El Gato
Villarato!
Immediate increase in chances created by a static side on raw talent and bravery. Multiple teams at all levels unable to contain him consistently basically being at the mercy of his bad final pass/touch/finish. Being a generally great substitute whenever called upon, often when not really expected to. Mental resilience to media scrutiny demonstrated for over 2 years despite the volume of mistakes and lack of polish in some aspects (which he does make slow and subtle improvements in). Several intangibles that you can point to that other players in his generation do not have.
As for tangibles.. just finding some stats to back up the assessment (league only for now).
Let me preface this by saying, I think Fati is at the moment a more well rounded player. But then again so is Rodrygo. So is Ferran Torres. So are most young wingers who are decent at most things, but don't stand out consistently in many meaningful ways.
I also agree Vinicius needs to get better at producing from his position to be considered to be as good individually as Fati right now. But that doesn't mean Fati, or any other player is as impactful to the team performance. Anyone that watches Barca since start of last season can say that a good Barcelona performance is not directly connected with Fati presence, which for all intents and purposes proves he doesn't have the kind of presence to warrant considering him a constant threat like you would with other types of player. I'm pretty sure I've seen correlations floating around the interwebz indicating as much. I'll try to dig them up.
Vinicius on the other hand came into the team barren on the left wing after CR and was immediately the biggest offensive threat on the basis of intangibles and our manager(s) often preferring him over other choices, including a world-class polished player like Bale. You always know when he's on the field, for better and worse. You'll barely find a match where he played well but didn't manage to make a relatively high xG chance that he or another player should score. Part of it being of course that if he doesn't play well he's an all-round net negative and is usually subbed off. On the assumption that with time he learns to kick the ball with even 20% more consistency, he'll be head and shoulders the most impactful of the current crop of wingers and unless there's some late bloomer who's not nearly on the radar right now, he'll be the best of the lot. But in my view you'll struggle to compare anyone here. So let's focus on those that were named.
a) Fati.
Following compares their games only at the LW, all normalised per 90 mins of football (here called attacking left midfielder - AML, or left forward FWL).
First one? Bigger numbers for Fati all around everywhere but 'expected goals per 90'. Which doesn't always mean better numbers, but in many cases it of course does.
xGChain = measure of how often a player is involved in an action leading to a shot (guys like Messi, Lewa or Kimmich are bound to score high; metric prioritises forwards)
xGBuildup = the opposite, kind of; a measure how often a player is involved in an action that doesn't (necessarily) lead to assist/goal (guys like Thiago, Alonso, Rakitić or even defenders can score as high as forwards)
More on them here - https://statsbomb.com/2018/08/introducing-xgchain-and-xgbuildup/
So what do we see in games where they start at LW? That Fati is better at:
- producing passes that usually, providing a competent striker, would end in assists
- has more assists
- happening to be more involved (not by much) in high-quality goalscoring chances
- being more involved in buildup (which doesn't mean he's got more quality there)
- producing marginally more key passes
What is Vinicius (arguably) better at:
- shooting more
- creating more high quality chances for himself; while Fati is possibly taking more shots from difficult positions dragging his xG down - I personally don't see this based on the map below; the only thing I do see is what we know - Vini misses more sitters
Uncanny how it's almost exactly the opposite when they're both subs. The only other highlight in the sub scenario is that Vinicius xG and S90 absolute numbers don't change drastically. In fact all this data experiment shows is that both are better at different things and one is better used a starter than the other, but both are more than capable subs.
Hence my use of the word 'impact'.
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