Lisandro, Vitinha and De Ketelaere: the art (and science) of recruitment
Lisandro, Vitinha and De Ketelaere: the art (and science) of recruitment
We scout Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands in search of philosophical answers.
If England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy possess Europe’s Big Five Leagues, it’s the next tier - those leagues I humbly denote ‘The Next Three’ - which are growing in importance to modern scouting.
Those are the leagues of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal. Big clubs spend extraordinary amounts of money shopping from The Next Three, not just to acquire homegrown talent from very established footballing powerhouses, but also to sign ‘bridge talent’ — players who arrive for a connecting flight on their way to Europe’s elite.
Players who broke through in these leagues have been hugely influential in the top five, European competitions, and international tournaments over the past 12 months. Think Jérémy Doku, Victor Boniface, and Victor Osimhen from the Belgian Pro League; Mohammed Kudus, Cody Gakpo, and Lisandro Martínez from the Eredivisie; and of course Bruno Fernandes, Luis Díaz, and Vitinha from the Liga Portugal.
And that’s just scratching the surface. Clubs from The Next Three are relentlessly pumping talent into Europe’s top five leagues.
I want to explore what has made past transfers from these leagues work, and what they can tell us about what might work in the future. I’ve picked out one defender, one midfielder, and one forward, each transferring from a different The Next Three league to a different top five league, to see what we can learn.
The forward is Charles De Ketelaere, who didn’t quite ‘pop’ after his initial move from Brugge to Milan in the summer of 2023, but last year played a key role in Atalanta’s Europa League winning side after leaving Milan behind.
In midfield, we’re going to take a look at Vitinha, a player who struggled for minutes at Wolverhampton Wanderers but is now the heartbeat of Paris Saint-Germain.
And in defence I’ve chosen Lisandro Martínez who, despite initial criticism of apparently being too small for a Premier League defender, has established himself as one of the league’s better centre-backs.
Why have these players worked, specifically? What did scouts notice in their profiles to be confident they’d translate across leagues? And how can tomorrow’s scouts use this knowledge as they survey The Next Three for their own future purchases?
Let’s dig into these questions and see what we learn about the art - or should I say science? - of modern recruitment.
In this analytical epic:
Charles De Ketelaere: how the Belgian became a star in Serie A
Lisandro Martínez: what he’s brought from Ajax to Manchester United, and the bits he hasn’t
Vitinha: why a massive technical ceiling has seen him blossom at Paris Saint-Germain
THE FLOATING FORWARD
Charles De Ketelaere is a fascinating footballer. He’s big and moves nicely, but he’s not really a nine. He’s quite fast and skilful, but he’s not really a winger, either.
He’s a 6’4” combo-forward. Not a ten, a nine, or even what the Italians would call a trequartista, who traditionally played a creative role off the main forward - De Ketelaere is something different and more modern.
I began by investigating which positions he played in the league with Brugge. Of 36 matches played of 60 or more minutes, he played 24 times as a forward, seven times as an (attacking) midfielder, four times out wide, and even once as a wing-back.
This was always part of CDK’s allure; he’s a ‘plug-and-play into the right system’ player, rather than someone who needs a consistent position. I would argue he needs the right system and a very distinct role.
I honed in on his nominal ‘centre-forward’ minutes in his final season with Brugge, and his unique statistical profile became evident.
Creating under pressure? Elite. Off-ball running? Extremely unconventional for a striker. Athleticism? Very mobile for his size. I’m going to save this piece from having 30+ data visuals in it by just saying — trust me.
But I will show you what he did as a creator in his last season at Belgium. This is the sort of outlier talent I made reference to in the introduction. Here are some Passing Under Pressure numbers compared to other forwards in the Belgian Pro League in 2021/22:
This is pure CDK: drop off the defensive line and into the pockets in the half-space and out wide, and be relentlessly direct as a creator.
Straight away, it becomes a little clearer why things didn’t quite click in Milan, where, rather than playing his unorthodox, roaming forward role, De Ketelaere was deploed as a static number ten.
While this might only seem like a minor change, it does have major ramifications on De Ketelaere’s effectiveness.
Hone in on the Dangerous Pass Ratio Under Pressure metric for a second. At 20.9%, his was a 96th percentile score amongst 95 midfielders in Serie A in 2022/23, but much lower than the 36.4% ratio he achieved as a forward at Brugge in 2021/22.
We can also look at the 11 times CDK played 60 minutes or more as a midfielder in the Belgian Pro League. This should give us an idea of whether team style or positional difference had the biggest impact on his output in this metric.
And the answer, of course, lies somewhere in the middle.
Let’s start with the comparison of his stats as a midfielder in both competitions first…
…and then here’s the team style comparison.
These numbers tell me there was a double-whammy hit to CDK’s output. His role clearly nerfed his impact closer to goal. Milan’s slightly less aggressive build-up style also probably played a minor role, which meant his Dangerous Pass Ratio Under Pressure as a midfielder at Milan was lower than in the same position with Club Brugge — although there were probably league effects to be considered, too.
Of course, other micro-effects can’t be discounted: form, adapting to life in a new country after a big-money transfer to one of Italy’s biggest clubs, new team-mates, a new language, lack of continuity in playing time, etc.
Underpinning it all, perhaps, was an unrealistic expectation of what CDK’s offensive output would be. He notched up 23 goal contributions in 2,000 minutes for Brugge - after the change in role, he managed just one assist in 1,100 minutes in Serie A.
The $64,000 question, then: what changed at Atalanta?
Unfortunately, we don’t have a sample size to compare midfield minutes, but what we can see is his role reverted to something more akin to what he was doing at Club Brugge: playing much closer to goal.
Almost instantly, his numbers jumped back towards his final-season output in Belgium.
In fact, his utilisation is possibly even better at Atalanta than it was in Belgium, because he is often playing off another striker, which allows him to drop off the line and get onto the ball — illustrated by the uptick in Pressures Received per 30 TIP.
Et, voilà!
Just like that, the goal contributions came flooding back: 18 in 2,000 Serie A minutes. Football is a funny sport.
CDK probably doesn’t have the off-ball running profile to a be a monster goal scorer. He doesn’t get in behind or receive in the box often. But when you pair up what he can do as a creator in the final third, with the goals he will just naturally score by playing close to goal, you can extract some crazy returns.
This all empowers Atalanta’s other attacking players, and helps to create a very synergised, dynamic, and dangerous attacking unit.
If you want to read more about what Atalanta do, I’d suggest you go read this piece I wrote during the off-season on The Five Principles of Gasperini's Atalanta:
Shameless plug, begone.
Our first lesson here in terms of portability from The Next 3 to the top five leagues is this: in many instances the move’s difficulty is overblown. CDK is a great case study in how it’s really the change of a club’s architecture, and a player’s role within it, which is more important than the change in quality.
Anyways, onto our next player…
THE BUTCHER
I am very interested in what a closer look at Lisandro Martínez will throw up. While he moved to Manchester United from Ajax alongside his coach Erik ten Hag, it’s fair to say the two club’s styles are… different.
While true, and despite a rocky first month or two, it’s universally accepted now that Martínez’s move, barring a tough run of injuries, has been a success.
So why has it been easier for him to acclimatise to Manchester United than it was for CDK in Milan?
It’s easy to deduce it’s got nothing to do with his athletic profile. He’s not an elite athletic player — that’s fine, he makes it work. What else, then? Do other indicators show us players like Martínez lean more heavily on their individual quality than the tactical function of their team?
Firstly, he is brutal ground duellist.
Yes, he gives up a bit of size, which has minor flow-on effects in his aerial work, but across the ground, his duel win rates (60%) in 2022/23 (when he last had a clean bill of health) held up with any of the centre-backs people would categorise as elite in the Premier League. In 2023/24, Virgil van Dijk notched 64%, and William Saliba 60%.
Both players hold aerial advantages over Martínez, but the little Argentine holds up superbly whenever the ball is in his zone.
Interestingly, Martínez’s ground duel win rate in his final Eredivisie season at Ajax was 68%. So he moved to the Premier League, the most athletic league in the world, and barely missed a beat.
That’s just an innate quality, and will travel with him anywhere.
Other metrics follow this exact trend, in which his output hits a gentle but nondescript speed bump with the improved quality at Premier League level.
The first is his pass completion under pressure — a vitally important attribute for any centre-back playing at the top level. At 86% in 2022/23, his completion rate was only 2.1% lower than in his final season in the Eredivisie, and ranked in the top quartile of Premier League centre-backs.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s an elite attribute, but it’s comfortably at a high Premier League level. It is very important to this United team specifically, considering how much on-ball pressure Martínez faces compared to other centre-backs in the league. In fact, only two players in a 74-player sample received more pressures per 30 TIP.
The biggest drop-off for Martínez at United has been in opportunities for him to damage as a passer. And this is the area in which the change of club, tactics and style has impacted his game most.
To be fair, some of this can be attributed to how utterly dominant Ajax were in the league in 2021/22. They scored 98 goals and conceded 19 in a 34 game season. Just look how far clear Martínez was of anyone else in this stat at the bottom of the graph above: Ratio of Passes to Runs that are Dangerous (the percentage of their passes to ALL runs that are made to dangerous runs').
