Talent, naturally, is a huge indicator when assessing whether a player will make the step up to a higher level of football.
Manchester City clearly believe Elliot Anderson can manage it after agreeing to pay Nottingham Forest £116million for the England midfielder’s services.
But how do recruiting teams judge whether players will be able to transfer their skills when moving to a club nearer the top of the game’s food chain? And, for the players, what are the difficulties they face following such a transfer?
“From a scouting live or video perspective, the key matter is if the things they do in a game are replicable at any level,” says one head of recruitment, who, like others quoted in this article, is speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“One example is Eberechi Eze; the strong points of his game on loan at Wycombe Wanderers (in the 2017-18 season, when a Queens Park Rangers player) are the same thing he’s doing now at Arsenal. It is the way he can take players on, the way he could stand players up and isolate them one-v-one. It didn’t matter who you were, he just made the game look so simple.”
“It’s less about how dominant a player is at their current level and more about whether they’ve got attributes to transfer that to the next level,” says a senior former coach at a Premier League club.
He’s a Premier League champion with Arsenal now, but Eberechi Eze played in the fourth tier with Wycombe as a youngster (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
“I look at decision-making, how quickly they process the game, whether they can execute technically under pressure and if they’ve got the athletic profile to cope when the game becomes quicker and more demanding.”
According to two senior scouts who either have worked or are working at Premier League clubs, possessing a ‘super-strength’ is one distinct indicator of whether a player can translate their qualities to higher levels. Provided they are at a suitable age — their best years in front of them — and malleable enough to be refined, that super-strength should be effective at a bigger club.
“Virgil van Dijk’s super-strengths when he was in the Netherlands (at Groningen) are the same that saw him be successful in Scotland (with Celtic), and he just built on it since (with Southampton and Liverpool),” says a recruitment head. “Sadio Mane (RB Salzburg of Austria to Southampton to Liverpool to Bayern Munich) was a similar one — his pressing, transitional ability and killing teams with his finishing — were transferable if you played to those strengths. There’s just certain traits that you can see, and go, ‘It doesn’t matter what level that happens, you’re not stopping that’.”
Given the increased demands of playing at the top, including the scrutiny and the volume of matches in the Premier League and Europe, assessing a player’s physical output is essential.
One example given by a recruitment figure is Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai, who joined them from RB Leipzig of Germany three years ago. Although he had experience playing in European competitions, the heightened challenges at Anfield were obvious. Yet the recruitment figure says Szoboszlai was already “an elite technician, with good base levels”, which complemented his “match-winning ability/star man mentality”. Since then, he has been able to develop physically.
A leading Scottish Premiership club are among several who receive ratings based on a transfer target’s technical and ‘confidence’ levels. The latter refers partly to how many minutes the individual has played. If it’s a lot, their self-confidence increases.
One drawback to specific data processes is a bias against players at a lower level. They may rank poorly on intensity metrics, for instance, not accounting for the fact that this could be a consequence of operating down the divisions, which either suggests he does not need to increase his intensity, or has not been asked to.
“Another good example would be someone like Charlie Austin (who rose from non-League after being released by Reading as a youngster to play six seasons in the Premier League with QPR, Southampton and West Bromwich Albion),” says a head of recruitment. “OK, he never went to a big club, but the way he finished chances and had that instinct around the box, he was the type of striker that went through the levels so easily. All his actions were very repeatable, provided he was in teams that found the right chances for him.
“Sometimes that’s the important bit for scouts. It’s not all, ‘He’s a really good player’, ‘He’s a really bad player’. It’s also the style that gets the best out of the player.”
As with any signing, the school of thought is that data is effective if used to inform a club’s decision to recruit a player from a lower division, not to dictate.
“I only ever use it to support what I’m seeing,” says a scout. “It’s not to make the decision for me. Certain metrics like duel success, progressive actions, ball recoveries or chance creation can all help build the picture.
“But the question I always come back to is: if I put this player into a higher-level environment tomorrow, what parts of their game would still stand out? If they’ve got those transferable qualities, they’ve got a chance.”
Other ingredients influence judgement: technical or tactical factors, or intangibles, such as a player’s character.
