Ivan Toney: Why Premier League clubs want Brentford’s latest success story
There are some clubs in football who have mastered the art of player identification. Brentford are one of them.
It has allowed them to sell the likes of Ollie Watkins, Saïd Benrahma and Neal Maupay for a combined £72million. The trio arrived at Griffin Park in deals reportedly worth £6.1million.
Maupay netted 25 goals in his second full season with the club before leaving for Brighton. Watkins replaced the Frenchman positionally as well as in terms of output, hitting 25 Championship goals during the 2019/20 campaign before his move to Aston Villa.
The Bees used £5million of the Watkins money to bring Ivan Toney to the club. The 25-year-old had bossed League One with Peterborough United, scoring 40 goals in 76 outings. Many clubs had been linked with him, even those in the Premier League, but it was Brentford who made the move.
The big question heading into the new season was whether or not the former Newcastle United youngster could make the step up and replace the goals scored by Watkins.
He’s rather emphatically answered that.
The No17 has netted 30 times in the Championship this season, a haul no other player can match. Toney has also chipped in with a further ten assists to take his total to 40 goal involvements in 44 appearances.
His form hasn’t gone unnoticed.
According to The Athletic, a host of clubs are scrambling to bring the 6ft2 centre-forward to the Premier League this summer. To pry him away from the club, a record fee would likely have to be paid. As it stands, the sale of Watkins to Villa for £30million tops the departure list.
With finances not what they were before the pandemic, the thought of spending in excess of £30million on a player with just two Premier League appearances to his name would be viewed as too much of a risk by some.
However, having a reliable goalscorer within your ranks can transform a mid-table club into one battling for European football. It can help a team evolve from Europa League level to Champions League standard.
Look at Villa. They escaped relegation by a single point last season and scored just 41 goals in total. With five games remaining this year, Dean Smith’s side have racked up 48 goals and are on course for a top-half finish. Furthermore, only six players can better Watkins’ total of 13 strikes.
Toney will be viewed as a high risk, high reward move by some.
However, in the right team, there’s very little risk at all. His output is transferable.
The 30-goal striker does take low-value efforts from outside of the area. He rarely hits the target with these efforts and he’s yet to score from distance. That can be coached out of him. What will likely appeal to Premier League clubs is his ability to be in the right place at the right time.
As evidenced in his shot map above, he’s scored a high number of his goals from within the six-yard box. Furthermore, a lot of his efforts arrive inside the central part of the area.
You don’t want to sign a player who is scoring unrepeatable goals. When it comes to strikers, you want consistency.
Toney is consistently in high-value areas. You can shape an attack around that. There are no guarantees in football, but if you have a striker who is in the right place at the right time, more often than not he’ll be amongst the goals.
His shot placement map also paints a positive picture. In a feature discussing the importance of this, we highlighted why hitting the corners isn’t always necessary. If you’re in a good position and close to goal, hitting a shot centrally is sometimes much more effective. Keepers struggle to react and they can’t get their feet sorted quick enough.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why so many of Toney’s goals have been scored in central parts of the net. As the shot map showed, he’s always fairly close to goal when taking the majority of his efforts.
In the right team, the 25-year-old could even eclipse what Watkins has achieved in his debut season in the Premier League.
All the graphics and visualisations in this article use Wyscout data and were produced in the Twenty3 Toolbox.
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