context but beyond that we can see lots of nice things about this shop map one of the things to notice is how high his expected goals per shot is that's a figure of around 0.18 that means that you're expecting him to score from one in about every five shots and the reason for that the reason why this is such a high figure is because you can see his shot locations are really good he's only got three shots from outside the box All Season that means he's taking shots closer to goal that means he's more likely to finish but it is also worth noting that this shot map doesn't tell us what kind of chances were created in each instance we can't see if it's a crowded box or whether or not these are chances generated in transition and hoyland's goal scoring numbers show up really nicely against his peers as well so this is a chart which shows all of the under 23 forwards with 900 plus minutes who played in the top five European leagues last season now the way to understand this graph is that anyone above hoyland is anyone who is scoring at a higher rate of goals per 90 minutes than him this season than anyone to the right of him is anyone who is putting up better XG than him per 90 minutes as well so the first thing to notice is that his actual goals are tracking his expected goals that means that you're getting a good rate of return from him as a striker but then if we look at the players who are doing better than him in terms of the expected goal figures a lot of good teams are showing up so we've got Anthony fatty at Barcelona Rodrigo at Madrid we've got my Coco at Dortmund and then erling Holland at Manchester City these are all very good teams but then we've got Rasmus hoyland playing for Atalanta a team who aren't guaranteed to get Champions League football every season and he's competing with these sorts of players so that's a really good sign as well but if we compare Rasmus oil into another Elite Striker that Manchester United have been linked with this window we can start seeing why the valuations between him and that Striker are so different so on the board here we've got Victor Osmond's Pizza chart from last season compared to Erasmus hoyland's chart from the same time period and the big thing that stands out for me is this blue area here which we can see is the attacking quadrant of the chart and the specific metric that stands out here is shot volume so we've got Victor awesome in here with a shot volume percentile of 99 on this chart compared to only 53 from Rasmus hoyland now if you prefer the raw figures ossimon is pulling up around 4.6 shots per 90 minutes and hoyland is only putting up 2.6 shots why is this important well more shot volume equals more goals Victor osserman got 26 goals in Syria last season which is 10 goals more than we speculated Highland would have got if he'd have played all 38 games now of course it is worth remembering that A team's playstyle does have an impact on a player's statistical profile victorman played as an off-the-shoulder Striker for Napoli who won the league whereas Rasmus Holland was playing a lot more as a link up hold up player for Atalanta and we can see that here is link up play volume is much higher than osserman so he is offering an upside outside of pure goal scoring but as we said Manchester United need a player who can score a lot of goals that is why you spend 100 million pounds on Victor osserman and you spend much less on Rasmus hoyland now we're already getting into the realm of how Manchester United might think about the value of a player but before we go any further I just want to give you two caveats the first one is that player valuation is nothing more than what a Club is willing to pay for a player so there's a sense in which this is entirely speculative the second thing to say is that we don't know any of the exact figures here and so what we're going to do from here on in is entirely hypothetical so let's start off with a question what are a club actually paying for when they buy a player they're actually paying for the right to play that player for the whole length of their contract and so if we're thinking about a player's fee we have to think about it in terms of that contract so let's say that Manchester United are going to pay 50 million pounds for hoyland and they're going to give him a five-year contract that means that each year they're valuing him at about 10 million pounds so I've got that on the screen in front of me here this is Rasmus hoyland if he costs 50 million pounds over a five-year contract you can see each year he's costing Manchester United 10 million pounds and this is the way that football clubs account for the values of their players in their books this is actually a process called amortization you may have heard of it now Victor osserman is going to cost Manchester United more so let's speculate that they spend 100 million pounds on him which I think is the best case scenario with Victor osserman and they gave him a five-year contract now his yearly value is accounted at 20 million pounds because he costs twice as much as hoyland but of course it's not just the transfer fee that goes into what a player costs because wages are really important as well they have become increasingly important as players have been paid more and more so it's impossible now to think about the value of the player without thinking about the wage of that player as well now as we've already said hoyland plays for Atalanta in Serie app they are a Champions League challenging side but they actually have a mid-table wage budget ever very low wage budget for their output and on top of this Holland was signed as a young player from the Austrian Bundesliga and so it's rumored that his wage packet is only around 10 000 Euros per week which is very low indeed now this is really good for Manchester United because that means that they can pay him a much lower wage than they would be paying to Victor osserman so let's imagine that Manchester United are able to agree a wage of around 50 000 pounds per week that means his yearly wage is around 2.6 million pounds so if we add that to the graph here we can see that his value doesn't actually jump up a huge amount before Manchester United on the other hand Victor osserman is being signed as an elite Striker and so would expect Elite wages and so what I've done here is I've added his wage at around 250 000 pounds a week because that's in line with Manchester United's wage structure but as you can see from the graph that means that you're adding a huge amount more onto his value that's 13 million pounds a year more which is around what you're paying hoyland in total including his fee and if you want to quiver with the values I've thrown out then I've made another graph here which shows you what would happen if Holland was on a hundred thousand pounds a week and if Osman was only on two hundred thousand now as you can see even in this unlikely scenario hoyland is still only