Marco Bustos is currently the hottest free agent on the CanPL market.

Over the coming weeks, attacking midfielder Marco Bustos is set to make a decision between his hometown club Valour FC, who he spent the 2019 season with, and Vancouver Island’s Pacific FC. While he started the 2019 season slowly, having been a late addition to Rob Gale’s team, Bustos grew into the league and ultimately ended the season as comfortably one of the best players in the league.

While some reports suggest that Bustos has already picked Pacific FC, which would certainly make sense considering his recent social media activity, higher-level reports suggest that he is yet to make his final decision. Either way, it’s likely that Bustos will become one of the league’s highest-paid players.

Marco Bustos is a player with a serious skill set, and despite being similar in both height, position, and style of play to fellow Valour teammates such as Dylan Sacramento and Dylan Carreiro, Bustos was able to stand out above the rest as Valour’s most important player and arguably their best one too.

Let’s take a deeper look at his strengths, weaknesses, and potential, as we judge whether or not he is deserving of being the highest-paid player in the Canadian Premier League:

Bustos is a machine in the final third and is almost unplayable when he’s on his game.

If you take a look at Marco Bustos’ stats for the 2019 season, they were underwhelming in the Spring season and rather excellent in the Fall. As I mentioned earlier, he joined Valour very late-on in a deal that was difficult to complete, and therefore he never quite got the chance to have a pre-season or get to know his teammates and playing system before getting thrown into the deep end. Bustos had 1 goal and 0 assists in 7 Spring season matches, but bagged an impressive 6 goals and 3 assists in 18 games in the fall, although 2 of his goals were penalties.

It’s true that Valour weren’t exactly cohesive or fluid throughout the season, meaning they probably did not get the best out of Bustos overall, but the 23-year-old still managed to display his quality on a weekly basis and single-handedly carry Valour’s final third play often.

Bustos does his best work in the attacking third of the pitch, and he was often Valour’s main source of creativity from those positions. Even when he started on the right-wing, Bustos would cut inside and play a more central role, which is where he thrives on the pitch. Despite this, I wouldn’t classify Bustos as a “playmaker” or “creator”, since his main trait is making dangerous runs and finding the back of the net, rather than setting up teammates – although he isn’t half bad at the latter either. He is simply someone who wants to be on the ball, and his quick feet and bursts of speed from still positions make him a tricky customer in 1v1 situations.

He isn’t just effective in the final third, however. All season long, Valour were a dangerous team in attacking transition, and the play of Marco Bustos was a big part of it. As I mentioned earlier, he is always looking to get on the ball, and passing the ball into space is certainly one of his biggest strengths, and players like Petrasso and Paolucci were able to feast off of it regularly. When Bustos has the ball in transition with attackers making runs in behind ahead of him – watch out.

In terms of his positions, Bustos is most suited to the number 10 role, just behind the striker, but can also play as a right-winger in a few different formations. Despite playing most of the season as a 10 or right-winger, Bustos even put in some good performances when he was played as a right midfielder in a 3-4-3 and a striker in a 4-2-3-1. As long as he is playing in a role where he sees a lot of the ball and has space on his left foot to cut into dangerous areas, Bustos can perform.

Fitness levels are another strength of Marco Bustos. He was reliable for Valour all season long, picking up no significant injuries, which was crucial at times since Michael Petrasso was in-and-out of the medical room. Bustos also has a high intensity to his game, which goes hand-in-hand with his fitness, meaning he can influence the game throughout the 90 minutes and press the opposition effectively as well.

Despite his boatload of strengths, Bustos does have some weaknesses that he won’t be able to shake off.

The worst types of weaknesses, not just in football but in anything, are the ones that you can’t do anything about. Unfortunately for Marco Bustos, a few of these make up his weaknesses, although not enough to seriously hinder his career.

Anyone who has watched Marco Bustos will have noticed his extreme one-footedness. He will never, ever use his right foot unless absolutely necessary, and when it is necessary, he will either screw it up with his right foot or try and make something happen with his left, which ultimately fails. This, in my opinion, is his biggest flaw by a country mile. On many occasions last season, Bustos had glorious opportunities to pass or shoot the ball with his right foot, and he would squander them nearly every single time.

For many players, being this one-footed would make them extremely predictable and ineffective. Bustos is predictable most of the time due to this one-footedness, but since he possesses immense skill and quickness in tight spaces, it doesn’t make him ineffective.

For example, if Bustos is running at a defender 1 on 1 and is aiming to find some space behind him, is he going to cut to the left, or to the right? Of course, to the left. I know this, you know this, Bustos knows this, and his defender knows it too. However, since he has other skills in his locker like I mentioned before, more often than not, he is still able to go around the player completely or pull off a pass or shot once he takes a touch to the left and finds a bit of space.

This also happens regularly when Bustos has the ball around the edge of the box when the opposition has defenders back in numbers – a regular occurrence. Similar to Lionel Messi, you know he’s going to cut in onto his left, but you can’t quite stop him. Of course, I’m not comparing Bustos to Messi closely, but the two do tend to get shooting opportunities in the same areas and have similar styles of play. Unfortunately for Bustos, even when you scale the comparison down to CanPL level, he doesn’t have as good a right foot or as good a finish as Messi!

#3 in the CPL Top 10 Goals of the season countdown goes to Marco Bustos for his finessed shot against Forge FC#CanPL pic.twitter.com/aBzP08r6P2 — CanPL (@CPLsoccer) December 30, 2019

The goal linked above is a clear example of Bustos’ one-footedness (cuts in onto his left), but how his quality on the ball doesn’t let it hinder him. Here, he creates space with a touch to his left and fires off a shot.

Unfortunately for Bustos, the time to train his right foot is long gone, and his only choice now is to play to his strengths.

All in all, Bustos is a strong player at this level, but it isn’t the end of the world if Valour can’t keep ahold of him.

Bustos is also a player you could call “luxury”. In other words, he can be the icing on the cake for a title-contending team. Valour certainly were not that in 2019, and likely won’t be in 2020.

Despite Bustos doing a lot for Rob Gale’s team in the attacking third, having him in the team would often hinder them defensively. Perhaps him moving on would not be the end of the world for Valour, as it could allow them to build a more functional, structured midfield with strong foundations. They also could manage to find a more balanced attacking player that can reproduce Bustos’ 2019 output if they look in the right places.

If Marco Bustos does land with Pacific FC, then it will likely go down as the biggest intra-league move this off-season in the Canadian Premier League. At just 23, Bustos can hit a new level over the course of the next few years, as he looks to propel his career onto bigger and better things while getting back into the national team picture.

I personally don’t think he deserves to be the highest-paid player in the league since he does have some significant weaknesses that are difficult to overlook sometimes, but if that’s what it takes to land him, then so be it. Bustos is a high-end player at this level of football, and you don’t find players like him everywhere you look.

While it seems more and more likely that Bustos will leave Valour, neutral CanPL fans should feel grateful that they’ll get to see him play in their league for another year.

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Mahith Gamage Website An avid football fan right from his first experiences with the sport, Mahith Gamage has been dabbling in football journalism for a few years now, creating his own world football blog and podcast, freeflow football, whilst featuring frequently on many other football media outlets, covering European football. With the start of the Canadian Premier League in 2019, Mahith began coverage of his hometown club, Valour FC, through NSXI. He enjoys spreading his knowledge and opinions of the beautiful game to fellow football fanatics in Canada and throughout the world, using articles and tweets, thriving particularly on tactical analysis and player scouting. You can find him tweeting about world football day and night, at @mahithgamage.

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