Background checks are usually completed, but gauging if a player, say, joining one of the big teams from a mid-table Premier League club, is mentally robust enough to deal with the increased scrutiny has no proven formula. The extra limelight impacts several aspects of a transfer’s success: raised expectations, media attention, tougher training demands and, of course, the possible burden of being weighed down by a hefty price tag.
The pressure to perform immediately can be consuming.
Where previously a star player may be treated as the big fish in a smaller pond, there is genuine competition for places at their new side.
In the cases of Jack Grealish leaving Aston Villa for Manchester City and Ross Barkley going from Everton to Chelsea, both amassed a Roy of the Rovers kind of reputation at their boyhood club. When they signed elsewhere, however, they became like any other player in the squad.
“When I moved to Chelsea, I had the difficulty of being on the bench,” Barkley tells The Athletic. “From childhood to then, I’ve never, ever been on the bench. At 19, I was a starter (for Everton). But at Chelsea, I was getting 60 minutes here, 30 minutes there. I then had all the doubts I wouldn’t have had before. You’re not guaranteed to play if you don’t perform.”
“I see a lot of players come into this club and, quite frankly, it’s just too big for them,” Harry Maguire told reporters in April. Manchester United paid Leicester City £85million for Maguire in 2019, making him the world’s most expensive defender.
“The eyes on you, the scrutiny, the analysis. Every goal that goes in, it’s someone’s fault. There’s going to be ex-players speaking about it. That’s just part and parcel,” he added of life at Old Trafford.
“I always look for players who respond well to setbacks, take information on board and keep wanting to learn,” says the former Premier League coach. “They tend to have the best chance of making the jump.”
Harry Maguire knows playing for Manchester United isn’t for everybody (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Playing for a ‘big team’ expected to be the protagonists in most matches is another consideration.
Maguire could be found wanting in specific match-ups, largely whenever United pressed high and left him, having sat in a deeper block at Leicester and played in a back three for England, needing to cover large spaces and defending against transitions. This magnified his mobility, a perceived weak area.
“Clearly, there is a positional aspect at play,” explains another Premier League scout. “For a centre-back, how do they deal with physical confrontation or increased one-v-one scenarios? For a striker, now with less time, what is their speed off the mark or alertness like? For a midfielder, it is geared on distance covered, strength in duels and accuracy of passing.”
Now at City, Anderson will have more touches and need to make more passes than he was accustomed to at Forest, so his overall play will have to be slightly different. The 23-year-old, currently playing at the World Cup with England, will face low-block opponents routinely, with the onus on him to produce line-breaking passes in congested areas. This is in contrast to much of what he experienced at his previous club, who based their attacking structure on sitting deep before breaking quickly.
Generally speaking, Anderson will encounter similar challenges at City to Grealish, who joined them five years ago also in a British-record transfer.
Even under new head coach Enzo Maresca, stylistic parallels will remain with how City played for the past decade under Pep Guardiola. The emphasis on positional play, controlled possession and negating transitional opportunities. For Anderson and Grealish, there was an acceptance at their previous clubs to be reactive, recognising space appearing and then passing or dribbling into it.
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“It’s so different to what I was used to at Villa,” Grealish told Sky Sports in 2023 about adjusting to City’s game. “(Villa manager Dean Smith would say) ‘Go and find where you think the weak link is in the defence. If you want to go right, in the middle (or) hug the touchline’.”
Players have to refine their skill sets to adapt to new tactical challenges. It relates back to having a ‘super-strength’ which can be relied on.
When Andy Robertson left Hull City for Liverpool in 2017, the left-back learnt that he had to be more repeatable with his crossing, considering he was now being presented with more opportunities to deliver balls into the box.
“I need to concentrate more on what I do in the final third. At Hull, I would maybe have two attacks in the whole match, whereas now I’ll have 10,” Robertson told reporters, six months after his move. “When I played with Hull in the Premier League it was more about defending whereas, on my Liverpool debut, I had more touches than anyone on the pitch.”
The glare will only intensify once Anderson returns from the World Cup and begins life at City.
A breadth of challenges will be presented to players in such circumstances, but ones their new employers, through data and character checks, will be confident they can overcome.
