I used data to find Bayern Munich a replacement for Thiago. A thread.

Firstly, in order to find a replacement for Thiago, we need to find a player whose played in a similar system. To do this, I used a team similarity model, using PCA to judge how similar teams were to each other based on a few categories.

The categories the tool took into account were:

- Pressures p90
- Proportion of pressures in bottom/middle/final 3rd
- Proportion of passes that were long/short/med
- Average pass length
- Team dribbles per touch
- Team passes per touch
- Possession
- Tackles/Interceptions

etc

This is the graph that came put, with the distance between each team representing the similarity in play style between them

Based on this criteria, these are the 25 most similar teams to Bayern Munich relative to the rest of Europe

Now that we've limited the search for our Thiago replacement to players who are in a similar team, we'll search these teams for player who score similarly to Thiago based on his play style.

A similar player to Thiago was looked for on the teams above based on these categories:

- Avg pass length
- % of touches in bottom/mid/final 3rd
- dribbles, passes, carries and shots p/ touch
- % of passes that are short/med/long/key/into box/progressive
- Padj tackles/intcs p90

These 35 players came out on top out of the 25 teams searched:

Then we filter out the U27's, as we don't want players that will be in decline too soon. It leaves us with this.

We also remove the players who don't score as well as the others in the 2 similarity rankings (Laimer, Bakayoko and FDJ)

We also sort the remaining 10 by @lgopfelix 's Impact score. which basically measures how good a player is by how often he plays and the quality of his team.

According to Impact Score, If a player plays a high % of his teams' games, and his team is really good, he's a "good" player. Sounds simple, but makes a lot of sense.

I filtered the rest out to get a final 4 based on "Impact score", below

Based on viability, financial, ability related factors I've ranked the 4 on who I think would be the best transfer.

4th: Marcelo Brozovic

Slightly older than most on the list, Brozovic could still be a reasonable option for Bayern. And though he doesnt suffer from some consistency issues. On his day he's definitely capable.

3rd: Fabian Ruiz

He's taken a dip over the last year, but he's still young and constantly improving in his game. His ball progression most notably is at a really high level, but he struggles under pressure.

2: Rodrigo Bentancur

One of the more dynamic players on the list, Bentancur has been touted as a future star since his days at Boca. Now, he's maturing into a fully fledged starter for Juventus, and has the ceiling to be an important player for Bayern if he was to leave.

1st: Matteo Kovacic

Admittedly, there are a few issues here, at 26 and with 15K career mins, Kovacic is unlikely to improve much. And there are still some flaws he needs to iron out of his game. But his weaknesses can be hidden in the right system, and his talent is undeniable.

Conclusion:

Again, these are all merely options that can be considered, they could always just play Kimmich at CM, or do what they actually ended up doing, and pick up Marc Roca for less than £10M.

But regardless, I hope this has been interesting.

Thanks for reading