Bristol City’s Alex Scott – Everything Everywhere All At Once
By
Nancy Frostick and
Thom Harris
Mar 16, 2023
19
If
Bristol City midfielder
Alex Scott ever writes his autobiography, he needs to look no further than last weekend’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars for a title.
Because ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is what the Guernsey-born England youth international has been doing for Nigel Pearson’s Championship side this season, to the extent it is little surprise that Ashton Gate’s leading man is being linked with a string of
Premier League clubs.
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Cautious estimates suggest the 19-year-old will cost £25million, and Pearson is adamant it will take more than that to prise Scott away. He drew praise from his idol
Jack Grealish after they went head to head in an
FA Cup loss to
Manchester City in February, and
Wolverhampton Wanderers,
Tottenham Hotspur and
Leeds United are rumoured to be among those chasing his signature.
What makes Scott so good, apart from the fact he has already made 85 senior appearances at such a young age, is his ability to progress play, get around the pitch and recover the ball. It is just about everything a manager could want from a central midfielder, with Scott having completed the second-most passes of any City player (989 in total, at a rate of 30.5 per 90 minutes), had the second-most touches (1684, 52 per 90), the most tackles (75, 2.3 per 90) and the most key passes (36, 1.1 per 90) while winning the most fouls (78, 2.4 per 90) in the first 36 games of the season.
But another part of what makes the former
Southampton and
Bournemouth academy kid an exciting prospect is his versatility, having featured as a right wing-back under Pearson last season before coming inside to feature as a No 10 or in a deeper role to great effect (as shown by his share of minutes per position below).
In any of those central roles, Scott’s desire to be on the ball and progress play is crucial to City’s attacks. When he plays as a central or defensive midfielder that role often involves him hitting defence-splitting passes and when he is operating as a No 10, often in front of
Joe Williams and
Matty James, he drifts into pockets of space in more advanced positions.
The still below from Saturday’s 2-0 home win over
Blackpool shows Scott playing in a midfield two with 34-year-old
Andy King, a 50-cap Wales international and Premier League title winner with
Leicester City seven years ago.
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Scott’s movement out to the right provided an essential outlet for full-back
George Tanner, as the youngster slipped a ball first time into the channel for
Mark Sykes to run onto and trigger an attack.
In the same game, Scott’s movement to the byline with the ball after carrying it from the edge of the box created another chance as City recycled possession back to
Jay Dasilva. Scott’s key strength is keeping possession ticking over with short passes, and his combination play in the final third is crucial to how they attack.
As play progressed he received the ball back from King (No 10) and delivered a cross into the penalty area with his left foot, which resulted in City winning a corner.
The freedom Scott, voted the Championship’s Young Player of the Month for February, is given in central midfield under Pearson allows him to roam anywhere, which makes him more difficult for opponents to pick up.
The graphic below shows Scott’s forward carries of 10-plus yards distance in the league this season, where he is averaging 3.2 carries of over 10 yards per 90 minutes as well as carrying the ball into the final third 1.6 times per game.
Defensively he is just as strong, with only 13 Championship players having made more tackles than Scott at an average of 2.3 per game as of the weekend’s fixtures. He ranks in the 95th percentile for tackles in the defensive, middle and attacking thirds, again showing how active he is all across the pitch.
His ability with the ball at his feet has led to him being nicknamed the ‘Guernsey Grealish’, with the England international labelling Scott a “top, top talent” following that recent meeting in the FA Cup. Scott identified Grealish as his favourite player as a youngster, at a time when training with the academies at Southampton and Bournemouth required flights from his home in the Channel Islands to the mainland every weekend.
His release by Southampton as a 12-year-old led to him signing for hometown club Guernsey FC in the Isthmian League’s South Central Division (the eighth tier of English football), where he became their youngest-ever player aged 16, before signing for Bristol City on a pre-contract agreement in 2020.
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“Guernsey is very unique; it’s a small island so we generally know every player and you see them grow up,” says Guernsey FC manager Tony Vance. “I’ve known Alex since he was probably four or five; you tend to know the ones that look really promising at a very early age.
