The January Transfer Radar
Who might be on United's shortlist in the winter window?
Ben G is on the case again this transfer window, compiling shortlists for potential transfer targets for United to be looking at. If you’re a Coconut member, you’ll get this and Ben’s weekly match previews, plus his monthly Get Your Stats Right and Stat Pack features. Don’t miss out!
It’s that time of the year again... the transfer window! United finally get to sign some players to fill some gaps and address key issues in the squad. In this article I’ll run a few searches to try to come up with a couple of names that might be interesting to look at.
I’m trying to keep this as realistic as possible, so for example I won’t dedicate any time to looking at non-UK leagues since the chances of the club making any signings from abroad are very low, especially with GBE regulations. Even if I think the Finnish top flight Veikkausliiga and American second tier USL Championship are markets the club should look at, the reality is that we will almost certainly not sign someone from there – especially in January.
With that in mind, here are the leagues I’m mainly looking into:
League Two
National League
Irish Premier Division
Scottish Championship
These are leagues that are either relatively lateral or a little below League Two’s level. Of course, the club will know about options in League One or the Championship, but these might be players who are playing few minutes and thus are difficult to include in a data-driven discovery process. For ease, I’m going to look for players with at least 720 minutes this season in these 4 competitions. The club has recently looked in League One and League Two for January transfers, but now that we’re in League Two again, you’d think that might mean more National League options could be appealing.
I’ll also take a quick look into National League North and South to see if there may be any outliers, particularly younger players, that might be solid investments, as well as Premier League 2 to see if there’s maybe a striker or two that could be a fun loan prospect.
The most important thing to note here, of course, is that this is a fun article. While I’ll approach the player discovery in a methodical manner, I have no idea if any of these players might even be realistic. But of course, if Bonner signs anybody named in this article after it’s published, rest assured UTAS will be taking full credit...
Enough intro, let’s get into it. The 3 positions we’ll be looking for players are:
Striker (possibly 2 of them even – this is the real focus)
Winger
Left Back
Strikers
Overall, I’m going to be using an app I created that allows us to find and analyze player performances. So, if you enjoy this article and want to look for other players, feel free to play around with it! The key feature in the app I like to use for something like this is the Player Search function. This allows you to select a position and then set minimum targets for players to meet in different areas of the game. For example, a minimum number of shots per game, or xG, or cross success rate, etc.
For the strikers, I wanted to find players who are able to get into the box and/or have decent movement to get on the end of crosses, do not need an invitation to shoot, and are good finishers to boot.
