So far, we’ve looked at centre-forwards and midfielders who could be getable for the Vancouver Whitecaps. This time we’re looking at a slightly hard-to-define profile; the winger/forward. Essentially, we’re looking for someone to fill out the front three with Ryan Gauld and Brian White, someone with a mixture of striker traits and winger traits. Of course, some of the players we classified as strikers last time could also fall into this category. Lots of options!

If you want to know how the following list is generated, check out the previous edition of this series.

Now, a few things to notice right away. Firstly, there are a lot more U-22 eligible options compared to the centre-forward list. I’m guessing this is a combination of young strikers being snapped up by big teams more quickly and teams being more willing to give younger players a chance out wide. But there are also a lot more players who are going out there, doing some dribbles, but not actually generating many scoring chances. That doesn’t do very much for the Whitecaps as they already have Jayden Nelson, Ali Ahmed, J.C Ngando, and Edier Ocampo to do that.

Now, there is a bit of a hidden 3rd rail in sensible Whitecaps transfers. That is how long it takes a player to get the required work permits to actually take to the field for the team. From what I can gather from the Canadian immigration website, East Asia and Scandinavia are pretty safe bets to have a short turnaround for a work permit. But there are some random countries in Europe that have incredibly long wait times. There’s also a bunch of countries that have no publicly available data about wait times. I thought about trying to figure out which players had the best balance between ability and wait times but ultimately I decided that was a bit much. The point of these is to see what’s out there, not necessarily predict the exact player they are going to sign. Like last time, we’ll look at options from three different levels.

U-22: Mbaye Ndiaye/21/Motor Lublin

Mbaye Ndiaye is a Senegalese winger playing for a less fashionable Polish team. Despite this, he’s flirting with 0.5 xG+xA/90 which is well above average for a starting-level player. There isn’t a ton of video of him online but the compilation from a game against Legia Varsovie below makes him look like a very technical player who causes problems.

Senior Roster Player: Matthias Phaeton/25/CSKA-Sofia

For the regular senior roster player, I am going with the star of the Guadeloupe national team Matthias Phaeton. Phaeton currently plays in Bulgaria where he is putting up respectable underlying numbers. The data shows Phaeton doing a lot of running with the ball and generating a lot of shots which is basically what the Whitecaps need. Of note, he has 0 assists despite putting up a lot of xA. So he is generating chances for his teammates but they are not putting them away. This potentially makes him a nice buy-low option. I doubt he would be an MLS all-star but he would probably be solid.

There’s a really nice compilation of him with a Cyrillic title but for some reason that uploader disabled playback on other websites. So here’s a very annoyingly edited compilation of his performances at the most recent Gold Cup.

DP: Adriano Bertaccini/24/Sint-Truiden

Adriano Bertaccini is currently 3rd in scoring in the Belgian league, despite his team being 3rd from the bottom of the table. The guy who manages to be good despite his team being a bit crap has been a cornerstone of this most recent period of relative success for the Whitecaps and Bertaccini would be a continuation of that. Of course, wrestling him away from Sint-Truiden mid-season when they are fighting relegation might be tricky. He also plays off the left, traditionally Ryan Gauld’s spot so you might have to shuffle things around a bit. But those numbers suggest to me this is a player who would explode on a halfway competitive team.