Tottenham should consider a midfielder who can pass

Hello and welcome to the Friday grab bag, which took a couple of weeks off for transfer grades. I’m happy to be back with some yelling about Tottenham’s midfield.

During our rebuilding teams series over the summer, I said that I thought Tottenham Hotspur’s biggest priority in the market needed to be a central midfielder who’s excellent at ball progression. They proceeded to sell none of their existing midfielders and buy no one who did that.

The results are apparent in this absolute war crime of a passing map from Spurs’ 2-2 draw with Bodo/Glimt midweek, which prompted me to make an admittedly grim and not very funny joke. Can you blame me, though? Look at this shit.

In miserably related news, Tottenham Hotspur announced a new contract for Rodrigo Bentancur on Friday morning. While Bentancur has a reputation as a great leader in the dressing room, and certainly looks the part of a top teammate on the pitch with his high work rate, he’s not a particularly good midfielder, which is ostensibly what he’s getting paid for.

With Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison out injured, likely future starting No. 8 Lucas Bergvall — who shows flashes of brilliance, even if he’s a bit frustrating on the whole — has been moved into a more attacking midfield role. The No. 8 minutes have mostly gone to the rotation of Bentancur and Pape Sarr, who is the exact same guy except younger and a bit more athletic.

Their passing and carrying numbers are revolting.

Some teams can carry a No. 8 who’s a true runner and destroyer if they either a) are just yeeting the ball to a striker partnership, or b) have a holding midfielder who is an elite distributor. But Spurs are currently playing 4-3-3/4-2-3-1 variants, and their No. 6 is Joao Palhinha, who might be the worst passer that a decent Premier League club is ever willing to start in midfield. He’s such an elite ball-winner that I’ll give him a pass — and he’s scored a couple of nice goals! — but his limitations become more obvious and punitive in Spurs’ side than they were in a more direct Fulham team, or a Bayern Munich side that had good passers next to him.

All of that is the main reason why, despite sitting 4th in the Premier League table, Tottenham’s attacking numbers look like this:

Oof.

Xavi Simons has added some excellent playmaking ability to the Tottenham lineup, and the return of Kulusevski and Maddison in the 2nd half of the season should help quite a bit too, but none of them solve this team’s fundamental problem. It’s difficult for your elite advanced playmakers to create shooting opportunities if no one can get the ball through the middle third of the pitch and find them in the first place.

I don’t think Spurs have an internal solution to this problem. There will be calls to give Yves Bissouma another chance, to give Archie Gray more minutes, and to promote youngster Callum Olusesi to the first team. Perhaps one or more of them will perform better than the current crop of deep-lying midfielders currently getting minutes. But I am highly skeptical that any of them are THE answer.

Long term, the answer is likely to sell Bissouma and Sarr, and buy a new midfielder. In the short term, I think Thomas Frank needs to seriously consider a tactical shift that involves playing 2 strikers and yeeting the ball in their general direction.

Speaking of Spurs’ struggles, Ted wrote about why he’s betting against them this week over on the gambling newsletter. Leeds aren’t even getting a +0.5 or anything like that, it’s a straight-up pick ‘em. He had a few other surprise underdog bets in the Premier League this week as well, you can subscribe to Variance Betting if you’re interested.

On the podcast, the boys talked about PSG’s big win over Barcelona, where they had some impressive youngsters on display. Great to see that the team coming off a Champions League win has teenagers from their academy coming into the first team and scoring against Barca, that’s not terrifying at all.

The FPL corner

On FPL Mate’s weekly experts poll, he revealed that sharp players are bringing in Viktor Gyökeres this week. Personally, I am not — I feel OK about my striker setup of Erling Haaland, Joao Pedro and Igor Thiago — but it’s interesting to look into why.

Basically, good FPL players make a lot of their big plays based on the fixtures. If you just look at the current numbers, Gyökeres isn’t an obvious candidate for an FPL team. This isn’t a knock on the player in real football terms — it’s too early in his Premier League career to draw any conclusions — but his numbers don’t jump off the page. His xG per 90 is not even 1/3 of Haaland’s, and about half of what he produced last year at Sporting Lisbon.

Gyökeres is also performing right at his xG. He looks like a totally fine, but not elite striker at the moment.

But Gyökeres did that against fairly strong opposition. This weekend, Arsenal are at home against West Ham, who are in 19th place. The Gunners’ upcoming stretch of fixtures is their easiest of the season, and they don’t play another top tier team until they go away to Chelsea on November 30.

Basically, FPL players are not betting on Gyökeres, specifically. They’re betting on the starting striker for Arsenal being someone who has a lot of goal contributions over the next six matches. And I think that’s a very reasonable bet, even if Gyökeres’ numbers aren’t great yet.

Games we’re watching

The best place I know of to find TV and stream listings for your region is LiveSoccerTV.

Chelsea vs. Liverpool — Two managers on Bald Fraud Watch, only one can survive. I actually think Chelsea have been playing fine besides all the red cards, they should stop doing that.

Real Madrid vs. Villarreal — The Yellow Submarine have a great setup to frustrate Los Blancos, I expect a close one.

Eintracht Frankfurt vs. Bayern Munich — I do not expect a close one, something like 8-2 or 7-3 is very possible here.

Juventus vs. Milan — I know every time we recommend a Juve game it ends up being outrageously boring, but they’re actually starting to look entertaining now. I promise.

Lille vs. PSG — Probably not competitive but we can hope. If nothing else you get to check out Senny Mayulu, Ibrahim Mbaye and Ayyoub Bouaddi.

Stuff we’re reading

Tom Garry at The Guardian reported on Crux Football buying Montpellier women, and if you read the whole article, you might recognize some of the people mentioned!

Callum McCarthy at The Cutback provides some other big updates on the business of women’s football.

The homies at Scouted released this year’s Scouted50, which our own Neel Shelat and Mohamed Mohamed voted on. While Max Dowman is probably the best 15-year-old I’ve ever seen, I’m surprised he was voted ahead of Ayyoub Bouaddi, who is already running the show in Champions League games.

Grace Robertson at Grace On Football detailed how new Manchester City assistant manager Pepijn Lijnders is changing the team, and his boss Pep Guardiola’s adaptability.

Kyle Boas at Tactics Journal has another proposal for things that could change at City, specifically their midfield rotations.

Mustapha Hassan at Total Football Analysis breaks down why Florian Wirtz hasn’t started firing for Liverpool yet.

Ed Maylon and Matt Hughes at FootBiz dig into how and why Daniel Levy got ousted from Tottenham.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Transfer Flow here. We also have a podcast where we go in depth on transfer news and rumours every week. We’re on YouTube here, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching for “The Transfer Flow Podcast.” If you’re interested in football betting, check out this post on why we started Variance Betting.