The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day
White Queen (Through the Looking Glass)
The Dons return to European action tonight against Romanian Army Cracks Steaua Bucharest (kinda), champions of Europe in 1986. The one that got away for the Dons.
One name, almost certain to be in the starting XI is Topi Keskinen. It’s just over a year now since the Dons made the ‘flying Finn’ one of their most expensive signings. A few days later, in a memorable debut, he scored a superb last-minute winner versus Queen’s Park.
I’ve been wanting to write about our Finnish fishing lover for a while. He represents so much about the new Aberdeen and indeed Thelin’s Reds. Here goes.
Player Trading Model
People want to come to Aberdeen now because they know they will get an opportunity to move onto a bigger club….We demonstrated that with Bojan, Ross McCrorie, Lewis (Ferguson) and others. And Topi will be another one if he continues at this level.
But there is no way we are letting Topi go at this stage because he is a key player for us. Unless someone comes in and offers us £20million tomorrow!
Dave Cormack, RedTV interview
I’d like to do a deeper dive on the Player Trading Model at some point, but all I will say is that it’s not apparent to me yet that Aberdeen have cracked the market.
There have been significant successes, and the club deserves a lot of credit for that. However, many of those players were purchased under the ‘old recruitment model’, remarkably, some of these players even came from our own youth Academy. Another two came from MTK Budapest under the Darren Mowbray regime, and you wouldn’t say Ramadani or Miovski were, a ‘Project Player’ (thank you Twitter), but rather were about finding value in unlikely places.
Keskinen might be a poster child for the new strategy, both young and exotic. A mix of the old (Ferguson) and the new (Miovski). As the quote illustrates, Topi is a piece of real estate that we are in the process of trying to remodel/repaint/tidy the garden up a bit, before eventually flipping. In an ideal world, he will go in the summer of 2027 after three years at the club.
It won’t be £20million, but what will it be? If Topi does improve and delivers us a Miovski season, then that fee will surely grow. If not, he’ll get Vicente Beusijened. In the cold realities of football in 2025, the ‘Bojan option’ is pretty much the best scenario we can hope for.
2024/25 Numbers (SPFL)
Given Keskinen’s age, the step-up in level, the amount of football he has been playing over the last two years, his goal and assist return, and the fact Aberdeen did win a Scottish Cup last year, I think the signing thus far can be deemed a success, so far.
Minutes played: 2435 (2nd in the team)
Shots: 59 (highest in the team)
Goals: 5 (4.24xG, 2.54xGOT)
Assists: 2 (2.69xA)
I’d encourage you to take a look at Topi’s FotMob or SofaScore profile to help accompany this chapter. One point to note is Keskinen’s total ranks across the SPFL versus his per 90 ranks. You don’t need to be able to read them, but you can see a difference by the conditional formatting (greens are good, reds are bad).
This can both be good and bad. The good, actually the very good, is that Keskinen plays a lot. We’ll come back to this in a future post, but Liverpool’s Ian Graham determined as one major indicator of success whether a player plays more than 50% of available minutes. Topi played 18 months of football straight. Hopefully he gives Big Tobers some of what he’s been drinking.
The bad might be the Keskinen is not overly efficient. Some of these stats are ones we might not want to be concerned about. Ohers we would.
Topi Keskinen: Player Attributes and Profile
Here’s a radar from the Ben Grifis website based on Wyscout data and compared to other wingers in the league.
You can see he gets high marks for acceleration, progressive carries, shots, and touches in the box. He also does well in defensive actions. I don’t really know how to interpret the smart passes metric. I’m assuming it means he doesn’t make a lot of smart passes, but when he does, he completes them. Write in and tell me if I’m wrong. He does poorly in assists and crosses.
Over the summer, I also tried out the wonderful twelve football earpiece app, developed by Soccermatics author David Sumpter and his team. It’s free to try, and you get five reports you can run. Just send a Whatsapp message and you’ll be spat out a report.
This image has some slightly different metrics.
