The transfer window has shut. Monday Night SCOUTED has arrived.
The final round of UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League fixtures combined with another fantastic weekend of football meant that I dug too many rabbit holes to dive into.
They include:
Titanic performances from a teenage trio
The beginnings of another SCOUTED Archetype, inspired by Victor Osimhen
Hat-tricks and Tricky Trees in SCOUTED Stats
Teen Titans
Do you remember when I said the future of football was left-footed? Here is some more evidence.
On Wednesday night, Lamine Yamal and Ethan Nwaneri both scored on MD8 of the UEFA Champions League League Phase. They both received the Player of the Match award. They are both 17 years old.
Yamal completed more take-ons than the rest of the Barcelona side combined, Nwaneri had more shots than any of his Arsenal teammates. At the weekend, we saw more balletic dribbling from the Barça boy and more sharpshooting from the Gunner.
First, let’s take a look at Lamine Yamal. You have seen the clip, surely?
In Barcelona’s win against Alavés, Yamal equalled Jamie Gittens’ U23 record for take-ons attempted in a Big Five European League game this season (17) and became the third one to complete 10+, joining Florian Wirtz and Abdul Fatawu - the Ghanian holds the outright record with 12. But that is just the start.
Thanks to , we know that Yamal is the first teenager on record to complete 11 take-ons in a single LaLiga match. Not even Lionel Messi managed it.
Stathead has take-on data for Europe’s Big Five Leagues since the start of the 2017/18 season. In that time, Jérémy Doku is the only teenager to complete more take-ons in a single game. After his recent haul against, Yamal has now completed more take-ons in 2024/25 than he managed in the entire 2023/24 season.
41 more and he will break the record set by Jadon Sancho in 2018/19 for most take-ons completed in a Big Five European League campaign by a player starting the season as a teenager.
The following day at the Emirates Stadium..
After Myles Lewis-Skelly became the youngest player to score a Premier League goal against the reigning champions for 22 years, Ethan Nwaneri came on to become the first to do so in 31 minutes. More on MLS in a bit…
Tom Ede told is this was the first time that two teenagers had scored for Arsenal in the same league game since September 1986. Opta told us this was the first time two players aged 18 or younger had scored for the same team in a Premier League game since April 2007. I also found out that it was the first time two players aged 18 or under had scored in a Big Five League game against a team managed by Pep Guardiola.
Nwaneri’s sweet striking, specifically from the zone Llew highlighted, has fired him to seven goals across all competitions this season, including three in the Premier League. According to Opta, only Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen (9) have scored more times for a Premier League side while aged 17 or younger. Per Stathead, Nwaneri is the first Arsenal player to score 3+ goals in a single Premier League game when starting the season at 17 years old or younger.
Yamal is breaking ankles, Nwaneri is breaking nets; both are breaking records.
But perhaps the standout titanic teenage display at the weekend belonged to this guy.
Myles Lewis-Skelly did not just score against Manchester City, he completed 100% of his take-ons, won 100% of his aerial duels, completed 90% of his passes, won more fouls than any other Arsenal player (3) and did not commit a single one himself. He uses his body like a Premier League veteran, making him difficult to beat and almost-impossible to dispossess.
These stats are from Opta help hammer home the point and set Llew up nicely for a feature we have been discussing in recent weeks.
Defensively, he stands out for his physicality despite only having turned 18 in September. Against City, he won eight of his nine duels, giving him the highest duel success rate (88.9%) of anyone in the game for either team. No opponent has managed to dribble past him even once in his 553 minutes of Premier League action.
That physicality has shone throughout all of Lewis-Skelly’s first-team performances so far, with the young left-back winning a higher percentage of his duels (74.2%) than any other Premier League player to have contested more than 25.
Lamine Yamal, Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly all dropped titantic displays last week. The future of football is left-footed. La Masia and Hale End are making sure of it.
The Osimhen Test
Victor Osimhen is a caricature centre-forward. On MD8 of the UEFA Europa League, he almost generated as many Expected Goals (1.48) as passes completed (2). He attempted nine shots from 21 total touches.
Across the entire UEL League Phase, he averaged a shot every 3.8 touches and almost had as many shots (41) as successful passes (53). This is the pinnacle of a goal-hanging poacher. This is the next centre-forward profile I want to explore.
