At some point, we will need to replace Eriksen. If an offer was made to swap Maguire (30m), Elanga (25m) & McTominay/Fred (30-35m) + 15m for Bellingham, we'd take it. Why? It's replacing less productive assets with a more productive ones. He's good, we can afford him, he'll fit our system & he has everything in him to make it "great". We should take him without batting an eye.
City has Gundogan, which imho, similar type to Bellingham.
Hopefully not. We need a playmaker far more.
Which club are a more attractive proposition than us today? Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham are all struggling to make Champions League places, Newcastle is still speculative, City have their own FFP issues, and Arsenal cannot compete with us financially. Dortmund probably don't want to sell to Bayern, Bayern are unlikely to pay the asking fee, and they anyway have a strong midfield (that's why they let Sabitzer leave), Juve are in a mess, Barca are struggling with FFP, Real Madrid have a really strong midfield, maybe PSG could be an option, but I would guess that if we wanted Bellingham, we would be right at the front of the queue.
From what we know, if Liverpool had the money and were in the CL next season, he'd probably go there. Klopp has been tapping him up for ages. The money may yet happen once they get sold.
Not sure Bellingham is an ideal replacement for Eriksen, very different kind of midfielder. I think you'd still need a deeper playmaker alongside him, as well as a DM. His defensive stats aren't great and he's more of a ball carrier than a passer. If you're going to compare him to one player in our team it would probably be Fred... although he's obviously better than that. He doesn't have the defensive side to his game to be Casemiro, not yet anyway.
Madrid's midfield is struggling, not that I think he's the solution.
FDJ or Bellingham I guess these are the big recruitment calls which will ultimately determine our managers success here long term. Have to go with him just based on his showing so far seems to get a lot of them right. Antony would be the ? mark I guess in terms of his cost vs worth to the team but plenty of time for him to flourish yet. I still think we need quality cover for Case as well this summer but the Brighton lad I wanted seems too spendy.
I think they are quite far apart. Jude is box2box, gundogan is a normal CM, he can dictate play where Jude cannot.
Agree with everything you said.
A box2box can dictate play, they're not mutually exclusive. Scholes played as box2box, don't remember him having any problems dictating. And Bellingham already does it for BVB. Unless you think it's Emre Can or Salih Ozcan who do it for them.
This is the quandary. As a number 8 alongside Casemiro we are better off with a deep lying playmaker like FDJ, and as a 10 we have Bruno, and when we replace him, I would prefer someone like Musiala rather than a Bellingham. A bit like Haaland, he does very well at Dortmund in the German league, but we would have to alter our style of play to accommodate him, and I doubt ETH would want to do that.
We can have different opinions, but can we make the criticism vaguely realistic and based on some semblance of facts?
Scholes was never a b2b, he was a CM or at times an AM or DLP.
That's a box2box, fam. We played 4-4-2 and 2-man midfields back then. There was no dedicated AM or DLP. That's what Scholes was doing, popping up everywhere, including helping in defence.
Salih Ozcan has 30% less passes per 90 than Bellingham, despite being the deeper player of the two. He does some things better, like defending and holding position. But dictating play is not one of them.
I think you'd struggle to find someone who supports that theory, but I don't know. Maybe that's just me
That is not a b2b, a b2b is someone who carries the ball forward and does a lot of hard work.
What makes you think Bellingham is overrated? I haven't really seen that much of him apart from when he plays for England.
A b2b is someone who covers from box to box. Being versatile, assisting in defence and taking part in the offence. It's not strictly about ball carrying ability at all. Scholes is in many publications' list of best box-to-box midfielders of all time.
Fam, you yourself called those guys DLPs. The P stands for playmaker. But you tell me Playmaker and DLP are quite different.
He just doesn’t have elite level ball ability for my money. He’s got a great attitude and engine, and good talent - but he becomes overrated when I’m told his value is 120m.
I feel like Bellingham would be perfect if we were trying to upgrade on Fernandes — I.E. our furthest forward midfielder of the three. It looks like he does his best work in the final third of the opponents area of the field - goals, assists, industry in a forward thinking sense. That would be nice, but I feel like we need the central midfielder who does his best work in the middle field - buildup phase. Like Rozay I think Frenkie ticks so many boxes in that sense
That’s exactly why we don’t need him. We need a playmaker far more - of the Modric, Scholes etc ilk (not quality as we won’t find that) than we need someone who excels in take one from midfield. If we want to spend a fortune on him then get rid of Bruno.Hope this helps you guys in your assessments!
1. CIES lists him as attacking midfielder player type.
Quote: Jude Bellingham (Borussia Dortmund) tops the ranking for attacking midfielders, i.e. midfielders mainly active in two attacking areas.
Source: here
Btw, they estimate him at a whopping € 211M.
User opinion driven estimate is at "up to € 250M" even, see here.
This is Jude's profile: here
As can be seen, he does overwhelmingly good in the attacking departments.
Perhaps intesting for you, he mostly featured as left CM/ LAM over the span of their data collection, which further isolates him from anyone close to his normed ranking points. (It is also why the notion of "stacked midfield at Real Madrid" is rather useless, as his profile is not currently present there.)
2. CIES also lists him as shot-oriented attacking midfielder in their "global rankings of take-on players", i.e. "players who have performed best in the area of take on over the past year", where he's 12th. Source: here.
Him and Foden top the list; but, again, "collected over a year". With him on an upwards and Foden on a downwards trajectory, you get the point: he's a threat.
Admittedly, Dortmund stress this out, as he's their target man for several high xG book plays, plus a decent chunk of corners. Yet, subtracting that still leaves you with a high impact attacking midfielder - at 19 which is no age.
À propos high impact: This is CIES+Wyscout's normed impact ranking. Two DMs and four CMs ahead of him, old and/or different players types. A 96 compared to Modric's 100 sheds light on how immensely good he is.
TLDR:
Data collected, compared and normed suggest he's among the global elite of attacking midfielders.
His offensive impact as abstracted by CIES metric suggests that as well.
Combined with his age/ expected number of years ahead of him, as well as his uniqueness of left-side-tendencies among the few peers there are, the profile you get makes him the most sought-after player, and rightly so.
The clue is in the name “box to box”, someone who gets around and up and down the pitch - think Fletcher, early Roy Keane, Bryan Robson was the epitome of box to box. Not necessarily to carry the ball forward but popping up in spaces to hurt the opposition or tackling back, filling in, a bit of everything
Hi.
Matthaus and Falcao in the past were B2B, but they also did playmaking.
Caceido is a DM, we have Casemiro for that. Jude is the Eriksen replacement. He can definitely play as the 8 in our team. We need creativity and Jude has that.
Like feck is he an upgrade on Bruno
Get both as case ain’t getting any younger and caceido couldn’t be much better than learn from him for a year or two
Likely too expensive for a Casemiro understudy. Brighton rejected 75m for him, no? Unless Qataris buy us and go on a spending spree, then I don’t expect us to invest >150m in the DM position alone in the space of 12 months.
He’s not. They don’t even play the same position, BVB play Reus at #10.