Here’s the summary:
In the Premiership 2024 season, Topi Keskinen has shown promise as a winger, particularly in his run quality, as evidenced by his effective box entries and touches in the penalty area. While he excels in creating openings and carries the potential for impactful play, his finishing and passing quality have not reached the necessary levels to consistently convert opportunities into goals. Overall, his performances suggest a talented player still finding his rhythm in a competitive environment.
Earpiece App Report, Topi Keskinen
You can check out the full report here. And I recommend throwing a few other names in there. Maybe an Australian forward…
Most of this, and it’s not to demean the excellent resources and information shown above, is in keeping with my general feeling on Keskinen, which I’d wager may well be shared by a few of you:
Strengths:
He’s quick and gets himself in good positions by timing his runs well
He gets a lot of shots off
Very good ball carrier
Decent in pressing
Areas of improvement:
Finishing
Timing of final pass
Variation of crosses
1v1 situations at top of the box
As the Twelve earpiece report shows, Keskinen’s super strengths are his ability to carry the ball forward and time his runs into the box. Scouting dashboards across Europe may well be flagging him up in their filters on these particular metrics. One in particular is worth exploring.
Progressive Carries
According to this article in The Athletic, progressive actions are football’s most important metric. In more advanced data, you’ll see players’ progressive passes and carries recorded. From there, it’s a simple sum to identify how a player may have improved his team’s scoring chances by moving the ball from a zone with little chance of scoring to one with a higher chance.
One of the early calculations to measure that is Expected Threat (xT), which was developed by Karun Singh in 2021. There are now more advanced models, but I think this does a decent job of illustrating some of Topi’s strengths.
*Sorry for another link, many of you may be aware of all these terms but many may not. I think if we are to frame Topi in terms of the player trading model, these metrics are important to understand
This little passage of play against Celtic was a good showcase of Keskinen’s ability to carry the ball and break pressure.
Keskinen picks up a lose ball and manages to break past the first line of pressure.
He drives into the space, and then skips past Callum McGregor.
Now its a footrace between him and Johnston.
Topi makes his move to cut across but is ultimately dispossessed.
So you’ve got the promise there, the ability to be in back and in a good defensive position, to break out, and carry the ball from one end of the pitch to the other. I did a pretty basic xT calculation and that run increased Aberdeen’s chances of scoring in the next five actions by 9.2% and it reduced Celtic’s by 3.3%. A net swing of 12%.
Fast, but Fast Enough?
Keskinen is no doubt quick, but the race against Johnston would highlight my concerns in terms of his potential ceiling. His game has clearly been built around beating men with his pace, but against the top defenders in the league, the guys who could operate in the Championship or lower levels of the Premier League, he doesn’t quite have the top-line speed to separate, in the way that Shayden Morris does.
Johnston caught him, and the run amounted to nothing. Perhaps he should have looked to find a teammate earlier, or cut back and wait for support.
I don’t have any access to tracking data, so it’s not a sentiment based on any facts, just from what I’ve seen over the last year. I would expect that would have been an adjustment moving from the Finnish league, and his game is still in the process of adapting.
Wide Forward
Topi started his Aberdeen career playing mainly on the right but moved to, what we understand is his more favoured left. Right footed, he is also adept at playing crosses with his left foot.
To describe him as just a winger would neglect some of the structural adjustments Aberdeen make, in terms of the wingers pushing beyond the #9, in build-up and transition. It is the latter in which Keskinen seems to excel. Here’s a chance from Hearts at home earlier in the year.
This is of particular relevance when we consider what has probably been one of the topics in this summer’s transfer window - what Jimmy wants from a number 9 and the expectation that goals will come from the wide forwards. Guys like Topi.
Shots
We’ve got a lot of numbers on Keskinen, but one of the most interesting is the number of shots he took. It’s impressive that he has got himself into the position to take the most shots in the team, and I’m sure that does him no harm with the scouts either.
