Kalvin Phillips: Is he the perfect replacement for Fernandinho at Manchester City?
Manchester City have signed a midfielder Kalvin Phillips from Leeds United.
The Englishman will replace Fernandinho in the defensive midfield role, who has left the club after winning his fifth Premier League title in May.
Following the signing of Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, Phillips is the second addition to the Premier League champions’ squad this summer.
Phillips has attracted the attention of numerous Premier League clubs in recent seasons, with his outstanding performances most notable still under Marcelo Bielsa, who was sacked by the Leeds board at the end of February after a prolonged run of poor results in the league.
At City, the English midfielder will have to compete with Rodri for his place in the starting XI, who has had an outstanding 2021–22 season in both the Premier League and Champions League. The Spaniard has been virtually irreplaceable in Pep Guardiola’s tactical plans and has played the third highest number of minutes among City’s outfield players last season (3920 minutes) — behind only Joao Cancelo (4649 minutes) and Bernardo Silva (3941 minutes).
Phillips, on the other hand, has had an injury-plagued season, making just 20 Premier League appearances — 1596 minutes of game time — last term and ranking just 13th in the Leeds squad in that regard. In the last six seasons, including the Championship, Phillips stayed under the 30 league appearances mark only once — in the 2020–21 season. A lengthy injury was certainly the deciding factor, but with Rodri in the team, Phillips will have to deliver his absolute best game to become a regular under Guardiola.
The following scouting report will take a closer look at Phillips’ playing profile, highlight his strengths and weaknesses, and analyse whether he is the right fit for Guardiola’s tactics at City.
Kalvin Phillips: A statistical overview
The Yorkshire-born midfielder is valued for his versatility in both attacking and defensive roles, as he has a fairly all-round player profile.
The ability to sustain possession and distribute the ball are undoubtedly some of the most important qualities to have if you want to succeed as a midfielder under Guardiola. While Phillips is not yet a world-class passer, he has enough quality and offers a sufficient passing game: last season, he completed 81.5% of his passes overall, playing in the team who fought to avoid relegation from the Premier League and did not dominate games like City.
Phillips was most successful with medium range passes, where the England midfielder had an impressive 91.1% success rate. He fared slightly worse on progressive passes (average 4.1) and passes into the final third (average 4.4), but is still capable of driving play vertically.
The defensive part of the game is where Phillips shined even more last season. He was among the leaders in just about every major defensive metric, including successful pressures (average 8.4), tackles won (average 2.4), shots blocked (average 0.56) and contesting opponent dribblers (average 2.7). Preventing the opponent’s build-up play in the form of blocked passes (average 1.8) and winning back possession in the form of ball recoveries (average 12.1) were also among Phillips’ best defensive attributes last season.
How will Phillips fit in at Man City?
Fitting into the tactical schemes of the Premier League champions is no easy task. That is why a comparative analysis of Phillips and City’s two main defensive midfielders in Rodri and Fernandinho can give us a good overview of whether the now former Leeds midfielder meets the criteria to be Guardiola’s “number 6”.
As can be seen from the statistical comparison above, Phillips lags behind Rodri and Fernandinho in each of the standard passing values, with the largest difference being in long passes — only 69.3% completion over the last two seasons. However, if we disregard the long passes, the English midfielder does quite well on the short and medium passes compared to the two City players, although he is still slightly behind in terms of completion rate.
Looking at advanced passing metrics, Phillips is also slightly behind City’s two midfielders, if key passes are disregarded. The former Leeds player averaged 0.94 key passes per 90 minutes over the last two seasons compared to Rodri’s 0.83, but he seems less able to move play vertically from the middle third to the attacking third than Rodri. Phillips averaged 3.96 progressive passes and 4.85 passes to the final third in the 2020–21 and 2021–22 seasons — worse than Rodri.
Another set of metrics also suggests a slightly better level of performance from Rodri and Fernandinho compared to Phillips. The English midfielder recorded fewer progressive carries (average 1.95) and carries into the final third (average 0.58) than the Spaniard and Brazilian over the last two seasons.
However, this does not necessarily mean that Phillips is incapable of taking the ball further forward, but may simply be a result of the role he was given during his time at Leeds. In addition, he was also less influential in creating shots and goals, but again this is may be due to the general qualities of the teams, which differ significantly between City and Leeds.
While Phillips may need some time to get used to Guardiola’s principles of positional play to become his best version on the ball, the Yorkshire-born midfielder is certainly more than ready to fulfil his defensive role.
Phillips fared better than the City duo in key defensive metrics, with Rodri merely making more ball recoveries (13.3 on average) than the Englishman (12.1 on average) over the last two seasons. Fernandinho was excellent at reading the game and knowing when to pressure the opposition and intercept their passes, and was often the initiator of City’s attacks after gaining possession. In purely statistical terms, Phillips is no worse than the former City captain, and that is something that will be of the utmost importance to Guardiola.
What will be Phillips’ best position at City?
Under Bielsa, Leeds often lined up in a 4–1–4–1, which is a variation of the more familiar 4–3–3 system. Both tactical formations, in their purest form, feature a defensive/holding midfielder, a so-called “number 6” or single pivot, who sits just in front of the back four. Under Bielsa’s stewardship, Phillips was often assigned that very role, as he is capable of distributing passes as a deep-lying playmaker and also possessing excellent physical attributes to cover on the defensive side.
Comparing Phillips’ role at Leeds with the roles of Rodri and Fernandinho at City, many similarities can be seen. Both the Spaniard and the Brazilian were used as lone holding midfielders in a 4–3–3 system, with Rodri more likely to be used against teams defending in a low block, while Fernandinho was almost always in the starting eleven against sides that relied on transitional play, such as Tottenham.
This simply means that Phillips already fits Guardiola’s positional play system in terms of its basic structure. Even more interestingly, Rodri and Fernandinho at times formed a double pivot in a more structured 4–2–3–1 formation, with Kevin De Bruyne taking the “number 10” role. On difficult European nights in the Champions League, Guardiola could well consider a defensive midfield duo of Rodri and Phillips.
Conclusion
In today’s football market, City have struck a remarkable deal, signing an England international for less than £50 million. With his physical attributes and defensive skills, as well as his passing ability from deep, Phillips is definitely a worthy replacement for Fernandinho.
Written in 2022.
