Hey you! Yes, you! Have you signed a goalkeeper on loan this season and made them your first choice? Has that goalkeeper been recalled and you are now scrambling to find a replacement? If the answer to both questions is “Yes” then you are in luck! With our new tool… I sounded like a 90s commercial, don’t I? And I’m not even born in the 90s. Ignore my attempt to sound like a 90s commercial, both questions above sometimes do come up in the world of football and it is a significant problem.
Ho Chi Minh City FC is currently facing that exact situation. Their manager, Phung Thanh Phuong, has expressed his frustration publicly when his first-choice keeper, Patrik Le Giang, got recalled by Hanoi Police during the mid-season window. The situation gets even worse when his third-choice keeper just came off a surgery and it is getting late into the transfer window. This leaves the manager to quickly find a replacement during a time when most teams have locked in their keepers for the rest of the season, so the available options are quite limited.
Even though this situation is not new and unique by any means, I still find it interesting and possibly a fun challenge to take on. With the help of data and my decent knowledge of Vietnamese football, let’s identify Patrik Le Giang’s profile and identify potential replacements for him.
Disclaimer: The transfer targets proposed in this article might not be some of the most ideal targets due to limited knowledge. Because information such as the players’ actual wage, transfer availability, and HCMCFC’s available transfer and wage budgets are not public, these targets are judged solely on data (and my limited to decent knowledge of Vietnamese football) and should not be taken too seriously.
Note: While working on this article, the club has confirmed that they were able to retain Patrik’s service until the end of the season. I can only wish that I could have seen this earlier, but I guess this will be an article written for an alternate universe.
The subject
Patrik Le Giang was sent on loan to Ho Chi Minh City during last season’s mid-season transfer window from Hanoi Police. Initially, the loan deal only lasted until the 2023 season. But because of his impressive performance for HCMCFC, they came to an agreement with Hanoi Police to extend Patrik’s loan deal to the end of the 2023–24 season.
Note: Vietnam’s top divisions, the V.League 1 and 2, decided to change their playing time from a Spring-to-Autumn season, to an Autumn-to-Spring season like most European leagues after the 2023 season.
During the current mid-season window of the 2023–24 season, Hanoi Police had sent their second-choice keeper to a different team, which left them with only two goalkeepers in the squad (Most V.League 1 teams have three keepers in their squad). As such, they decided to recall Patrik and planned to make him their second-choice keeper for the rest of the season, which led to the current situation with Ho Chi Minh City.
Now that the overview of the situation is out of the way, let’s look at the player himself. There is no doubt that Patrik Le Giang is an important player for HCMC as his performance last season saved them from relegation and he has continued his form into this season to help the team sit quite comfortably in mid-table (7th at the time of writing).
Considering he has played in Slovakia for the majority of his career, this is the level of performance that many have expected to see from a high-quality goalkeeper like Patrik. The only reason for his limited opportunities at Hanoi Police was because of the arrival of Filip Nguyen. The former Slovácko keeper was considered better than Patrik as he played in the Europa Conference League with Slovácko, and immediately took the only unnaturalised player spot and left Patrik unable to be registered to play in the league. Now that Filip has been naturalised, it only makes sense for Hanoi Police to recall Patrik to fill in that unnaturalised spot.
His quality is clearly reflected through the percentile ranks of his stats after 18 matches of this season and shows how important he is to Ho Chi Minh City’s overperformance. As a shot-stopper, he stands out as one of the best in the league as he ranks 94th, 89th, 72nd for save percentage, prevented goals, and conceded goals respectively. He is also comfortable with challenging for and claiming aerial balls, which is shown through his 78th and 89th ranks in exits and aerial duels attempted.
Since Ho Chi Minh City is not a strong team, it is not surprising to see Patrik and the team’s defence conceding plenty of shots (4.06 shots against per 90s). Yet, the fact that he is preventing 0.303 goals per 90 while also conceding less than 1 goal per 90 is a true testament to his quality. This makes the task of finding his replacement slightly harder as there are not many domestic goalkeepers who can match Patrik’s ability.
On the distribution side, he does not seem to involve too heavily in the team’s build-up phase as his ranking for passes per 90 is in the middle of the group. This can be because the team’s manager does not see the goalkeeper as an important piece in the team’s build-up phase. As such, Patrik might have only acted as a safe backpass option when the opposition pressed high up the pitch. But considering he is ranked quite low for average pass length (in metres) and long pass accuracy, Patrik is still a player who can distribute short passes when needed and can be a bit inconsistent with his long kicks.
Having analysed Patrik’s data from this season, we can roughly build a goalkeeper profile that we can use to identify potential targets:
Must haves:
- Be a good shot-stopper
- Can prevent crucial goals for the team
- Good at saving shots
- Can challenge for aerial balls and claim crosses from open play or from set pieces
Optional:
- Capable of distributing short passes is optional, but good to have
- Good at long distribution is also good to have (to send long passes towards foreign attackers)
The analysis
Finding undervalued keepers within the Vietnamese domestic pool is quite challenging, especially some of the North-based teams tend to have the monopoly in the market and every team has three keepers registered for their squad. However, I will only loosely take those considerations into account and put ourselves in the most optimal position to find potential targets to replace Patrik Le Giang.
While it can be easy to use data and find replacements for outfield players, the same cannot be said when it comes to goalkeepers. Most teams tend to rely on one keeper to play throughout the season and backup keepers might or might not have the chance to get some minutes.
Even if they do, they present a very small sample size to judge their performance within that season because one or two good matches does not translate to being good in the long run. This means that keepers who are actually good but do not get the chance to play might slip through the cracks and we might rule out good transfer targets. This problem exaggerates when the available pool of players is really small, which is the case for a lot of Asian leagues where there are foreign player limits and teams have to rely on the domestic pool.
Because of this, I will use the aggregated data from the last five V.League 1 season (including this season) in order to give everyone the best and fair chance of being assessed. I will also determine a minutes played threshold to find keepers who are underused rather than targeting unrealistic first-choice keepers. Assuming that Ho Chi Minh City’s finance is not as strong as, say, the three Hanoi-based clubs, setting up the threshold also maximises the chance of finding a keeper who has been ignored by teams with stronger financial position. With those criteria in mind, let’s establish a long shortlist of potential targets.
A few things about this long shortlist:
- I choose 600 minutes as my lower threshold because it feels reasonable having taken into account what I have laid out above. I even think that 600 seems quite low since that averages out to be less than a full 90 minutes for each season. But since the player pool is very small, that threshold gives me the best chance to find someone who might not be good in the short-term, but has rooms to improve in the long-term.
- I would be an idiot to not consider keepers who are not with a team right now since they have the best chance of being signed. As such, I am more lenient with the lower threshold but will have to be quite strict with each player’s age.
- This is a long shortlist and, having filtered out unrealistic targets and players who might not be good enough, there will be players who remain unrealistic. Filtering these players will be done manually as I try to establish a top 5 targets. If given more information like player’s wage, transfer availability, or club’s available budget, I will take those into account and filter the shortlist down within my code.
- One variable that I will use for consideration but won’t include in the code is a player’s relative value to the club. This is different to a player’s absolute value, which is the transfer value that you usually see on Transfermarkt. A player’s relative value, for me, contains:
- the duration where they can contribute at their best for the club,
- the potential of bringing profit back to the club in the future,
- that player’s adaptability to the current squad and environment,
- that player’s ability to be a mentor for younger players within the squad.
The long shortlist is then manually filtered once more based on my own assessment of their transfer availability and willingness to move. Usually, when a keeper is playing for a bigger team, they will be more reluctant to leave on a permanent basis due to the current wage that they are earning (yes, I know it is kinda weird since you usually want to more game time than money) and their parent club will also more reluctant to sell, especially when it is the late stage of the transfer window. If a keeper is young and developing, their parent club will usually not allow them to leave if they are the second-choice. Other internal and relationship issues are also taken into account, but I will not get into that here.
Having manually filtered the shortlist and calculate the overall rating score for each player, these are the players that we are left with:
A bit about the overall ratings:
- I will not bore you with the technical details of the ratings themselves since most of it is purely math and I know math can be boring for some. But I will try to explain them in the simplest way possible.
- The ratings are calculated based on the average stats of each player throughout the past five seasons, divided into three categories (goalkeeping, distribution, and duels), and some weightings are added to highlight the more important stats.
- Usually it is more exhausting to know if a player is good or not when comparing raw stats. Firstly, just looking at the stats is already overwhelming, then you have to understand what each of them means, and then compare it to the other players. Imagine doing that with about 20 stats, your brain power will be drained quite quickly. That is why the overall ratings make it easier to contextualize the problem and know who is good and who is not.
These overall ratings and some information that I gathered after doing some Googling allow me to establish a top five goalkeepers that I want to analyse more and can potentially become the final transfer targets. Now comes the raw stats dump! These stats will be particularly helpful for the next section, where we analyse the data of all five top targets.
The targets
With the goalkeeper profile that we have established earlier, these criteria will be applied to each target to see whether they are a good match for Ho Chi Minh City or not. These are the criteria from earlier:
Must haves:
- Be a good shot-stopper
- Can prevent crucial goals for the team
- Good at saving shots
- Can challenge for aerial balls and claim crosses from open play or from set pieces
Optional:
- Capable of distributing short passes is optional, but good to have
- Good at long distribution is also good to have (to send long passes towards foreign attackers)
Ho Van Tu — Ha Long FC
Van Tu is the youngest goalkeeper amongst the top five that we have shortlisted and he is currently playing for a very low division side after a stint as a free agent. He has a few games in the top division for Nam Dinh with his last appearance dated back to the 2022 season, which is a slight concern. However, he might be open to a move back to the top division with Ho Chi Minh City and has rooms to grow into a decent first-choice.
The thing that stands out the most about his stats is his distribution ability. He is particularly good at making long and progressive passes, which can be come a dangerous weapon that Ho Chi Minh City can utilise. Amongst the top five shortlisted keepers, he registered the most long passes (6.89 per 90s) with the highest success rate (69.9%) and the same with progressive passes (5.53 per 90s; 81.58% success rate). With Wander Luiz up front, the team has a striker who is good in the air against Vietnamese centre-backs. Van Tu’s long passes can play to his strength by allowing Luiz to challenge for aerial balls in the middle of the pitch and indirectly boost a slightly goal-shy attack (1.08 goals per match).
He is also active in making exits and challenge for aerial balls, but with a low success rate which might be due to his low height (175cm). Another concern is his goalkeeping quality as his save percentage is relatively low (55.32%) and he conceded 0.23 goals more per 90s, which are the two key criteria from the profile. Compare to the other four on the shortlist, he had to face the second-most shots (4 per 90s) and also conceded the second-most (1.8 per 90s).
Final verdict: B
- Van Tu is a good distributor of the ball, which can be a good asset for any team who has their keeper involve heavily within the build-up phase. His long passes can be dangerous and can allow tall strikers to play to their strength. But because distribution is not one of the must haves criteria, his distribution quality does not rank very highly for me.
- Because the important goalkeeping stats are quite low in comparison to the remaining four players that have been shortlisted, I do not see him as a good short-term option. Since Ho Chi Minh City relies quite heavily on their goalkeeper’s performance to create a mean defence (1.08 goals conceded per match), Van Tu might not be up for the task of replacing a high-quality keeper like Patrik Le Giang.
Tran Van Tien — Song Lam Nghe An
As the second-youngest goalkeeper and one of the three keepers who are still playing in the top division on the list, Van Tien presents himself as an interesting target. Because he is still playing for Nghe An, it will be harder to sign him on a permanent basis unless he is getting close to the end of his contract. In an ideal world, should Ho Chi Minh City gives him more game time and a reasonable contract, Van Tien should be one of the top choices for the club.
Similar to Van Tu, Van Tien’s distribution ability is also decent compare to other goalkeepers in the long shortlist. His volume of passes (7.95 short passes, 5.22 long passes, 4.93 progressive passes per 90s) are quite high, but the accuracy of those passes can definitely improve and be worked on during training sessions. But this still highlights a goalkeeper who is willing to be involved heavily during the build-up phase.
However, what stands out the most about Van Tien is his goalkeeping quality as his stats prove that he can be a solid shot-stopper. Even though he had to face a decent number of shots (3.91 per 90s), he conceded the least amongst the top five shortlisted (0.8 per 90s) and prevented more than half a goal per 90s (0.7 per 90s). He is also aware of his weakness in the air and does not make too many exits to claim crosses or long passes (1 per 90s) or challenge for aerial balls (0.5 attempted per 90s). Considering he has the third-most minutes played compare to the remaining four on the shortlist, these numbers are quite impressive even though the sample size is quite small for the period of five seasons.
Final verdict: A-
- Without considering his distribution quality, Van Tien’s goalkeeping stats over the past five seasons are already impressive enough for me. Even if he might not be good in the air, he can help Ho Chi Minh City save crucial points for the remainder of this season and be a potential long-term first-choice for the club.
- Should the team moves towards a more possession-based style either with a domestic or foreign coach, Van Tien can also be a good asset, albeit with some improvements with his distribution.
- It will be hard to sign Van Tien during the mid-season window. But with Patrik almost certain to leave at the end of the season, Ho Chi Minh City should make Van Tien one of their potential replacements for Patrik.
Nguyen Hoai Anh — Khanh Hoa FC
Two significant advantages about Hoai Anh is he has played almost 2000 minutes over the past five seasons and is currently on the books of a last-placed Khanh Hoa team. It is still quite early to make predictions, but should Khanh Hoa gets relegated at the end of the season, Hoai Anh’s availability should increases significantly as Ho Chi Minh City can offer him another season of top-flight football.
Another advantage that Hoai Anh brings is he has played for Southern-based clubs in the past, particularly Ho Chi Minh City themselves on a year-loan in 2016 and for Sai Gon FC in the 2022 season. This means he will not need much time to adapt to an environment that he has played in before and can fit into the dressing room easier than others.
An overall look at his stats suggests that he is a well-rounded, above average option as he does not stand out on most aspects. Playing for weaker teams might be one of the reasons as he has had to face plenty of shots (4.4 per 90s) and conceded a decent amount of goals (1.48 per 90s) while registering a decent save rate (69.47%). He can be a distributor from the back but his distribution skills might not be needed most of the time due to the lack of possession that his previous teams might have had.
Final verdict: B+
- Hoai Anh is not a bad goalkeeper by any means. But because he has been playing for teams who are not known to be “strong teams”, he has been on the wrong end on a lot of occasions and that might have affected his stats.
- At 30 years old, he is entering the peak age for goalkeepers so there might not be a lot of rooms to improve from this point and potential to bring in profit. However, he can be considered as a decent second-choice should he be available at the end of the season and can quite do a job when being called upon.
Tran Buu Ngoc — Free agent
Buu Ngoc is a veteran goalkeeper who has played for some big teams like Gia Lai or Thanh Hoa in past seasons. He is very familiar with the Southern region having started his career and made his top-flight debut at Dong Thap, which gives him the adaptability advantage. At 32, he can be a mentor to younger players in the squad and a senior figure in the dressing room.
Having played the most minutes among the top 5 shortlisted, he has shown his quality as a shot-stopper in past seasons. While he conceded the least shots (3.45 per 90s), he also conceded the second-least goals (1.13 per 90s) and registered an above average save rate (67.84%). His biggest advantage when comparing to the remaining four keepers on the shortlist is his height (192cm, according to Wikipedia) and the ability to control aerial situations (2.57 exits & 0.6 aerial duels attempted per 90s). His shot-stopping quality might not be as good as Van Tien, but when called upon, he can deliver a decent-to-good job.
His distribution stats suggest that he is more of an old-school goalkeeper who prefers to make long passes from goal kicks, which is highlighted by his average pass length (41.54 metres) and average long pass length (55.75 metres). As mentioned earlier, the ability of making long and direct passes to the front can play well to Wander Luiz’ advantage in the air and can allow Ho Chi Minh City to create quick counter-attacks. Buu Ngoc might not be a good asset for a possession-based team, but for the short-term, the team can take advantage of his long distributions to create more goal-scoring chances.
Final verdict: B+
- Even though Buu Ngoc is 32, he is still a good option for the short-term. His shot-stopping quality is clearly not as good as Patrik, but he can contribute to the defensive work that the team has done throughout the first half of the season.
- An old-school keeper with good long distribution can also work in modern football with the right set up and training. Buu Ngoc can add to that and provide an attacking outlet to maximise the strikers’ strengths.
- He does not have a lot of potential in the long-run and almost no potential to bring in profit, but as mentioned, he can be a good mentor for young players/goalkeepers while also be a senior figure in the dressing room.
Pham Huu Nghia — Ho Chi Minh City FC
Why look far away for a replacement when a decent candidate is already on your books? While Huu Nghia might be the weakest option of the five, he is already the second-choice and might have learned plenty just from watching Patrik trained everyday. As a short-term option until the end of the season, it might be worth giving him a chance at the no. 1 spot while finding a backup player who either can develop or be a solid option when called upon.
His goalkeeping stats is not very good by any means, especially when he has had to face the second-least shots compare to the remaining four on the shortlist (3.66 per 90s). This will require Ho Chi Minh City to adjust their defensive style to minimise his weaknesses while continuing to build a strong defensive foundation that helped them concede just over 1 goal per match after 13 matches. A lot of work will need to be done on the training ground so that Huu Nghia can be a decent shot-stopper, but it is time that they already had since the start of the season and will have instead of having to accommodate a new signing into the squad.
On the other hand, he is a decent distributor of the ball, albeit with a low percentage of success. His volume of passes is decent (11.66 short passes, 5.76 long passes, and 3.82 progressive passes per 90s) and he can improve the accuracy of such passes on the training ground. But considering he made this amazing long pass while playing for a second division team, he can also be used as a counter-attacking initiator from the back and make good use of the pace that many domestic strikers can bring.
Final verdict: B
- While it will not cost Ho Chi Minh City any transfer fee or agent fee to sign Huu Nghia, they will need to work with him extensively on the training pitch to improve his shot-stopping abilities. It will be a catch-up game, but he will save them time spent scrambling to find a replacement for Patrik and potentially sign a keeper that might not even be up to the standard.
Conclusion
Recently, I have been enjoying doing some recruitment projects both internally and in my own time. When I read about Patrik Le Giang and Ho Chi Minh City’s situation, I thought it would be a fun challenge to do and write about something that I have not written before on this blog. It has been a long article and a lot of work (my code notebook is veeeeeery long), but I do enjoy working on project like these and find undervalued players. I will try to make more in the future, potentially about bigger clubs, if people like to read these types of articles. For now, see you soon!
Originally published at https://talkingtactics.substack.com.