“He was at Southampton for a few years and they’re probably frustrated now that they released him and he came back to Guernsey. When he was back over here he was a little bit disillusioned with football at around 15.
“In terms of playing for your island, there is definitely a sense of pride and ownership because we all care so much about it. What’s been interesting about his journey is while he wasn’t at a club as an academy player from very early, he never had a proper sort of apprenticeship. He got his apprenticeship by flying over and playing in men’s football in non-League (with Guernsey). That can have a real positive impact on players over being in an academy where everything is safe and results don’t matter as much.
“It’s no surprise that his statistical information is backing up what people are seeing, because his numbers were always good for us. There are things he does that can’t be measured at our level, like the way he can drive through players and break lines. The other thing he’s exceptionally good at is winning fouls — the way he puts his body between players to gain the advantage for such a young age, it’s very impressive.”
Scott playing for Guernsey in the eighth tier of English football (Photo: Guernsey FC)
Nic Legg, one of Guernsey’s directors, says: “I remember the first training session he (Scott) came along to because Tony actually said to me that it might be worth getting some footage done of the session and do some media around it, because he thought Alex could be that good, and a friend of mine came along and filmed the training session.
“And some of our senior players were kind of looking at Alex and they knew how good he was. We knew he was different, we knew he was really special.
“Obviously the challenge as a 16-year-old was it’s OK to be good in training but when you go into a physical league like we play in, it’s a completely different environment. And then Alex had an opportunity to travel away with us, he was on the bench and he came on to make his first appearance away from home. He didn’t score but he hit the crossbar with what must have been his second touch. He did a few bits of skill and there were probably about 100 people at that game but you could see people saying, ‘Who is this?!’
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“The fans loved watching him. It was really exciting and it became apparent very quickly that if we could give him an opportunity to move on, that’s exactly what we needed to do. The first thing that struck me about Alex and also his family when he came to us was, as a 16-year-old, how polite, humble and grounded he was. I always knew when he went to Bristol City, however well he did, he’d settle in and make a really good impression. For the football club in terms of losing his talent it was obviously disappointing for the fans, but incredibly pleasing to show the platform that the football club can give.”
Guernsey are an amateur side so won’t receive any development fee or sell-on clause should Scott land that big-money move to the Premier League — the club are a registered charity who have to pay for the flights and accommodation for every team who travel south from the mainland to their island around 50km (30 miles) off the French coast for games at the 5,000-capacity Footes Lane stadium.
But Bristol City are increasingly taking note of what they are doing.
Scott’s fellow teenagers Ben Acey and Tim Ap-Sion have also signed for them from Guernsey FC and City sent now-first-team full-back
Cameron Pring on loan in the other direction when he was coming through their academy.
As things stand, Scott remains an integral part of Pearson’s side as they look to improve on a 17th-place finish last season. Should his future lie in the Premier League — and any length of time watching him play suggests such a move is inevitable — then the data based on this season is encouraging.
The
smarterscout pizza chart below, which employs advanced analytics to break down elements of a footballer’s game into different performance, skill and style metrics, shows Scott’s strengths (carry and dribble volume, defending intensity, disrupting opposition moves) when adjusted to Premier League standard.
Scores are generated to show how often a player completes a specific action and how effective they are at them compared to peers in the same position, which is encouraging for Scott given his age.
Premier League interest in Scott, who has 16
England caps from under-18s to under-20s, is justified given his progress but teams need to be prepared to pay big money for one of the
EFL’s brightest young talents.
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“It wouldn’t surprise me that clubs are interested in him, but there have been no bids,” Pearson said after the Blackpool game. “Whoever makes a proper bid at some point will have to put in a really big bid. He has to be more than £25million, he shouldn’t go for less than that. Since he made his debut, he’s played upmost of 80 games for us. Some people talk about playing in a second season you can get a drop-off, but I don’t think we have seen that at all.
“I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it, I’m aware of speculation but that’s all it is. There’s no doubt in my mind we’ll have to deal with bids this summer.”