He actually ranked at the 91st percentile in the Premier League with a 7.2% ratio in 2022/23. And so some drop off here was almost guaranteed - it would’ve been even if he had moved to Manchester City.
With a bit more digging, I found almost every dangerous pass Martínez completed in his final season in the Eredivisie was to a run in-behind. I was interested to figure out whether this was a league-wide trend - another example of Ajax’s dominance in that era - or simply a demonstration of what Lisandro Martínez can do in the right environment.
Comparing our two leagues for centre-back passes to dangerous runs in behind per 30 TIP, we can see a pretty big gap between the 2021/22 Eredivisie and 2022/23 Premier League.
This tells us there is more space in the Eredivisie, and more avenues for direct passes from centre-backs into the front-line to launch attacks. This is likely one of the reasons the Eredivisie has traditionally been a high-scoring league.
Ajax’s dominance also introduces some team effects. Yes, Lisandro’s obscene numbers bump up their averages (5.08 Opportunities to Pass to Dangerous Runs In Behind per 30 TIP, 1.52 attempts, 0.76 completions), but his esteemed centre-back partner Jurriën Timber also averaged above league average (1.58 opportunities, 0.27 attempts, 0.19 completions). In limited minutes, Daley Blind put up some big numbers too (2.45 opportunities, 0.55 attempts, 0.41 completions).
I think the overriding reason Lisandro’s passing numbers have taken a big dive from Ajax to Manchester United is an idea I’ve already explored in the past when profiling Kobbie Mainoo.
Manchester United are run through the boots of Bruno Fernandes. If we again look at just passes in behind, Bruno was miles clear of any other player in the Premier League in 2022/23 (7.34 opportunities to pass to dangerous runs in behind per 30 TIP, 4.04 attempts, 2.45 completions). The closest player was Philippe Coutinho at Villa (6.24 opportunities, 3.27 attempts, 1.49 completions).
A good way of breaking down this whole scenario is threefold: one, coaches make distinct choices about who they want to play the ball through in possession; two, the natural gravity of players like Bruno Fernandes means they are relentlessly drawn towards the ball; three, opposition coaches make choices in what they try to shut down.
To summarise: coaches apply a lot of direct on-ball pressure to Lisandro Martínez to negate his ability to spark quick transitions, but United’s system also doesn’t empower him to take advantage of it, with the data suggesting that United tend to funnel the ball through Fernandes instead and take risks further up the field. Some people may think this is good, some people may think this is bad — you be the judge.
These are the variables at play any time a transfer happens.
I think Martínez stands on his own two feet in the Premier League because he is a natural duellist and a secure technical player, but one could certainly argue he has more to give.
With a clean bill of health, for now, we’ll see how he develops over the course of the 2024/25 season.
PERFECT CONDITIONS
You won't find many more perfectly synergised coach-player combinations then Luis Enrique and Vitinha. But it's easy to forget that before Enrique, Vitinha arrived at Paris Saint-Germain during what many considered a middling season under Christophe Galtier. That Ligue 1 campaign saw PSG scrape the title over RC Lens by a solitary point.
Vitinha always seemed like the kind of player who would excel playing proper big club football. He was always a little small and slight, but you won’t find many more technically astute midfielders anywhere on the planet. PSG locked him down for little more than €40 million, and haven't had to wait long for the Portuguese to explode into his prime, which perfectly coincided with Enrique’s hiring.
With this case study, I'm very interested in analysing what changes from Year One to Year Two at PSG. I know what I'm going to see with his Porto numbers — they're going to be off the charts — but I think the PSG data will offer insight into how a player like this blossoms when elevated to the elite level.
It's worth remembering that a little more than 12 months before arriving at PSG, Vitinha was struggling for minutes on a season-long loan at Wolves. There’s a lesson there too. Sometimes these smaller, super technical, elite playmakers can struggle at lower mid-table Premier League teams, but would be perfect for more dominant clubs. I’ll say it again: it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of a transfer’s tactical context.
Not many people would consider Vitinha an athletic monster. However, running his data compared to his two seasons of PSG, and all the midfielders who competed in the Primeira Liga and Ligue 1 from 2021/22 to 2023/24, I was very surprised by how much he can move when called upon.
He can cover a lot of ground, he can cover it quickly with a burst of acceleration, and he can keep pushing with repeated high speed efforts. It’s not a bad arsenal to have in your back pocket. But you can see how much his game changes between playing under Sérgio Conceição to Luis Enrique. It’s not because he forgot how to run a lot, obviously, but because Enrique’s teams are very structured and positional.
Nonetheless, he still has that burst when he needs it, and it has helped him blossom into a fairly dangerous goal threat for PSG last season with his carrying through midfield and long-range shooting.