To do so, I decided to find out the following: during his time at Napoli, was Victor Osimhen the premium poacher in Europe’s Big Five Leagues? The hope was that I would stumble across some next generation goal-hangers along the way. Here is the Osimhen Test in Scatter Plot form, with a few high-profile names highlighted.
If at any point you would like to ignore me and query the tables, it should be available here. If you would like to explore the Scatter Plot, click here.
For those venturing on, I am going to work through my methodology, explaining my thought process while highlighting some outliers and anomalies. Spoiler alert: one of them is the €77m man, Jhon Durán.
To begin answering my question, I exported Stathead FBref data for every forward to score at least five non-penalty goals from 2020/21 to 2023/24. This produced 703 players.
182 of those players were aged 23 or under during the final season contributing to their data. That sounds convoluted but it’s the best way to explain it. For example, Martin Ødegaard appears as an U23 player because he was tagged as a forward by FBref for a handful of games during the 2021/22 season, therefore appearing in the export. If anyone has any suggestions on how to refine position further, let me know.
I then calculated my two top-tier poacher metrics you can see in the Scatter Plot: Touches per Shot and Penalty Box Proximity. It’s very nice to see Osimhen rank second for both. After all, this test is named after him.
For Touches per Shot, Rodrigo Muniz is a fun surprise at number one and he’s good for the brand considering he was born in 2001. The fact his Average Shot Distance is the third-closest to goal within this group of 15 is another good sign; Mauro Icardi, who leads this group for that metric, stands tall in a land of giants to rank third overall for this metric.
The appearance of Loïs Openda, Darwin Núñez and Erling Haaland also shows that Power Forwards can exhibit Poacher traits: purposeful, pacy off-ball runners rarely have lots of touches. It would be interesting to see how Osimhen and Muniz stack up in the Power Forward profile (I have a SkillCorner article in the works, watch this space).
Returning to Penalty Box Proximity, another big-body centre-forward takes top spot:
Like Muniz, there is a much smaller sample of data for Artem Dovbyk when compared to Osimhen, but the fact nearly a third of the Ukrainian’s touches occurred inside the penalty area is a testament to Girona’s style of play and the Ukrainian’s ability to operate and make an impact in that area.
After posting about these metrics following last week’s MNS, the very smart Scott Willis () made a very smart suggestion: what about applying the calculations to final third actions only? Although it produced a similar ranking, there were enough subtle changes to suggest we can use the Final Third derivatives to laser in on the centre-forwards that set up a tent in the penalty area.
For instance, it helps provide a fairer representation of style for strikers in teams that demand a lot of work battling for duels in the middle third. Take Luuk de Jong. He ranks in the 74th percentile when looking at his percentage of total touches that come inside the area (Penalty Box Proximity). However, he ranks in the 94th percentile when focussing on the percentage of his final third touches that occur in the penalty area.
This suggests he does a lot of work to help his team get into final third but once that territory is secured, he pitches up his tent in the box - his top five ranking for Average Shot Distance we saw earlier backs this up. My theory is that there is less of a gap between both metrics when looking at his output for PSV given their recent dominance of the Eredivisie.
The nugget of (potential) insight to introduce after looking at that first batch of data is that when looking at the correlation between NPxG and the others in this table, the strongest positive correlation was, excluding Non-Penalty Goals, was provided by Penalty Box Proximity (0.76), ahead of its Final Third variant (0.74) and Shots (0.7). Non-penalty Conversion Rate (0.13) and Touches in the Penalty Area had the weakest correlation in the set (0.24).
Conversion Rate is the biggest purple patch metric I have come across in my eight years of working with this kind of data. Darwin Núñez and Nicolas Jackson both hit 30% before their respective moves to Liverpool and Chelsea. Now they share a reputation as two of the poorest finishers in the Premier League.
I believe it makes little sense to focus on Conversion Rate on its own. There could be value in measuring it for particular game states or periods of the match to help profile the clutch poachers, while extreme values would also be worth investigating. But it is more often than not a vanity metric to highlight form and generate buzz for a signing - trust me, I used to help generate that buzz. If I told you that Chris Wood’s Non-Penalty Conversion Rate within this dataset is 13.8%, would that change your perception of him? It shouldn’t.
Eyes of Arsenal fans reading (and writing, guilty) may have been drawn to Benjamin Šeško in the table above. I imagine the recruitment team’s job is to try to work out if there is a particular skill or collection of other metrics that suggests he could maintain that 29.8%, rather than pushing the club to sign him because of it. Trust this process.
As for the lack of relationship between Touches in the Attacking Penalty Area and NPxG is likely due to the fact wingers and wide-forwards usually dominate the former.
Not only do the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Mohamed Salah rain down shots from inside the area, their take-ons completed and passes inside the box all contribute to the tally. There is a reason we described Victor Boniface as the ‘nine with a winger’s soul’. Also note that Darwin Núñez appears in another Top 15, while Alejandro Garnacho is the closest to Mbappé for this metric. Keep the faith, United fans.
As I have stressed before, I am still an aspiring data journalist [says who? - ed] and far from a data scientist - I have not studied maths beyond GCSE level. You may think ‘spending most of your time in the box will lead to good chances’ is so obvious it’s not even worth saying. But I’ve said it. I am completely ready for someone to tell me that I have used correlations and the like incorrectly.
Even then, I still think looking at Penalty Box Proximity at least alongside Touches in the Attacking Penalty Area and other traditional metrics can help identify the ‘out-and-out centre-forwards’ everyone cries out for. When people say ‘out-and-out centre-forward’ they mean Victor Osimhen. Do they also mean Jhon Durán?
The Colombian is an anomaly for numerous reasons, but let’s deal with his shot make-up for now. Despite ranking 7th for Final Third Touches per Shot, he has the lowest Penalty Box Proximity in this group. This fits the eye-test perception of his maverick playing style, further compounded by his Average Shot Distance of 17.1 yards. Does any of this matter when he’s scoring 0.74 NPG per 90? We don’t know, but it’s worth the risk to find out.
Durán’s data paints the picture of a shoot on sight, pot-shotter. Now, he’s playing alongside another one up front.
While players like Jhon Durán are undeniably box-office, Victor Osimhen is renting an office in the box. Goal-hanging is a craft and the Nigerian has mastered it. Now you know how to discover his apprentice.
SCOUTED Stats
Beyond Lamine Yamal’s dribbling exploits, there was a hat-trick of goals and a hat-trick of assists this weekend.

All records refer to players under the age of 23 within a single match in a Big Five European League in 2024/25 unless stated otherwise. Stats correct as of 3 February 2025, 20:00 GMT.
🎩⚽️ Mika Biereth joined the hat-trick hero club, scoring three non-penalty goals within eight minutes against Auxerre in just his third Ligue 1 game for AS Monaco. These Sturm Graz strikers, eh? This was the third U23 hat-trick of 2025 already, following Amad Diallo and Dango Ouattara - we only had four in the second half of 2024.
🎩🅰️ Anthony Elanga joined Cole Palmer and Florian Wirtz in providing a hat-trick of assists this season. He also equalled Palmer’s record for Expected Assist Goals (1.4).
I started drafting a section about his role in the Forest side but fell down other rabbit holes. It was a celebration of wingers playing on their orthodox side and how their impact could scale with increasing transitions. Elanga’s superpower is his speed. The technical skill this superpower augments is his crossing, from both set-pieces and open play and he used it to transform the City Ground into a Tap-in Simulator for Chris Wood. By receiving the ball and being able to bolt forward in a straight line to cross (or shoot across goal) without adjusting via a chop back ensures the transition reaches terminal velocity. According to Opta Analyst, Elanga averages more yards per Carry (15.44) and more yards per Progressive Carry (15.94) than any other player in the Premier League to embark on at least 25 for each metric. Elanga is in triple digits for both.
Perhaps a secret to punching above your weight in this football meta is to go old-school. I’ll leave it there for now.
With no Premier League football this coming weekend, the next edition of MNS will be the second SCOUTED Squad from Europe’s Big Five Leagues.
If you missed the first one, it included some season-long stat leaders alongside 22 of the most fascinating U23 players based on their output. There will be no repeats from the first Squad. If you subscribe, you will see it first.
Have a great week,
Jake.
Hi guys, brilliant article again by Jake (the one on Brazilian Centre-backs might have to go in the hall of fame, loved it!). I'm studying data analytics and just wanted to ask how you guys got into sports analytics or scouting and if there are any books, publications, newsletters etc that you would recommend to someone looking to get started.