Chelsea player is 17th best in the league in his position say stats – but pundits disagree | OneFootball

Marc Cucurella had a really solid game on Saturday, another impressive outing from the Spaniard who has built on a strong second half of last season with a good campaign under Enzo Maresca.

We would say he’s been among the best left backs in the Premier League this season – but curiously the stats would say otherwise.

A glance at WhoScored’s list of Premier League left backs, who have made a minimum of 10 appearances this season, sorted by their average rating, shows that Cucurella is only the 17th best in the league.

Ahead of him? Neco Williams, Antonee Robinson, former Chelsea academy starlet Lewis Hall, Diogo Dalot, Rayan Ait-Nouri, Josko Gvardiol, Pervis Estupinan, Riccardo Calafiori, Milos Kerkez, Keane Lewis-Potter, Vitali Mykolenko, Lucas Digne, Tyrick Mitchell, Destiny Ugodie, Alex Moreno and Myles Lewis-Skelly.

So, pretty much the whole league’s left backs then…

Cucurella surprises with low ranking in left back league

The Premier League’s top 10 left backs by rating on WhoScored.

What’s the deal then? Are Chelsea fans just overrated Cucurella? Does this stats rating system undervalue him in some way? To be fair, it’s been a bumper year for left backs. Robinson, Kerkez, Lewis-Skelly and Gvardiol are all being talked about as having had exceptional years, and some of the others listed there are also having great campaigns, just with less hype.

The question is how many of them you would trade for Cucurella? We suspect that, despite his great season, there are still a lot of Cucurella doubters out there. We’ve been linked with Kerkez before, and if we weren’t locked in on his teammate Dean Huijsen, we’d suspect we would be very interested in bringing the Hungary player in this summer.

We do still need a Cucurella backup – are there are bargains on that list we could try to snatch this summer?