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With a lot of Premier League teams needing a new striker in the coming months, a big opportunity has arisen with Nicolò Tresoldi being wanted by big clubs such as Chelsea and Arsenal. Now in this article, we are going to talk about why he could be suited for Premier League teams at this level and just what to expect if someone does take the gamble and snap this guy up in a couple of months’ time.
Now, Tresoldi might be a player that people are not necessarily aware of, but he does play for Club Brugge in Belgium, which has had a lot of players come through over the last couple of years with amazing attack and stats.
Right now they have Yam Vegilli and Carlos Forbs on the wings, who are very good. Obviously, before, they had people like Christos Tzolis, who had a good start to his life at Arsenal before picking up an injury.
Why Nicolò Tresoldi Scores So Many Goals
Now into his second season at Club Brugge, Tresoldi has had an incredible goal-scoring record and incredible output just generally since he joined from Hannover, scoring 23 goals and getting seven assists last season and now getting 12 goals already in 14 games this year. So this guy can clearly score. Now when you look at the stature of this player, he is just over six foot. He is decent in the air. He can be physical when needed, but he is not someone who really stands out in big physical traits.
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So how is he scoring so many goals? Now, the first thing about Tresoldi is that his box movement is some of the best in the world. I would go as far as to say he is one of the smartest strikers around right now.
He knows that he does not necessarily have all the pace or all the strength in different moments, but he is very smart about when he makes runs into the front post or the back post, helping his team.
If you put good crosses in, which Club Brugge does usually, especially in the Belgian league, but even against good opposition in the Champions League, he has this brilliant ability of sneaking behind players and actually using his size and nimbleness to hide behind players when they do not expect it and then branch off right at the moment you want, to score a goal, very much like a traditional number nine back in the day, where he is that real box movement player.
This has seen him have a huge amount of non-penalty expected goals, which you expect with a lower league like the Belgian league, but it is still very impressive. His shots are quite high, around two and a half per 90 as well, which is what you want to see. He has done this against good opponents in the Champions League as well, but he is not someone who is always going to touch the ball.
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He is very much off it, sits up front as a striker by himself, and waits for plays to happen, making runs in behind. Now while he is good in the box and while that is definitely the best effort he has, he can do things outside it.
Actually, many times he has peeled off into the center of the pitch. Both of their wingers have run up into the box to get on the end of runs, and he has been really good at doing flicks or little passes to help the team, and he is often very good in these ways.
Now he is not brilliant back to goal, and there are times that he will get caught out and will not have that physicality to compete at that level, getting pushed off the ball very easily, but he is smart enough to get separation from just his movement and his overall play.
He knows he will have to come even deeper in order to get the ball away from defenders sometimes. He will do that. He will peel off and pass it through to runners. I do like that a lot about him.
That is the thing: even though he scores a huge amount of goals, Tresoldi is a very unselfish player. He loves passing through. He loves playing in the wingers if they are going to run around. He is one of those strikers who really does benefit from runners in and around him, which is something that I always talk about with Gyökeres.
If more people ran with him, he would probably be a little bit better, although obviously there are issues there. Now, one of the funny things, though, is that he is not physically very dominant, and he is not really going to win all the duels, but he certainly tries.
Aerially, he wins a high percentage of duels where he actually gets in, although he is not getting in a huge amount of them. He is six foot one. He can win a header. He is pretty good in the box, like we said, making the movements. If you are going to cross the ball high, it does not always have to be low.
He can get a good head on the ball, but it comes from that movement. He waits for movement to happen, and then he will really arrive at the right time. He is actually really good at controlling the headers when he gets there.
Unlike people like Kai Havertz, who is really tall and wins a lot of duels, he is not someone who is always going to get any direction on the headers that matter.
This is not the same with Tresoldi. I also want to say that Tresoldi’s accountability in defensive areas is really good because he tries a lot.
Now he is more of a pressing forward type of player. If players are in front of him in a block or trying to build out, he is most likely going to run them down and try and win the ball back. Most of the time, even when they put the ball behind him, he will run back and try and win the ball around that midfield area.
