Mason Holgate - Worthwhile Buy?

Player Overview

The first January transfer rumour has arrived! Reports are suggesting that Leeds have approached Everton to enquire about English central defender Mason Holgate. Frank Lampard’s team are reportedly keen to offload the 26-year-old this window potentially allowing Leeds to make the purchase at a discount to what they’d usually expect to pay.

Mason Holgate’s market value predicted by TransferMarkt

Using Transfermarkt’s market value predictor we can estimate the hole that will be left in Radrizziani’s pocket if this deal is completed. The Evertonian is estimated to be worth around £16,000,000. This value is down from his previous high, as it was £20,000,000 last August. The Toffee’s desire to sell would likely depreciate the fee further. Leeds would likely need to spend 10–12 million of the king’s finest for the former England youth international.

One reason for that previously mentioned dip in market value is that Holgate has just endured the joint longest injury of his career so far. He has missed eight games in 50 days this season with a knee injury.

In typical fashion for a Victor Orta buy, The 6-foot tall performer has shown some versatility in where he can play. Although Holgate has played 80 games as a central defender, it is worth noting that the player earnt his stripes as a right back for 30 games earlier in his career and has even played five games as a defensive midfielder.

Avoiding that injury, however, Holgate has been robust for the Blues, he has played over 25 matches every season for the past three seasons. This time span covers several managers he has had to impress and accumulates over 6,000 minutes played.

Off-field therefore the move has both obvious strengths with his premier league experience but also noticeable issues are present notably that he is 26 with limited resale value. What matters though with all signings is how well he can play on-field…

Player Ability Overview

Under Jesse Marsch, Leeds use their centre-backs to build play, break lines and help create chances. Logically, therefore we will explore Mason Holgate’s ability to be a ball-playing defender to investigate how well he will fit within the American’s system.

Mason Holgate’s Player Score year-by-year

Using LRH-Analytics’ recruitment software we can evaluate the Doncaster-born player’s on-field performance data-wise. Over the past three years, Holgate is rated at a score of 49/100 as a ball-playing defender. We can see however that his number has remained almost constant for his whole career at .52/.53. This suggests that the player has reached potential and isn’t currently improving or developing with time. Surely, this is a huge weakness. If a player doesn’t improve they are very difficult to sell for profit, the only situation where this should be seen as beneficial for a team is if that player is a marked improvement to the team and can bring that profit in through prize money.

We can compare Mason Holgate’s performance with similar players by looking at those with approximate scores. Doing this, we see his ability compares with Fulham’s Adarabiyo, Nottingham Forest’s Boly and fellow Toffee’s bench regular Ben Godfrey. Whilst trying not to be harsh, these aren’t players to take Leeds to the top half of the league and therefore neither is Holgate.

This point can be expanded upon further when comparing to other Leeds players’ ratings:

We can see Holgate would not provide a concrete upgrade in ability compared to the current Leeds players. In order to make this deal make sense it should be questioned whether rather than being better than our current options if he is different to provide Marsch with a depth of choices to make when jigsawing his team together.

.

Player Type

We can analyse the exact type of player Mason Holgate is by investigating how he compares to other centre-backs and fully understand what the Jamaican international brings to a team.

Strengths

Firstly, we can see that Holgate’s biggest strength is his ability aerially. In the past three seasons alone he has won 106 aerial duels; this is 65% of all duels contested. At 6"0 he is equal to the average height of a premier league defender.

His next strength can be seen on the right-hand side of this radar, Holgate has a high game reading score. This means that per 90 minutes he makes a larger-than-average amount of tackles, interceptions, and recoveries. This can be debated though as on one hand, it shows his ability to read the game early however Everton also averaged the joint lowest amount of possession per game in 2021–22. This was at an abysmal 39.7% that they shared with Burnley across the season. THerefore because the other team has the ball more it is clear why Holgate would be able to win the ball more often.

Weaknesses

Firstly, we can see that the Evertonian struggles in possession, his ability to keep possession of the ball is ranked at 8% which means that 92% of defenders are able to maintain the ball better than he is. This is a huge red flag within Marsch’s system and the modern footballing world altogether.

We can also see his struggles in possession through the ball progression rating and chance creation scores, both of these are under 50% showing the average defender in the top 5 leagues across Europe are able to play forward passes and can create chances for their teammates more frequently than Holgate.

Off the ball, however, in a 1v1 defensive duel Mason Holgate is in the bottom third of players, he gets dribbled past on average once a game and this has aggregated to 47 times across these past three years.

Comparison to Pascal Struijk

Summary

It should be no surprise, therefore that there would be huge question marks above spending 8 figures on a player with both questions on-field for performance reasons and off-field in terms of future potential and subsequent sell-on-value. It would appear to be a better decision to move Struijk back towards his natural centre-back position and spend the money on a player to fill the left-back role.