costing Manchester United half of what Osman would be costing now one of the benefits for Manchester United of hoyland having a lower wage is that it means that they can front load the initial fee if they want so what I've done in this chart is I've tweaked hoyland's transfer fee so that Manchester United are now paying 75 million for him amortized over a five-year contract and so as you can see even adding 25 5 million pounds to the initial transfer fee doesn't make a huge difference because that 25 million pounds gets spread out over the course of a five-year contract and so hoyland is still much cheaper on an annual basis for Manchester United than Osman would be and so the big question for Manchester United is how do you account for this Gap in value between how much it would cost to have osserman and how much it would cost to have hoyland in terms of what they're going to bring to the team how they're going to have a rate of return on the field but it's important to consider as well that we're not just considering the difference between Osmond and hoyland we need to also remember that Manchester United only have one number nine that is Anthony martial and he barely played for Manchester United last season so we need to consider the difference between hoyland and no Striker at all and how can we think about rated return on the field well let's have a think about Champions League prize money so on the ball in front of me I've got the Champions League prize money from last season let me just walk you through it because this is quite a complicated table but in this column here we have the amount of money that you get from each stage so if you get into the group stages you already get 15 million euros to play with if you get draw in the group stages you get around a million pounds if you get a win in the group stages you get around three million pounds so in this hypothetical here if a team gets three wins and three draws in the group stages they get the 15 million pounds for getting into the group stages and then they get up to 26 million pounds then for getting three wins and three draws in the group stages that would also mean that they would get through to the next stage likely and that would give them another 10 million pounds here all of which means that if you get through to the final of the Champions League you're looking at getting a prize money return of between 70 and 85 million Euros which is a huge amount of money now when it comes to a player like Victor osserman who commands really high fees you look at this table and you can start understanding how clubs might justify paying that kind of money for him because he can be the difference between getting to a Champions League final or not but what about Rasmus hoyland how can we think about his value in these sorts of terms well if we go back to the original graph that I put up we estimated that hoyland would cost Manchester United around 13 million pounds a year including his transfer fee and wages across the five years of his country tracked now if we go back to the Champions League prize money table we can see that even if a team just gets to the Champions League they're going to pick up around 15 million euros in prize money which is around the same sort of fee that we speculated Manchester United will be paying per year for hoyland over the course of a five-year contract which means that if Poland can contribute to Manchester United getting regular top four finishes getting through to the Champions League he's already accruing back some of his fee per season in prize money now of course hoyland isn't going to be the difference between Manchester United getting champions league and not but he could be the difference between them getting from the round of 16 to the quarterfinals if he scores a couple of goals that make that difference could be the case that Manchester United pick up an extra 10 million euros and again that's a very concrete way of understanding how hoyland can contribute to his own fee and add a rate of return on the field and so the difference between Victor osserman and Rasmus hoyland is that the stakes are so much lower for hoyland he doesn't have to win the Champions League in order to justify his inclusion in Manchester United's wage structure all he has to do is score some important goals earlier on in in the competition and again this is a really good argument for Manchester United picking Holland over nobody because it won't take that much for him to recoup his value just a few performances here and there in the Premier League and the Champions League now if you need more convincing about hoyland offering value to Manchester United we just need to have a little think about David de Gea now David de Hayes recently announced that he is leaving Manchester United he's been at the club since 2011 and they signed him for a fee of around 19 million pounds all those years ago and that means that since then most of his transfer value has been amortized away into nothing so he's basically just being paid a wage but it was a very big wage there was obviously those negotiations with the club to try and bring that wage down but what I thought I would do is compare the speculated value that we'd say hoyland would cost over five years with the value that David de Haye would have cost if his wage structure had stayed exactly the same and as you can see David Haye was earning by the end around 19.5 million pounds a year which is well above the fee that Manchester United will be paying for hoyland over the course of that five-year period and also his wages as well so by removing David de Gea from their wage structure they've actually allowed space for another player to come in like hoyland saving money in the process now obviously Manchester United do need to bring in a new goalkeeper so a lot of this money will go towards bringing in that player but the overall point here is if you compare hoyland's fee and wages per year against the sort of wage packets that Manchester United are offering players then you can see that hoyland isn't adding a huge amount to their yearly budget now all the arguments I've made today have operated on the assumption that Rasmus hoyland doesn't increase in value if that is the case then Manchester United are quids in because they probably have an elite Striker on their hands and he's worth a lot of money but because his wages are lower the risk is much lower for Manchester United which means they can afford to absorb the initial fee without a huge rate of return all of which means Rasmus hoyland is absolutely worth it for Manchester United if you like this video please consider subscribing to the channel the athletic is home to some of the world's best sports journalists including journalists dedicated to each Premier League team so every fan gets the coverage they deserve not just the big clubs and you can try it for free now for 30 days see the link in the description