In terms of xG, you could say he outperformed, gaining five goals from 4.21xG, but his goal return overperformed his finishing with his total xGOT (i.e. the expectation that the ball would go in after he shoots) at only 2.54. In reality, goalkeepers should have done better, or he got a bit of luck. We did have two deflections in that five goals (Hearts and Hibs) and the other three came against Dundee.
But we know he needs to improve his finishing. The question is how?
I think when we compare his shot maps on FotMob from right and left foot, we get some interesting things to consider.
No surprises, he fancies his luck from long range on his right e.g. the Dundee screamer above.
Where I’m most interested in his that wee zone highlighted in the left-foot map. That’s exactly the place you want a wrong-sided winger getting into and then taking shots on their stronger foot,. Think Messi, think Salah, think Okkels?
It’s perhaps harsh to penalise Keskinen for his ability to take shots on with his ‘weaker foot’. The opening clips of these highlights shows how his ability to go two ways can open up crossing and shooting opportunities, as well as highlighting his ability to play on the last man and make runs in behind.
I just don’t think we saw enough of this from last season and if he’s going to increase his goal tally to nearer double figures, and he’s going to be playing on the left, then, in my opinion, he needs to improve his ability to slow defenders down, shift it and get shots off on his stronger foot. Just like in that goal against Hibs.
The Final Ball
We had this situation on Saturday against Morton.
Both Yengi and Aouchiche are ready for tap-ins, yet Keskinen tried to smash the ball past the keeper at point-blank range. Point to note, later in the game he played a wonderful through pass for Clarkson to score.
It does sometimes feel that (Roy Keane might agree) that Keskinen hangs on to the ball too long. This results in him shooting too close to the keeper or failing to make that next pass to a teammate.
Is this an execution failure or a decision failure. I’d probably say the latter and that should, hopefully, give us hope.
Individual Development
We’ve all heard the stories of players hanging back after training to work on their free-kicks, but how does individual coaching actually work at this level? There seems to be a common theme in terms of Thelin’s wide recruits: Pace but the need to improve their final ball/shot.
The boss man said it himself in regards to Kenan Bilalovic: noting that the club “will work hard with Kenan to develop him for the future.” Standard fare, but it would be interesting to know what that entails?
Almost every youth academy has young players working on Individual Development Plans (IDP). Rene Meulensteen was working with Cristiano Ronaldo on his finishing back in 2007 and Dundee’s new manager was the Head of Individual Player Development at Brentford before his popular unveiling at Dens Park.
I’m not sure who fulfills that role at Aberdeen currently. According to this article from the P&J prior to Thelin’s appointment, Emir Bajrami (a winger by trade) was in charge of this role at Elfsborg, based on an interview with Boras Tidning football writer Oskar Palsson.
Palsson said:
“Bajrami is very popular in the squad and had a good career as a player so I really understand that Thelin wants to bring even Bajrami.Young, offensive players are listening to him and Elfsborg has had a good reputation of wingers the last years. I think Bajrami is one of the keys behind that.”
That’s worth considering when we assume Thelin can just get the old Elfsborg winger factory up and running in the North-East. Perhaps it will be a role for the incoming transition coach, or maybe its Peter Leven.
It’s just not technical improvement that can increase a player like Keskinen’s output though. If the cogs are all in smooth motion then I think the aim is to create better scoring chances. The start of last season saw a lot of cutback goals. Transitions, whether straight up counters, or ‘artificial’ e.g., provoking a press and going in behind (see Yengi article) can also make everything a bit easier, if there’s more space to play with.
So far this season, I think Keskinen has been unlucky in that the final ball has not been there from his teammates. Specifically (and this is not a dig) but Aouchiche has had a few chances to play him in behind and fluffed his lines.
Under the Lights
Opportunities are likely to be few and far between in this playoff round but Keskinen will be an important figure. I think Thelin will enjoy the challenge and it might well suit his game model. Topi is a key part of that.
He will remain a work in progress in season 2025/26, but it’s important he takes some steps forward in his finishing and final ball. Aberdeen’s success, on and off the field, is relying on it. Some jam today, or rather tonight, would be sweet.
Enjoy the game. COYR.