Takefusa Kubo and Real Sociedad – how to survive (and thrive) in La Liga
Takefusa Kubo and Real Sociedad – how to survive (and thrive) in La Liga
La Liga's cost cap is a unique challenge - but smart clubs can turn it into a strength. Here's how.
La Liga’s cost cap rules are notoriously difficult to manoeuvre.
I won’t get too stuck in the weeds explaining their full remit. But it’s important to stress the impact they have on the financial flexibility of La Liga clubs. Perhaps these restrictions are for the better - today, Spanish clubs are operating on firmer financial footing than they were a decade ago, when the rules were introduced.
But here at SCOUTED, we’re interested in football players, not rules. La Liga’s squad spending limits in 2023/24 were headlined by Real Madrid’s monstrous budget of €727 million, but what we want to do is find solutions for clubs all the way down to Deportivo Alavés, who operate on a budget of around €31 million.
How do you build a team under such conditions? How do you run a modern club in a league defined by juggernauts and a huge wealth gap? How do you find players good enough to compete on such a strict budget? That’s what we’ll be exploring today - making our way through recruitment, academies, and best practices for selling.
In this massive analysis:
The tactical secret (?) to bringing through academy players
Big swings, big misses, and home runs
How Real Sociedad took a risk on Takefusa Kubo - and why it paid off
The big-club academy graduates who might yet explode
Scouring the Segunda for diamonds in the rough
But first, a very brief foray into the weeds.
Them’s the rules
La Liga’s cost cap rules are underpinned by the ‘squad cost limit’. This regulation essentially charts the total clubs can spend on salaries for players (as well as some non-playing staff), and a host of other economic liabilities that come with signing and paying players.
While the minutiae are quite complex, the fundamental rule is simple: a club’s squad cost limit is determined by how much revenue a club generates, minus various non-sporting expenses which include financing debts and other day-to-day liabilities associated with running a professional football club.
While the rules work as intended, there are other consequences for La Liga’s on-field product, with clubs afforded less flexibility to compete financially with the mega-dollars on offer from the Premier League.
So while costs are capped and clubs in La Liga are more financially secure than the turbulent period of the early 21st century, there’s still an ongoing battle to ensure that the on-field product remains attractive — especially in an era without the natural draw of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi headlining the league’s biggest clubs.
La Liga has already pulled some levers, with the biggest being a deal with CVC Capital Partners to sell an 8.25% stake in La Liga’s TV rights for the next 50 years, for around €2 billion. Naturally, there are limits placed on how much of this dividend clubs can invest in signing players, with much of it dedicated to capital expenditure, reducing debt, and other various growth strategies.
But first, let’s start with nailing down our theoretical player acquisition strategy.
Operating in this cost-capped environment is all about being creative. Having a strong academy structure in place is a great start, but can also be difficult, especially for clubs in close geographical proximity to giants like Barcelona and Real Madrid.
There are a lot of clubs doing interesting things regardless, and we’re going to take a closer look at them. Whether it’s clever, targeted investment for low-cost players from abroad, or finding cut-priced deals for intriguing young players from closer to home, there are many ways to solve the puzzle.
But we mustn’t forget its last piece: selling players. Building a competitive squad every season is obviously hugely important, but squad building isn’t a one or two-year process. To build a strong foundation, sacrifices sometimes need to be made in the present to prelude success in the future.
Because of such sacrifices, clubs like Real Sociedad and Villarreal were able to increase their cost caps from €86 million and €113 million in 2019/20 to €145 million and €144 million respectively in 2023/24. This comes despite the effects of the COVID pandemic, which actually reduced the total cost cap in La Liga from just under €3 billion in 2019/20 to just over €2.5 billion in 2023/24 (this dropped to €2 billion at one point during the height of the crisis in 2021/22).
Buying smart is one thing, but selling smart is just as important. And La Liga clubs, as all clubs do, need to know their market: which is, above all, the Premier League. So, we’ll lean on some previous work I’ve done in this space, and we’ll try to get a grip on the market for Premier League clubs in La Liga, and the types of players they seem to be most interested in shipping over to England.
