EMERGENCY STRIKER BENCHMARKING!!!

Kvistgaarden vs Idah

Given how big the news is today, I am sending this out to all subscribers - thank you to everyone who has been supporting our new platform.

As a quick reminder, this is an exercise to try and ascertain players’ potential relative strengths and weaknesses within the peer groups I create. These are available on the site for all new signings and often many of the more prominent rumored ones.

With Kyogo Furuhashi apparently on his way to Rennes, I’ve had to put this together pretty quickly - had done some benchmarking of Mathias Kvistgaarden in August 2023 and shared on Twitter at the time, but with Twitter becoming a horror show (in multiple ways), I have been unable to search within the site/app to locate.

That left me scrambling to look back through spreadsheets, when I realized that Kvistgaarden was part of the age-based peer group I had created as part of benchmarking Adam Idah when we signed him on loan last January.

The peer group covered the same trailing 12-month period as of the beginning of February 2024, and was for forwards with 2,000+ minutes aged between 20 to 23 at the time. Here was the thread on Twitter where I reviewed Idah.

I have liked Kvistgaarden’s profile since I first looked at him, and commented at the time that his profile was in the neighborhood of Florian Wirtz, while obviously accounting for the disparity of leagues/levels at which each player performed, respectively.

We see with this comparison that Kvistgaarden has offered a far more robust profile at Brondby compared to Idah’s time at Norwich. Once again, the difference in leagues is important to consider.

His proxies for decision making were pretty good and athletically robust for not being as big as Idah. I think he profiles far more as an all-around forward, or even as a #10 or an attacking 8 within our system, assuming we retain 4-3-3.

With that being the potential good news, here is the bad - I will be pleasantly surprised if we are able to sign him. We had three windows of opportunity in which he was rumored as a target, with reporting from August 2023 that a deal fell apart around £4 million and we pivoted to Luis Palma. Kvistgaarden then sustained a significant injury making the January 2023 window understandably questionable, and we obviously signed Idah last summer.

German clubs like RB Leipzig and Eintracht Frankfurt are also rumored to be linked. With that level of competition, securing his move to Celtic may be challenging.

If he ends up going to a Big 5 league, here’s hoping there was a robust process which helped identify Kvistgaarden that has other comparable profiles at the ready vs what appears to have happened last summer.