There are never guarantees of success with any transfer, no matter from which club a player is purchased. But one thing Liverpool’s signings this summer all lack is Premier League experience.
As Darwin Nunez has shown he can thrive in the Champions League – not least against the Reds themselves – then he should be able to cope with English football. Calvin Ramsay has spent his career north of the border, but he will be eased into the first team as back-up to Trent Alexander-Arnold so has time on his side.
It will be interesting to see how Fabio Carvalho fares. He made four Premier League appearances when Fulham were in the top flight in 2020/21. On his first start he scored, and showed a willingness to press which few players have matched. Whether he can perform regularly at Liverpool’s level remains to be seen though.
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The Reds’ transfer analysts will have a method of estimating how a player’s statistics are likely to be affected by a move to the Premier League. Research suggests Carvalho can expect his expected goals to drop by 17 percent, for instance, though playing for one of the best teams in Europe should help negate that to some extent.
Liverpool have also signed a player within the last two years who makes for a decent comparison with their new number 28. Carvalho turns 20 next month and Diogo Jota was that age at the start of his sole season in the Championship with Wolves, in 2017/18.
Sam McGuire of Twenty3 recently shared a statistical radar which overlaid Carvalho’s statistics from last season over Jota’s from four years earlier. While not identical there were clear similarities in certain areas.
Some of the differences between the players were to be expected, thanks to the different positions in which they played. As a forward, Jota took more shots and scored more goals while Carvalho the attacking midfielder had the greater impact on the creative side of the game.
However, many might have assumed that the Wolves man took more touches in the opposition box, or that the Fulham player would have been the stronger dribbler, but neither was the case. Perhaps the most thought-provoking metric is the one for which they were most similar: post-shot expected goals.
This suggests their finishing was of similar standard, which in turn implies Carvalho might have been unfortunate not to score a goal or two more than he did. Nonetheless, his record of 0.33 goals per 90 minutes against 0.32 expected shows his overall tally of 10 was fully justified.
And this meant he scored over twice as many goals as any other teenager in the Championship in 2021/22. As fascinating as that is, it is in the past. What matters now for Liverpool is what their new signing ( who has been called a “perfect player” by Harvey Elliott ) will offer them in future.
He should hold an advantage over Jota. As well as Wolves did in their first campaign back in the top flight, finishing as the best of the rest behind the established big six clubs, Carvalho will be playing with better players in a stronger team.
In other words, he’s skipping a step. Jota went from averaging 0.34 expected goals per 90 in his first two Premier League seasons with Wolves to 0.59 across his first two years with Liverpool, an improvement of over 70 percent. The Portuguese international will have matured and developed as a player in the intervening years but being supplied chances by the likes of Alexander-Arnold and Mohamed Salah will obviously have played a part too.
If Carvalho hits the ground running as swiftly as Jota did, it will be yet another success story for Liverpool and their talent identification process. That might be a little too much for Kopites to hope for but his comparable record at Championship level certainly bodes well.
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