I wrote extensively on Liam Scales in the Celtic Way last week. They have an incredible offer of only £1 a month for six months. The other writers are really strong, so I recommend it.
It is always a challenge to come up with a compelling view that might tell a story that accurately reflects a player's overall worth to the team.
I picked the following view up from a data vendor sight that is plugging their toolset on X. They are a bit “clickbaity” so won’t mention them but will happily steal their idea. Thems the breaks! (Ach, they are called “Data MB”).
Back to Scales and centre-backs.
Assessing defenders, like goalkeepers, is not as easy as attackers as I have mentioned many times. Also, to communicate, we tend to be reductive in the data presented to not confuse and overwhelm.
The following maps two facets – aerial duel win percentage and average pack pass score. Passin’ and heidin’. The reason I found this interesting is that intuitively we think of centre-backs as either being big, strong, and commanding, or smaller and good with the ball.
Absolutely an oversimplification but what do recent centre-backs look like in terms of having a foot in both those camps?
Aerial Strength + Ball Progression
This covers those with over 900 minutes in a season since 2017-18.

The most interesting aspect of this view is not the individual players so much as what it tells us about how the style of play has evolved over the last six seasons.
When Christopher Julien was at his peak, I was waxing lyrically on here about this aerially dominant eagle who also passed the ball forward through the lines! What sorcery!
Many of us considered Kristopher Ajer a ball-playing centre-back during his time.
But even Matt Phillips played more line-breaking pack passes than those.
Indeed, the far right of the graph, indicating a high volume of pack passes belongs to centre-backs from the last three seasons.
Brendan Rodgers-ball mark 2 is indeed more like Ange-ball than Rodgers-ball mark 1!
At least as regards how the defenders play. Stephen Welsh was a revelation in 2020-21 under Neil Lennon when he broke the 10 pack passes per match mark.
Now Liam Scales is averaging over 16.
The current centre-backs are highlighted in green and whilst both Scales and Welsh are adept at moving the ball forwards, they are amongst the lowest in aerial duel success. This view highlights neatly why buying Moritz Jenzm made no sense when you had Welsh in the squad.
We can see top top-right is where Cameron Carter-Vickers has his domain and is very much “the best of both worlds”. Aerially dominant and capable of moving the ball forward.
This is not earth-shattering, but I wanted to share a view that can help to profile candidates and remove some of the data noise, focusing on two core competencies.
But it also tells us that team style is very important, and a player may profile a certain way because of instruction as opposed to simply capabilities.