As a sidenote, I do think a decent chunk of the revision on Year One versus Year Two Vitinha at PSG is predicated on his becoming a sniper from distance. He scored nine goals in all competitions, compared to three the season before, on very similar xG totals.
His base position has also helped him get closer to goal and become more of a final-third threat under Luis Enrique. Let’s look at Vitinha’s Coming Short Runs per 30 TIP to map out how he moves much less towards his own goal to pick up possession.
Put into context, 17.6 runs is right at the top-end for midfielders in our three season Primeira Liga/Ligue 1 database, and 7.6 is middle of the pack.
This metric grants us a clear understanding of a midfielder’s role. Making lots of Coming Short Runs indicates a player is routinely moving deep towards the ball to receive. Not every Coming Short Run means they’re receiving as a six from the centre-backs, but it does indicate they are moving away from dangerous zones and receiving in areas where they are less likely to directly impact attacking thrusts.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but is indicative of a tempo-setting role. I think we can all agree now Vitinha’s best role sees him receiving and attacking towards goal, rather than moving away from it.
His high mark in the Primeira Liga in 2021/22 represents the fact he was essentially Porto’s go-to deep midfield creator (in a very dominant team), playing in a double pivot alongside the more rambunctious Mateus Uribe.
These are simple shifts in responsibilities, but dramatically alter how a player’s output looks.
Interesting with Vitinha in 2023/24 is his reduction in Coming Short Runs was not replaced by other types of runs. This is not a huge surprise given the positional approach of Luis Enrique, which resulted in PSG players making the least Runs per 30 TIP of any team in Ligue 1 last season — by quite a margin, too.
The key thing for Vitinha is his qualities have allowed him to shine in different roles, in different contexts, and at different clubs.
You’ve got the ‘give the ball to me, I’m the best player in the league’ version of Vitinha at Porto, who wanted all the touches and to set the game up, while covering heaps of ground with and without the ball.
But taking a player out of Portugal and asking them to do this in a top five league is rarely going to produce the same results. The probability they will be as much of an outlier talent in a top five league as they are in Portugal is tiny.
You can follow the natural evolution of Vitinha’s game, as he oriented less towards the ball and more towards his role within Enrique’s structure, finding the ball in pockets in the attacking half of the pitch, and more proactively looking for opportunities to carry, create and score.
I’m sure PSG’s recruitment team probably knew he could transition into this role, given Vitinha had played a decent amount of football as an offensive-minded midfielder during his academy career and in small spurts with the senior team.
One other key transferable has held firm between his move from Porto to PSG: his Ball Retention Ratio.
Ranking highly in this stat as a midfielder is generally the domain of deeper-lying players, who often have easier passes to make out of congestion and are looking to take less risks.
Despite that, of 419 midfielders in Europe’s top-five leagues last season, Vitinha was ranked right on the edge of the top 40.
He’s a gem.
ART VERSUS SCIENCE
Recruiting players is an art and a science. It’s about taking what you know and what you think you know and projecting both onto a range of variables, some controllable and some not.
Small miscalculations can have a massive impact on a player’s output at their new club. While Vitinha’s role has evolved and changed and the player has blossomed at PSG, a slight change of position quite negatively impacted Charles De Ketelaere’s output at Milan.
There are clear explanations. Vitinha’s technical ceiling is huge, and everything he does on a football pitch revolves around it.
De Ketelaere’s value rests on his directness and creativity in the final third, and pulling him away from those zones limits his best game-breaking qualities.
I tend to think people get a little too caught up on transitions from League X to League Y. Yes, leagues showcase a player’s qualities in different ways — think about some of the massive output attackers we’ve seen in the Eredivisie, for example — but understanding how a potential transfer opportunity fits with your own clubs’ style and philosophy is much more important.
Some players are malleable and will perform in whatever system they are placed. I think Vitinha is in said category. Others aren’t as flexible. De Ketelaere is perfect for a dynamic, fast, transitional style of football, and probably wouldn’t fare as well within the structure of Luis Enrique’s Paris Saint-Germain.
This is football. This is why good players ‘flop’ at one club and shine at another. And sometimes, the best transfer a club can make is not for a good player who’s playing well in the right circumstances, but a great player who’s playing poorly in an environment which doesn’t suit him.
A lot of transfers from clubs in Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands fall into the first category - players having career-best seasons at dominant clubs. That’s why they are often very expensive, and sometimes go pear-shaped when the players land in tougher environments.
But so goes football: where art and science meet.
Thanks for reading that. We have plenty more SkillCorner pieces in the pipeline, including analysis of Italian recruitment in the Balkans as well as the leap from League One to the Championship in English football.
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This is superb.