The Vancouver Whitecaps are making major changes to the centreback positions with two players coming in and one going out. Joedrick Pupe and Sebastian Schonlau play in leagues I don’t watch and journeymen centrebacks tend to not get as much love in the YouTube compilation or amateur scouting game. So I am relying pretty heavily on the stats here. This is particularly tricky since defenders are probably the hardest position to judge based on stats, at least the ones that are available to the public. How many tackles a centreback makes or how many headers they win really don’t tell you very much about if they are good or not. Win rates are a little bit better but don’t account for things like positioning. So I am not qualifying these as full deep dives but here is what I am getting out of Pupe and Schonlau’s data.

Joedrick Pupe:

If you spent any time in football focused online spaces you have probably encountered a picture of Sean Dyche with the caption “utter woke nonsense.” This reaction image is deployed when something is seen as being new-fangled or a departure from an older “brexit ball” style. Well, as far as I can tell, Pupe (28) is the personification of that meme. A Belgian centre-back who has played most of his career in the lower tiers of Belgium and the Netherlands. But, last season, he finally got his chance in the Belgian first tier with relative minnows Dender, and boy his stats are really something!

The Belgian top-flight is covered by fbref so we have access to a wide array of stats on Pupe. What immediately becomes clear is that this guy is an absolute demon in possession.

Pupe was in the 80th percentile for progressive carries and the 98th percentile for progressive passes when compared to other players in leagues outside Europe’s top-5 covered by fbref (which includes leagues like MLS, the English Championship, and Liga MX). That’s pretty impressive by itself but what really blows me away is that this was done on a team that averaged 43% possession last season. On a more possession oriented team like the Whitecaps, Pupe should have even more opportunities to do good stuff on the ball.

Pupe is left-footed and has also played a little bit of left-back so he provides some flexibility. Based on the video available he seems to mostly play on the left side of a back-three so left-back might be his more natural position in a 4-3-3.

So, what’s the catch? Why is a guy with this skillset available to the Whitecaps after a career mostly spent in the less glamorous parts of the Benelux region? Well, as I said at the start, defensive play is difficult to judge off of data but I have a theory! Pupe’s tackles won percentage and aerial duels won percentage are in the 24th and 26th percentile respectively. This does paint the picture of somebody who is not that reliable as a 1v1 defender. The poor aerial duel results are particularly odd as Pupe is not small, listed at 6’2. It may be the case that Pupe’s role as a wide centreback leads to him attempting more difficult challenges that are naturally going to have a lower success rate. I would need to actually watch him play to say for sure. I am pretty confident based on the stats that Pupe is going to be a major Boon to Vancouver’s possession game.

Sebastian Schonlau

Sebastian Schonlau (31), on the other hand, looks like a much more old school centre-back. Schonlau joins Vancouver after a lengthy career in Germany with Paderborn and Hamburger. He has 171 2. Bundesliga appearances and 23 in the top flight (all of which came in the cursed 19/20 season). Here is a look at his most recent 2. Bundesliga season.

Yup, that’s a centreback if I ever saw one. Schonlau wins an above average percentage of his aerial duels and a basically average number of ground duels. His on-ball stats are not nothing but are extremely vanilla. It seems pretty clear that Schonlau’s role is to cover for Ranko Veselinovic, who is out with a season ending injury, and based on the radar above I don’t see any reason he won’t be perfectly adequate in that task. Schonlau is 31 so he is likely to decline from here and using an international slot on him might not be great for next season and beyond. but as long as he can hold it together for another 4 months that doesn’t really matter. The Whitecaps, despite a bumpier period post CCL final, look like serious cup contenders. If you win you don’t need to apologise for anything. Sadly, Schonlau does not have a YouTube highlight real that I was able to find.

A fun little factoid is that both Pupe and Schonlau were the captains of their respective teams. So if the Whitecaps find themselves in another major final, maybe these players can help them with the mental side of things.

Bjorn Inge Utvik also departs. It has been a tough season for Utvik which finishes with a bit of a disaster class in the Canadian Championship. I think Utvik basically served his purpose over the last year and a half but it was probably time for him to move on. Getting 250k for him is a nice bonus.