Now the thing is he is quite aggressive, and sometimes when he has been sitting in a block for Club Brugge when they have played better opposition, he has not necessarily been the best player at sitting in the block and being the first to go. He does jump a bit early.
He wants to attack when he should not. He wants to get on the counter all the time. These are traits that you can definitely teach out of him and definitely get him to be a bit more patient, especially if you are a team like Arsenal or Chelsea, who would want him to be more patient.
Can He Cope in the Premier League?
That is certainly something you would have to think about, but I still like the presser. He works really hard; he is going to consistently run off the ball. These are big positives in the first place.
While he is not necessarily a really quick player and likes playing with spacing behind, he sits on the last line and can run through, but if you have quick defenders, you will be able to catch up with him.
He is someone who does like space too. Now I do think when you play a very slow approach that Arsenal specifically do in the box, he will be good enough in box movement to get in the box and find finishes in there. But you have to consider there are going to be two or three big defenders on him. It is going to be much harder. This is where I am not sure if he can adapt fully to that level that Arsenal needs or even Chelsea.
Chelsea would be a little bit better considering the space that they can get him on the break, but also he is not always technically refined. He is going to make mistakes on the ball. He is not going to be able to take players on all the time. That could be an issue with the quickness that you want. He does not necessarily need space for five.
It looks like a Club Brugge, but you have seen that with a lot of these players that come through. Depends on the price, depends on the risk that is really attached to him, but I do not necessarily think he would be the worst player against the low block, but that is something that we just do not really see, and we are going to have to see if he adapts in the future.
Although I will say most of his shots are not self-created; actually, leading into October, he had zero self-created shots this season, which basically means he is getting into the box from other people creating chances.
He does not take players on and score a brilliant goal himself, which means that individuality you would want at a top level might sometimes be a bit missing. He is going to get in the box and get in the right areas, but his finishing has also been a bit inconsistent as well.
Although he is getting big goal-scoring opportunities, which is the reason he scores all the time because of that movement, he is not always the best. He actually has a nice one-touch finish.
Like we said, he is good in the air when he needs to be. But sometimes he overthinks things, and he scuffs a shot wide or does not have the right shot selection, which has been a little bit of an issue. Now he is only 22; that is still a very young age.
These are maybe things that you can smooth out in the future, especially because he already has that good level there and can score goals. So these are things that you would probably consider developing, but you have to get him in the mirrors to get shots away in the first place, which is not exactly easy for every striker to do in the Premier League.
That really raises the question here because not only are you taking a risk on a player who is at Club Brugge, who has a great goal-scoring record, but he was not actually the main man there until Tzolis left. Even now, people like Forbs and Virginia have also had great seasons in that attacking line.
Maybe that could be an attacking thing. You have to wonder if he really is set up for the Premier League. He is not really physically strong, and he is more of a box striker, which can be useful, but is he going to be useful when the boxes are completely flooded, which Arsenal and Chelsea both specifically will deal with quite a lot?
I am not sure it is going to be that great. He also needs space, and a counterattacking team, which maybe has a lot of runners around him, would probably be a better outfit. So maybe a Chelsea you could look at there.
But then you would have to think about the future: a lot of these top teams would want to get away from that and play more possession-based football because that is the way you dominate in the likes of football.
So I am not really sure where Tresoldi’s level is. I do not particularly think he is an elite player. I do think he can be elite, and clearly that goal score is a big part of it. But after seeing people like Viktor Gyökeres in the Premier League, there has to be some wariness about buying these players who score a huge amount of goals in lower leagues.
Although Tresoldi has a goal catalogue that is a little better than Gyökeres’s, I also think his goal scoring against other teams in the Champions League has been very impressive, but then so has Gyökeres’s, you could say.
There are parts about him that I like and that can be effective, especially in the air, as a physical type of player. But is he big enough? Is he quick enough? I am not sure about the Premier League. Sometimes, specifically for Arsenal, they need a more powerful and paced player, a little bit more than someone like him.
Now, let me know what you guys think in the comments about Tresoldi, about going to either of these clubs.
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