Opposition Transfer Tracking

Volume I - Glasgow 49e...Rangers

I decided to be more pro-active in analyzing the signings of Rangers and Hearts this window given the material changes in control within their football operations ahead of the upcoming season. In the recent past I have consolidated a review of Rangers’ window into a single exercise, with last summer’s here.

In that summary, I speculated a fair bit about the potential suitability of two players in particular, Cerny and Bajrami, relative to a reorientation in their style of play to better suit breaking down bunkered domestic opponents.

WRONG!!!

Thankfully, Philippe Clement was not terribly adept at navigating various squad limitations due to injuries, and ended up playing Bajrami at the #10 position within his 4-2-3-1 only about 30% of his minutes, with the vast majority of his minutes played out wide. That was the opposite of how his time in Serie A was distributed.

This speaks to the importance of aligning player profiles, strengths vs weaknesses, team game models, and roles within all of that context - insert footballing rocket scientist Barry Ferguson playing, when he saw fit to at all, Hamza Igamane out wide as another example.

My assumption with the new Rangers regime and hiring of Russell Martin has been they would have a pretty clear alignment with recruitment and how the manager plays. This not to suggest they will necessarily be great or even good in talent acquisition, but given how Leeds have operated, this is my first chance to “test” that assumption.

It is within this context that I present the first two players to be reviewed, Max Aarons and Joe Rothwell.

Thanks to valuable constructive feedback from Alan, I have restructured how I present these graphics and broken them out into labeled groupings: