It looks like one of the best midfielders of last season is available for around 60–80M. And it’s clear that Jurgen Klopp is willing to break Liverpool’s transfer record again to get his man. So, who is Naby Keita and why should Liverpool buy him ?

Who is Naby Keita ? He is 22 years old, guinean and plays for RB Leipzig, one of the smartest clubs in the world. What type of player is he ? Well, this is when things turn complicated. His statistical output is extremely rare, because he does so many things very well.

Let’s try to analytically arrive at Naby’s profile and find similar players. I’m crunching a database filled with the last 2 seasons from the big five leagues. What we are going to do is compare Naby’s season at Leipzig with the last 2 seasons of players that can operate at DMC, MC or AMC that played more than 1200 minutes. There are 1703 unique seasons from 1007 unique players like this.

Performance

All stats are per 90 minutes. This is amazing. Naby is hitting around 80–95 percentile for almost every attribute we are considering. For example, his 0.28 goals per game are at the 95 percentile, which means that they were better than 95 % of the seasons in the database.

Profile

First, let’s try clustering midfielders’ seasons using Hierarchical Clustering based on the offensive and defensive stats showed before: