Diamonds in the Rough: Ivan Toney
Signing the player with the best goals per 90 rate in all 4 of England’s professional divisions last season might seem like a bit of an obvious thing to do for a club heralded for their smart approach to recruitment. But that’s what Brentford have done, agreeing a reported £10mil fee for Ivan Toney (24) to replace Ollie Watkins.
You might also think that such a tangibly good scoring record means that he’ll be overpriced and that an eight figure fee is steep for a 24-year old who has never scored at a higher level than League One, but the real value with Ivan Toney is that he shouldn’t be playing Championship football at all next season. He should be catapulted straight into the Premier League.
WhoScored’s League One rankings are a bit skewed as there are a weird number of strikers who played in a lot of matches but didn’t play a lot of minutes and some of those crop up even if I cut out anyone who made fewer than 15 appearances. The important thing to remember though is that Toney barely missed a game of the (curtailed) League One season — itself an impressive feat — and played at an incredibly high level throughout.
Toney’s monstrous 4.2 shots per 90 was 4th highest in the league (playing almost twice as many minutes as every one above him) and he hit roughly half of them on target (2 on target per 90, best in the league). He also offers a variety of different threats with his shooting: 2.2 were right-footed, 0.5 were left-footed, and his 1.5 headed shots were third highest in the league, behind man mountains Armand Gnanduillet and Adebayo Akinfenwa.
2.9 of Toney’s 4.2 shots came within the penalty area (2nd to James Norwood who played 1000 minutes less) and 0.4 of those shots were in the six yard box (20th but only 7 players with >2k mins rank higher).
He’s a creator too, with 1.7 key passes (joint 1st with Akinfenwa among strikers), resulting in a total of 5 assists. Unafraid of taking risks and willing to play with some flair, Toney’s also just a fun player to watch:
On the defensive side of the game, he’s an efficient, busy tackler — averaging 1.5 attempted (4th for League One strikers) and 1 successful tackle (joint 2nd) per 90 — and capable of being a ruthless and relentless presser when the opportunity arrives:
On top of that, he often positions himself smartly and is alert enough to intercept loose passes from defenders:
When strikers are described as being “all-rounders”, it’s usually because the writer has nothing interesting or insightful to say about them. But sometimes it has a slightly disparaging, jack-of-all-trades kind of meaning attached to it.
That’s not the case with Toney. He excels in so many different attacking areas at this level and has so many different facets to his game that it’s difficult to not be struck by how well-rounded he is.
Watching him in the flesh, the most striking thing about him is how good his balance is. It makes it exceptionally hard to knock him off the ball when he’s running or holding up play with his back to goal, and it lets him change direction effortlessly to bamboozle defenders.
He’s also an impressive athlete — tall but co-ordinated, strong but graceful, fast without losing any finesse. Check out how high he leaps and how much power he generates on the header for this goal against Accrington:
Toney’s also clearly a bright, switched-on player, alive to the circumstances of the game. Here he dashes back to make sure he’s onside before launching himself at cross for a diving header:
And here he pulls out to the left to create space for Dembélé to dribble into before slipping a nicely weighted pass back into his team-mate for the assist:
He’s quality at bringing others into play when he’s got his back to goal as well. Against Wycombe, he attracts three defenders to the ball, hold them off, throws in a cheeky nutmeg, and then has the presence of mind to recycle possession, rather than taking a speculative long range shot with his weaker foot:
Against AFC Wimbledon, he comes deep to win a header and then immediately spins off to get involved again:
… followed by a lovely little first-time cushioned header into the path of Szmodics:
Against Ipswich he drops off the frontline and steers a one-touch through ball into Dembélé, who is chopped down for the pen that Toney converts:
An overlooked and underrated aspect of Ivan Toney’s season is that he thrived in multiple different tactical shapes with multiple different attacking partners.
At the start of the season, Posh mostly used a 4–4–2 diamond and Toney played alongside a more traditional poacher-type striker in Mo Eisa, with a ball-dominant long range shooter in Marcus Maddison pulling strings behind them. Midway through the season, Eisa fell out of favour and Maddison moved on to Hull, so Darren Ferguson’s side shifted to a 3–4–3 shape. Toney found himself playing as part of a front two with a dribbling, creative link player (Siriki Dembélé) as a partner and had an off-the-ball runner/goalscoring number 10 in Sammie Szmodics to combine with too. Toney’s performances were consistently excellent in both set ups and he adapted his game to the strengths of those around him.
There is reason to exercise a bit of caution, however. Some wariness about signing players from Peterborough is understandable, given that Posh’s club model is built around signing forwards, giving them a platform to showcase their talents, and then selling them on at a profit. Jack Marriott, AMarcus Maddison, Britt Assombalonga, Dwight Gayle, Conor Washington, Lee Tomlin, George Boyd — all these players went through Peterborough en route to the higher echelons of the game and few managed to sustain their performances after leaving. As part of their business model, Posh place an emphasis on an attacking style of play, which can inflate the numbers and reputations of their players; how well these lads translate to other systems is something for buying clubs to consider carefully.
It’s also reasonable to ask whether he would have as much of a physical mismatch against defenders higher up the pyramid, but Toney looks like the real deal on that front to me. He has a similar frame to Tammy Abraham and, although clearly not as talented, he has that same combination of size and technical quality that allows him to be a threat from both central and wide areas, both on the deck and in the air. He’s a nightmare for defenders by himself and marries that with an ability to bring others into play. There’s lots to like about him.
He’d have been an excellent fit at Leeds and I think there are elements of Toney’s game that suggest he could be a decent Michail Antonio replacement for us, but basically all of the teams that are interested in signing Ollie Watkins would be better served by cutting out the middle man and just bringing in the player Brentford are replacing him with.
At 24, he’s a bit older than Watkins, but Toney’s early career move to Newcastle resulted in him getting bumped around on various loan deals and that lack of continuity hindered his development a bit. But he’s had a solid two season run with Posh now and will inevitably end up a Premier League player at some point.
Clubs could save themselves a lot of cash by buying him now, rather than later.
