This is what makes Bukayo Saka so Special

By Alfie Cairns Culshaw (Chief Editor)

It’s safe to say, Rio Ferdinand's take on Bukayo Saka's level caused a major stir online. Ferdinand received a lot of backlash by Arsenal fans, so much so that the former United defender was tormented by Gooners on a RyanAir flight to Porto back in late February. Just yesterday, Rio’s brother, Anton, relitigated this debate by claiming that Kobbie Mainoo is better than Saka was when he was 18. An outrageous claim.

How do I feel about these comments? I think it’s right to point out that in a time of commercialised online content, people are always looking for a take that is going to provoke people and garner clicks, and Ferdinand and TNT Sports probably knew what they were doing to an extent, and that’s fine.

Ultimately, the term world class is arbitrary, it’s all semantics. Everyone has a different perception of the term and what it means, and it’s essentially all made up.

However, to me, I do feel there is kickback from non-Arsenal people about just how good Bukayo Saka is, and I’m not going to lie, it does irritate me a little. I think some of it is about the aesthetic profile of the player. The general public’s utopian build of a winger is in the mould of a Ronaldinho, an Eden Hazard, a young Cristiano Ronaldo. Someone with technical flair, who comes with a certain aesthetically pleasing style of movement with the ball.

I think this is why there has always been some distortion of the feeling towards Mo Salah, an obviously absolutely elite player, but one who has a more unique running style that doesn’t fit with the archetypal crowd pleaser.

I’m not saying Saka is on par with these players as of yet, or has achieved close to what they have in the game, but for me he’s clearly up there with the best players in the world at the moment, and this doesn’t feel like the mainstream opinion. Part of it is to do with his linear career development and how that makes it difficult for outsiders to resonate with him, which Alex from the Different Knock perfectly demonstrated in a video when all this was kicking off.

Part of it for me, is this Salah Effect. He’s aesthetically more unique than the smooth on the eye, fantastic dribbly wingers.

I’m not going to sit here and engage in this futile ‘world class’ debate, but I did want to write about what makes him so special, and why us Arsenal fans love him so much. He deserves even more flowers.

Soft Factors

 I want to start with the human aspect, the soft factors if you will. When I think about what makes him so special to us, it is more than just what he does on the pitch. It’s what he represents off it.

We’ve seen a scintillatingly good winger in recent times at the Emirates in Alex Sanchez, who transcended the levels Saka has been able to reach at this point in his career. However, I think all Arsenal fans would agree, there isn’t remotely the same sentiment towards the Chilean than there is to Saka, for obvious reasons.

If Saka had been a £25 million signing a couple of years ago, there wouldn’t be the same special emotional connection between him and the fanbase. Not only is he a Hale End graduate, he’s also a symbol of the current project, that has seen us rise from mid-table mediocrity to title challengers in a matter of years.

When Saka made his way into the first team picture, we were right in the depths of despair. We were languishing in mid-table and eventually finished 8th in two consecutive seasons. In the midst of this circus of a squad, a Hale End core emerged, and at the heart of it, a baby faced Bukayo Saka flourished.

He was a shining light in our darkest days, and not only that, he rose and improved as the team did. He became the poster boy of our new project and has taken us right to the pinnacle of world football.

Being a life-long Arsenal fan, who has been on the books since he was 7-years-old, it’s easy for Arsenal fans to resonate with him. He’s living all of our dreams in front of us.

It obviously helps that he’s very, very good. While certain academy players have flirted with the prospect of being that academy starboy in recent years, the likes of Jack Wilshere and even Alex Iwobi, no-one has made a major impact on a first team that has been competing for football’s biggest honours since perhaps, Ashley Cole.

And Cole arguably ruined his Arsenal legacy by joining rivals Chelsea and even when he was here, he was just an important part of the armoury, surrounded by superstars. Saka is the superstar in this team. I think, with all things considered, he could be the greatest player this club has ever produced. Or, at least, he is very likely to show that he is in the coming years.

This hasn’t even touched on his likeable personality and demeanour off the pitch. From the humble interviews, to the heart-warming interactions with fans, such as the scene in All or Nothing when he invites a young fan who wrote to him to play with him on the Emirates pitch, it’s clear that Bukayo Saka is not just a special player, but also a special person.

He exudes the values of the club, the class and the commitment to bettering the North London community.

Hard(?) Factors

 Anyway, enough of the soppy stuff, why is Saka so special on the pitch?

On the very surface level, he has elite output. 16 goals and 13 assists in all competitions this season puts him in the 89th percentile for goals contributions per 90, or the top 11% for players in his position in Europe’s top five leagues.

On the underlying level, his 0.66 non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90, places him in the 93rd percentile, or top 7% for players in his position in Europe’s top five leagues.

His outrageous output is clearly no mirage.

A good wide forward is able to regularly find himself in good goal-scoring positions, close to goal and get a lot of good shots off. Predatory goals against Liverpool and PSV this season are a good example of Saka doing this.

A good wide forward is able to lay on good scoring chances for team-mates with accurate cut-backs at the byline and crosses to the backpost, an attribute which Saka has trademarked over the years, with goals for Leandro Trossard at Chelsea and Kai Havertz at Brentford coming to mind this season.

A great forward can be both a constant goal threat and creator at the same time, and Saka is both. An elite forward is capable of producing those individual moments of brilliance on a more regular basis than most others can. Goals against Nottingham Forest this season and Manchester United last season demonstrate Saka’s ability to do so.

It’s not only his work in the final third that makes Saka so good though. In football discourse, something that is so often forgotten or undervalued is ball progression. It’s always about what people do in the final third and how they prevent goals in their own third. What about how you get the ball up the pitch?

Saka is something of a cheat code in terms of progressing the ball up the pitch. You can feed him the ball in very difficult positions out wide, with several players surrounding him, and he’s able to pin them and turn and drive with the ball.

He’s also very effective at making runs into the final third or finding space in the final third to receive relatively simple passes from deeper players. If you watch him, you see both this ball carrying and receiving on numerous occasions throughout a game. He enables Arsenal to get up the pitch so frequently, which leads to dangerous attacking moves.

This is also reflected in the data, ranking in the 85th percentile for progressive carries per 90, and the 98th percentile for progressive passes received per 90.

All of this isn’t even to mention his tremendous off the ball work, which is a contributor to Arsenal being potentially the best off the ball team in the world.

I was listening to the Double Pivot Podcast recently, a great football analytics pod, and they were trying to identify a player Saka compares to. The closest they could come up with was Arjen Robben, but even that they admitted was slightly off the mark.

Neither Robben nor Saka possess absolutely explosive pace, but both players possess similar approaches to taking on a full-back. It’s quite hard to explain the similarities, but it kind of feels like they receive the ball, slow down, and carefully weigh up how to manipulate the ball into a position to carry out the next action and create a yard of space, using their immense upper body strength and immaculate close control. It sounds like a bizarre comparison, but trust me and watch both players receive the ball in front of a full-back and watch how they approach the situation.

Summary

In summary, Bukayo Saka is special, essentially. As Alex so eloquently put in his video, there are cultural and psychological reasons to do with the narrative around the player as to why not everyone sees this. However, it also feels a lot of it is to do with the aesthetic style of the player.

In essence, it doesn’t really matter if outsiders understand why Bukayo Saka is so special, even if it irritates us a bit on twitter. We know how good he is, and soon the rest of the world will.