Have Villarreal found their CB?

As if to rebuke me for focusing too much on Spanish player options, Greek source Sportime suggests that Dimitrios Siovas wants to stay in Spain and that Villarreal is interested in bringing him aboard. Now, before I go any further, I know the relative reliability of English and Spanish sources pretty well, but I don’t know anything about ‘Sportime’. For all I know their source is reading our blog (just kidding, probably no one in Greece knows we exist).

No price figures were mentioned in the article. Numbers for his release clause seem to be floating around the 12m range and Transfermarkt values him at about 5m. With Leganes going down, they’ll probably be eager to cash in on a player who is past 30 and only has one year left on his deal.

The next question, of course, is whether he’s any good. To give some statistical context, I decided to create a comparison chart between his numbers and Ramiro Funes Mori:

footballslices.com

Every number you see that says ‘(pAdj)’ is adjusted for possession. If you don’t do that with defensive statistics then automatically defenders on teams with less of the ball look great and teams with a lot of the ball have defenders who look awful. At a glance, you get the vibe that this is a player who could play a role for us, but wouldn’t really be challenging Albiol or Pau for a starting job.

Siovas is pretty good in the air, so if we adequately replace Santi on set piece duty he could be useful in dead ball situations, but he’s not a great passer so when he comes under pressure he very often just knocks it deep. That’s not the worse trait to have, and you appreciate the self awareness, but if a team like Getafe or Eibar decides they want to press us high up the pitch he’s probably gonna spend a lot of the night giving the ball away.

At 31, I really don’t see him improving, though maybe he continue at this level for another couple of years. We desperately need a CB, and he could do a job for us this coming season, but this wouldn’t be a signing that has me particularly excited.

Shoutout to sirjoe96 for finding the original Sportime article and bringing it to our attention in a comment section this morning.