Replacing Elliot Anderson - Part 2

In this instalment, we'll look at some players based outside of the UK, who are decent bets to replicate Anderson's work rate out of possession.

You can read Part 1 of this series - focussing on options based in England - here!

Finding a replacement for Britain’s most expensive player is never going to be an easy task - Part 2 of this series, I’ll be looking at some options who are perhaps best suited to give Forest the activity and work-rate off the ball that they’re going to miss now Anderson’s move to Man City is virtually done.

Leon Avdullahu - 22 - TSG Hoffenheim

The first option we’ll look at here is Kosovan international Leon Avdullahu, who played nearly 3,000 minutes in his first Bundesliga campaign after moving from FC Basel last summer.

The first thing that sticks out here is those large blue slices that look at the success and quantity of Avdullahu’s defensive actions. He’s a very active player, something we can definitely relate to when watching Anderson over the past two seasons.

Avdullahu it seems is more likely to make interceptions on opposition passes, but it does look as though he’s doing his defensive work in lower-danger areas, evidenced by the lower score for Blocking Shots and in my personally developed Threat Prevented metric.

We can see for the most part when looking at his overall position profile, Avdullahu is a fairly similar type of player in that he gets involved in lots of different areas of the game.

There’s a couple of concerns, mainly Avdullahu’s lack of experience at the highest level, and that for the most part he has been asked to play on the right side the midfield, when we know that Anderson tends to operate on the left side and that’s the spot that is open in Forest’s midfield.

It should also be noted that despite Avdullahu having a very high amount of defensive actions - he isn’t necessarily the strongest in 1 v 1 duels, this is an area that Anderson has improved in during his time at Forest. Instead, Avdullahu’s defensive numbers come primarily from his ability to intercept & recover possession, something we are familiar with in Anderson’s game.

On the bright side, even though Avdullahu does play most of his minutes on the right of midfield, he still receives most of his passes on the left hand side of the pitch. This suggests he’d be comfortable in moving over to the left if Forest were to sign him.

Despite only joining Hoffenheim last summer, they were so impressed with his debut season that he signed a new deal in April and extended his deal to 2031. For that reason, Hoffenheim won’t feel much pressure to sell, meaning if a team showed interest they’d likely have to fork out somewhere around £30m for his services.

Chema Andrés - 21 - VFB Stuttgart

Staying in the Bundesliga, young Spanish midfielder Chema Andrés joined Stuttgart from giants Real Madrid for a bargain fee of just €3 million. He’s already proven that he’s worth way more than that, so let’s dig in to why.