Channel: Tifo IRL

Views: 384,522

Keywords: Tifo, tifo football, tifo irl, tifo in real life, football, irl

Id: IpubwBElZtk

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/thoseion]

TL;DW - "Yes" is the answer they give at the end.

[u/OrdinaryOrder]

The sadness when you click on a TIFO video and is not Carl Anka.

[u/_nosfa]

This numbers are with assumption of 50k/week salary. Idk about that

[u/tungowiii]

I swear I saw this post before

[u/ImOnlyChasingSafety]

Worth is relative but with the value of strikers skyrocketing maybe it is time we tried to go for someone promising before they skyrocket above 100m like so many strikers are being priced now. It remains to be seen whether Hojlund can live up to the hype but in terms of profile he looks to fit the bill, plus hes a United fan.

[u/DivineKidd]

Can we get a not carl anka tag for these?

[u/sharklight-22]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I found the comparison to be quite absurd tbh. It’s like comparing between Erling Haaland and Darwin Nunez(assuming they were playing in the same league).Yes, Darwin is a much cheaper talented resource as compared to proven generational striker in Haaland, both in terms of transfer fee and the salary paid, but the overall impact Haaland had on City is just unbelievable.I mean how can you really amortise his value over 5 yrs period, when he proved to be extremely value for money in the first year itself.Saying that, it doesn’t mean Osimhen will have the same impact for as that of the Robot, but it really doesn’t make much sense comparing apples to oranges to prove your point

[u/Kelvinator3000]

So I assume the other was taken down because it didn't submit it as a link.

Similar videos on Onana have been allowed and I feel something like this would get lost in Daily discussion or Transfer Round-up Discussion.

Though, if this is eventually taken down, but you want to still discuss, a user already posted the video in daily discussion with his own addition views on Hojlund here

[u/Comessuer]

Opened video...saw it wasn't JJ...closed video