Onto our strategies.
The kids are alright
I’m not going to dwell on this section for too long, but it needs to be stated again and again: the best tool for building a club’s financial stability is a robust academy system churning out first-team quality players.
Not only are these players generally cheaper to pay than acquired first-teamers, they are also vehicles for the infamous ‘pure profit’. This is no secret amongst people who run football clubs.
However, running an elite academy is also not cheap. For a club like Getafe, who operate on a €40 million cost cap and are located in Madrid, bordered by two of the league’s three biggest clubs, an academy might not be the most effective allocation of resources. We’ve seen clubs take this approach in England, with Brentford famously dumping their academy program a few years ago, citing challenges in recruiting players in London, before reviving it recently to fall in line with new Premier League rules.
Interestingly, of the five most notable players to have emerged from the Getafe academy system in recent years, only two reached the first team before being poached by a Madrid rival: Emi Buendía and Hugo Duro.
The other three are Miguel Gutiérrez, who moved to Real Madrid as a 10-year-old; Álvaro Morata, who joined Real Madrid at 15; and Sergio Akieme, who left to join Rayo Vallecano at 15.
Nonetheless, Getafe are still producing players, with a couple of academy graduates, John Joe Patrick Finn and Alberto Risco, making debuts in La Liga this season.
For other clubs, the academy produces a much steadier flow of first-teamers. Athletic Club have a first team full of them, although this is only natural considering the club revolves around its famous ‘Basque only’ policy.
Barcelona are of course also famous for the consistent production of elite players through their academy, many of whom are now key cornerstones of their first-team: Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsí, Gavi, Alex Balde, and Fermín López chief among them.
Having B teams playing at senior level is another benefit Spanish sides can take advantage of. Villarreal have seen great success with this, despite their relegation from La Liga 2 last season. They initially gained promotion in 2021/22 with Filip Jørgensen in goal and Nicolas Jackson up front - both have since netted the club big fees with moves to Chelsea in the summers of 2023 and 2024.
Other excellent players have come through the club in recent years, including Pau Torres, Samuel Chukwueze, Álex Baena, and Yéremy Pino. Alongside Jackson, Chukwueze’s emergence is further evidence of the benefits of keeping eyes on Africa, with both moving to Spain as 18-year-olds before earning massive fees.
Without digging too deep into data, there is an art to filtering academy players into the first team consistently. One of the best ways, in my humble opinion, is by playing a tactical style that favours keeping the ball as much as possible.
You don’t have to be one of the mega clubs to do this either. Las Palmas (60%), Girona (57%), and Real Sociedad (55%), were all able to keep lots of the ball last season. All three clubs had strong seasons too, with Las Palmas avoiding relegation with a young side, Girona qualifying for the Champions League, and Real Sociedad continuing their run in the league’s top six.
This shields these academy graduates from what is generally a weakness for younger players — all the off-ball stuff — and empowers them in showcasing what they can do with the ball, which is probably the reason they’ve been elevated to the senior team in the first place.
I think this is a major reason why a club like Barcelona can seamlessly integrate players like Marc Bernal into their first-team squad, as they did at the start of this season before his unfortunate ACL injury.
By and large, Spanish clubs have proven over the last couple of decades that they don’t have too many issues with developing talented players, so let’s move on.
Swing and a miss, slugger
Signing players is like an ‘at-bat’ in baseball. With every signing, you’re taking a swing. If you miss on a transfer, that’s a strike. Every strike limits your opportunities to continue taking swings. In economics, they call these opportunity costs — the signings you miss out on or can’t afford because of a player you decided to sign previously.
Sometimes, you’ll sign a decent player. This might get you to first or second base. Perhaps you get a handy squad player, but not one likely to become a superstar.
Every club is striving for the home run - the player signed for a relatively small fee and sold for a huge profit.
In baseball, a player who hits the ball with lots of power is called a ‘slugger’. You can apply that terminology to clubs, too. Some clubs are safe, pursuing veteran options that provide guarantees, but lower upside. But some go for huge swings instead, and are often rewarded with a home run.
One of the best examples in La Liga is Real Sociedad. Their sporting director, Roberto Olabe, who has been in charge since 2018, is a very smart man.
Since he arrived, they have taken numerous big upside swings on players. Mikel Merino was the first, arriving for €12 million from Newcastle in the summer of 2018. That was followed by the €15 million acquisition of Alexander Isak a year later. While their incomings dried up during the pandemic period, they’ve resumed taking swings. They haven’t all been hits.
The €13 million signing of Mohamed-Ali Cho never quite clicked — perhaps more of a case of too much, too soon, rather than a reflection on the young Frenchman’s talent. Likewise, the €20 million acquisition of Umar Sadiq hasn’t yet brought the returns I’m sure the club would have hoped for.
But there have been more big wins too, such as Takefusa Kubo from Real Madrid for €6.5 million, while Arsen Zakharyan showed some promising signs in his first season in Spain after joining from Dinamo Moscow for €13 million.
The summer of 2024 has seen the club take another four at-bats. Orri Óskarsson arrived from FC Copenhagen for €20 million, Luka Sucic joined from Red Bull Salzburg for €10 million, Sergio Gómez was signed from Manchester City for €9 million, and Javi López was bought from Alavés for €6.5 million.
From 2018 to 2024, the trends are very interesting. The first thing that caught my eye is that Real Sociedad keep a keen eye on players that do really well at youth level, but haven’t quite put it together at senior level.
This was the case when they signed Alexander Isak from Borussia Dortmund, Takefusa Kubo from Real Madrid, and to a lesser extent, Mikel Merino from Newcastle. The trend continues with Sergio Gómez from Manchester City, who always struggled greatly for first team football at City and before that Borussia Dortmund, sandwiching a productive period at Anderlecht in between. Throughout this period, he had always been a dominant youth international player, and he finally capped off a 60-plus cap youth international career with a gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
The other trend is that Real Sociedad are starting to get adventurous. The club haven’t historically signed many foreign players, and very few from outside of Europe’s top five leagues, but that seems to be changing.
The arrivals of Zakharyan, Sucic and Óskarsson are ambitious swings into markets Real Sociedad don’t normally operate in. The last time they signed a player from Russia was in 1994/95, from Austria in 1997/98, and from Denmark in 2005/06.
The last trend is that three of the upside swings have been on strikers: Isak, Sadiq, and now Óskarsson.
For more information on why that’s important (hint: they have the biggest potential to exponentially increase in value very quickly), go read The Striker Factories, a piece I wrote recently on how different clubs develop young strikers.
Finding upside potential
Now that we’re 2,000 words into this, you’re probably wondering where the graphs and numbers are. Don’t worry, they’re coming.
We want to understand what exactly a club like Real Sociedad is identifying in these young players to convince them they have massive, latent potential not yet unlocked.
The player we are going to look at is Takefusa Kubo. Kubo is 23, but has had a crazy career path. He joined Barcelona as a 9-year-old, moved back to Japan four years later, debuted in Japan for FC Tokyo as a fresh-faced 16-year-old, went on loan to Ange Postecoglou’s Yokohama F. Marinos side at 17, left Japan for Real Madrid at 18, and then embarked on four consecutive loan spells. Those loans, at Mallorca, Villarreal, Getafe, and Mallorca again, had varying degrees of success.
He played 2,300 La Liga minutes in his first stint at Mallorca, then 300 in six months with Villarreal, a further 800 in the second half of that same season with Getafe, and then 1,600 in a partly injury interrupted second stint with Mallorca.
Across those ~5,000 minutes of football, he scored just six goals and assisted a further five times. In roughly 5,000 La Liga minutes with Real Sociedad, he has scored 17 goals and contributed eight assists.
The real questions are: what did they see in Kubo, and how have they developed him into such a dynamic offensive threat?
