The Genius of Simplicity

The final end-of-season player review features Adam Idah. When less can be more.

The final player-focused end-of-season review article shines a light on the £9 million man – Adam Idah. A Brendan Rodgers special project, and a player with a very high ceiling in terms of potential and ability, according to the Brodge.

Idah has only recently become the starting striker at Celtic, and that is more through happenstance than design. Firstly, Kyogo Furuhashi was sold to perpetual purgatory in Rennes without replacement. Then, Filipe Jota was badly injured, forcing Daizen Maeda back to the left wing after scoring 11 goals in nine starts as a striker.

In Idah’s initial six months at the club, he averaged 42.58 minutes per appearance. This season, he averaged 44.72 minutes. So, in that sense, he appears no further forward in being the starting number nine.

Despite this, in pure goal terms, he is now on 29 goals for the club, in 72 appearances, but the equivalent of only 35.32 full 90 minutes. Impressive in any context.

This is starting to look like one of my favourite analysis starting points – the good ol’ conundrum!

In assessing Idah, I will only go back to the start of Ange Postecoglou’s reign. The reasoning being that stylistically, Postecoglou and Rodgers’s teams are what James might call “kissing cousins”. Similar enough to say that striker performance is within an adjacent context.

I have not included Maeda as a comparator, as we discussed yesterday, he has only started 21 matches as a striker.