Upon doing a bit of digging, it became quite apparent to me that Kubo’s game hasn’t changed much from season to season. What we can see though, is that he left Mallorca as a fairly inefficient, but extremely high volume creator from out wide, and he has developed into a fairly efficient, high volume creator. Here are some numbers compared to other La Liga wingers from 2021/22-2023/24.
I absolutely love to see this kind of development. This is a player that has gone from being the complete go-to guy at Mallorca (49.9 pressures received per 30 TIP!!!) and somewhat having to force things, to wrapping his head around being a complimentary piece in a bigger puzzle. He has worked out how to slot himself in efficiently, with his Dangerous and Difficult Pass Completion ratios shooting way up, while his Difficult Pass Attempts per 100 Pressures came down massively in 2023/24. While on one hand, Kubo is an incredible technical talent that has always been capable of this, it’s also a credit to the club and coach-led development plan at Real Sociedad that has been able to extract it out of him.
This sort of internal development is why Real Sociedad can sell guys like Alexander Isak, Robin Le Normand and Mikel Merino, maximising their returns while being confident in their ability to plug those gaps in the first team with low-cost replacements and academy products.
I must also note that it also helps that Kubo has scored 17 goals on 8.7 xG since moving to Real Sociedad, which certainly helps boost his reputation. Although on the flipside, he’s underperforming on xAG — strikers aren’t consistently finishing his good work… yet.
Regardless, this is obviously a much-improved player that has been expertly identified and developed.
Looking for opportunities
Kubo’s departure from Real Madrid got me thinking about other reputable academy players who have fallen through the cracks at elite clubs and made their way to a new home in La Liga.
A recent example is Ilias Akhomach, a very dribbly Spanish-born Moroccan winger who I always enjoyed watching at youth level for Barcelona and Spain.
In 2023, Akhomach left Barcelona, having made only three senior appearances, and moved to Villarreal. While in an earlier phase of his development compared to Kubo, Akhomach’s first season as a regular first teamer was a big success, and he played almost 2,500 minutes across all competitions.
At SCOUTED, we’ve always been very interested in these stars at youth level who can’t quite force their way into the senior squads of big clubs. We strongly believe this is an area of recruitment underexploited by clubs, especially in an era when young players are showing a willingness to force their way out of clubs to get playing time.
These opportunities don’t just apply in Spain either, they’re continent-wide trends. In Italy, Lecce made an excellent move to secure 2023 Under-19 Euro Player of the Tournament Luis Hasa from Juventus. While in France, there are a lot of clubs that have made a pretty penny by raiding the academy of Paris Saint-Germain.
The earlier a potential buying club can sense an opportunity, the better the deal they can make.
In this case, Villarreal were actually able to snare Akhomach on a free transfer, reducing their risk and expanding the upside potential of the move.
Akhomach is an interesting player. He’s quite small, but he always seemed to have good athletic attributes to match his dribbling ability.
We wrote this about him during the Under-19 Euros last year, in the same week that he signed for Villarreal:
“It’s been a great week for Ilias Akhomach. After landing himself a nice move to Villarreal, moving on from Barcelona at the end of his contract, he put on a show in Spain’s opener, reminding everyone of how destructive a dribbler he can be in the final third.
When we say dribbler, we mean it. Akhomach completed eight of nine attempted, and was able to get past his man in a number of ways. Roulettes, spins, body feints, bursts of space… you name it, he did it. He’s very left foot dominant, but his touch is so nice it doesn’t really affect him — plus a lot of his dribbling quality lies in his body work as he slaloms through traffic.
Akhomach is an explosive athlete with a rapid burst of speed off a standing start, as well as impressive strength and balance to ride challenges. For a small player, his strength is an outlier attribute. His duel with a much bigger Icelandic defender to win the ball back for Spain’s second goal was as pure a one-on-one wrestle as you will see in this sport, and Akhomach was able to burn him and slide Víctor Barberá through on goal to score.
To go with his eight dribbles, Akhomach was fouled five times and assisted four shots. He assisted a goal from a corner and, once again, underlined that his left-footed ball-striking is something to keep an eye on. It was a brilliant all-round performance, one that should get Villarreal (and dribbly boi) fans excited.”
So how has he done scaling up to La Liga? Let’s dive into some numbers.
We can see his punchy acceleration is definitely there, but the 20-year-old’s full athletic package is still a work in progress.
He has that burst, but he just isn’t able to consistently back it up with repeat efforts. This is a player that just needs minutes, to be playing all the time and building his fitness base.
For Villarreal to find 2,500 minutes for him, as they fought tooth and nail for a place in Europe last season (they just missed out) is a great effort.
His dribbling has also translated to senior football. He is a touch inefficient, but he averaged 3.34 successful take-ons per 90 for Villarreal in La Liga, alongside very good carrying numbers — whether they be into the final third, penalty area, or progressive carry distance.
The inefficiency is real though, and will eventually start to hold him back unless he can clean it up as Kubo has.
While Akhomach’s dribble-heavy predisposition will naturally lead to a subdued Ball Retention Ratio Under Pressure, I think he is a touch too loose and overly aggressive, and for all the times he is able to beat his man and make carries into the final third and penalty area, they rarely translate into opportunities to do damage as a passer.
Akhomach is a work in progress, but he has strong fundamentals and seemingly supreme confidence in his technical qualities. I remain very bullish on him, especially as he builds up his athletic base to be a more consistent player over 90 minutes (he only completed two full 90s in La Liga last season).
These are the trials and tribulations of signing young players, and why the sell and replace transfer strategy can be a difficult game to play, especially if the player you are banking on takes a little longer to adapt to senior level than expected.
Nonetheless, looking for these academy players remains a low-risk endeavour for clubs, especially those like Villarreal for whom relegation isn’t an immediate danger.
Scouting Segunda
By my calculations, just 13 players playing for non-promoted teams below La Liga level in Spain in 2023/24 moved to first division clubs in 2024/25. While La Liga clubs spent a combined €500 million on players, only around €20 million of that was spent on players in Segunda or below.
This feels low, although it’s more in line with non-Championship second divisions than you might expect. Nonetheless, one does feel that there’s more talent in Segunda to be found, and that a clever club willing to pick out the best of the best from the Spanish second tier could find some bargains.
Obviously, signings from the second tier, unless they’re from the Championship in England, are generally quite affordable. It feels a tad surprising that newly-promoted teams in Spain, and others that are harshly limited by the cost cap, aren’t more active in trying to pad out their squads through this path. It’s not just about finding the next star, either. There are surely numerous reliable squad players, capable of playing in La Liga, milling around in Segunda.
Llew picked out a few in his Scouting the Segunda with SkillCorner piece from January 2024, and I’m going to do a quick sweep for a few more.
I thought I’d start with some pacey wingers, born in 2001 or later.
There was one problem. Every single player in the top right quartile of this graph was either a La Liga loanee, or has moved to another club for 2024/25.
As an aside, an interesting one for La Liga clubs here would’ve been Gabri Martínez, who left Girona on a free after a solid loan at CD Mirandés last season, and has so far been a solid contributor for SC Braga since his arrival in Portugal.
Otherwise, wingers are a bust. Let’s look at the same parameters for some strikers instead.
So you’ll notice the name Iván Azón jumps off the page. A cursory glance at Transermarkt threw up some interesting details; he was part of an academy side at Real Zaragoza that conquered Spain in 2018/19 and booked them a place in the UEFA Youth League, where they were eventually knocked out by Lyon.
He’s also played a few times at Under-21 level for Spain, most recently in September 2023, where he led the line in a team that included Ilias Akhomach, former Manchester United left-back Álvaro Carreras, Gabri Veiga, Girona’s Arnau Martínez, Napoli’s Rafa Marín, Liverpool’s Stefan Bajčetić, Real Sociedad’s Beñat Turrientes, Atlético Madrid’s Pablo Barrios, and Barcelona’s Pablo Torre. Not bad company.
Clearly there’s something to work with here, despite a patchy goal-scoring record of 18 goals in just over 6,000 minutes in Segunda thus far for Zaragoza.
Let’s start with the macro first. Segunda is a notoriously low scoring league, averaging just 2.19 goals per game since Azón became a first-team player. In that same period, Zaragoza have themselves averaged just 0.94 goals per game. This league is far from a striker’s paradise.
If we compare his athletic data to strikers of all ages though, you can see he has a bit going for him.
This is very much the mould of striker a club like Sturm Graz would be interested in pursuing, as I talked about in my recent Striker Factories piece. Here’s another plug in case you ignored it the first time.
A club that plays a fast, transitional style should be able to make things work with Azón. The issue is not many teams in his division do. In terms of runs and dangerous runs made, Segunda ranks lower than La Liga and even equivalent second divisions, such as Serie B and Ligue 2.
Within Segunda itself, Zaragoza are middle of the pack.
While scouting for players performing well is great, I really enjoy trying to dig deeper and find reasons why certain players might be underperforming in certain situations. Without having watched Azón play, my instincts tell me this could very well be an example of that.
STREAMLINING FOR A SALE
There’s a reason why I picked out Sprinting Distance and PSV-99 as my two metrics to outline a rough search for players in Segunda. As I wrote in ‘Ligue 1: How to build (and sell) a superstar’ in May, Premier League clubs are always on the lookout for athletic players — it’s a league that values them more than any other (and will pay huge money to buy them).
There are a few moves in La Liga I think are well lined up to eventually lead to a big sale to a Premier League club at some point in the future.
The first one is Thierno Barry’s €14 million move from FC Basel to Villarreal. He’s a 6’5” striker who scored eight goals in less than 300 minutes to start the season for Basel in all competitions. And he can RUN.
Here’s him compared to other strikers in the Swiss Super League last year:
They’ve also signed a giant named Logan Costa, a French-born Cape Verdean from Toulouse, who is about 6’3” and built like a tank. Giant French centre-backs are one of the Premier League’s favourite archetypes.
Sevilla’s purchase of Lucien Agoumé for €4 million is another interesting one, and another example of a La Liga club targeting a highly talented youth player that hasn’t quite broken into a senior team - in this instance, at Inter. He’s a tall, leggy, 22-year-old midfielder who has been on four loans in the last four seasons. In my opinion, he just needs a consistent run in senior football to showcase the talent that has earned him over 40 caps at youth international level for France. It looks like he’ll get that at Sevilla this season.
In this era of the Premier League’s utter financial dominance, signing players that appeal to the tastes of Premier League clubs is, in my opinion, a very viable strategy. And what do they like?
Big players, fast players, athletic players. Yes, obviously, there needs to be baseline quality footballing fundamentals, but you get my drift.
Darwin Núñez, Martin Ødegaard, Rodri, William Saliba, Erling Haaland, Dominik Szoboszlai, Joško Gvardiol, Luis Díaz, Moisés Caicedo: these are the types of players Premier League clubs target from abroad. They are either massive, incredibly fast, can run all day, or some combination of all three.
FINDING SOLUTIONS
As always, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to player trading. Every club has its own circumstances. From Real Madrid’s €727 million cost cap, to Alavés’ €31 million, and everywhere in between; every budget, every geographical location, every club’s history, and every club’s academy structure will dictate a different transfer strategy.
In this piece, we’ve laid out that there are many different approaches a club can apply to their overarching strategy, in order to reduce relative squad costs while maintaining competitive standards in one of Europe’s top five leagues. Not every approach is right for every club, but every club needs a strategy of some sort.
The cost cap places real limits on La Liga clubs, and so clubs need to be creative and flexible in how they can work their way around it, ultimately aiming to gradually increase their cost cap year on year by increasing revenues, especially through player trading.
This article was produced under a commercial collaboration with SkillCorner, SCOUTED’s official data partners. Their tracking and performance data is used by more than 150 of the world’s biggest clubs, leagues and confederations. Learn more.
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