The £11m deal that proves Brentford are still one of the smartest sides in the transfer market
Brentford are closing in on the completion of a signing that could be another very cunning piece of business.
By the time you read this, Jens Cajuste may well be a Brentford player already. Terms have been agreed between the Bees, the player and his current club, Napoli, and he is expected to undergo a medical on Monday. All going to plan, he will be playing in red and white stripes this season – and he may well prove that Brentford haven’t lost their touch in the transfer market.
According to Fabrizio Romano, the 25-year-old Sweden international will arrive on a season-long loan spell for a fee of €1.5m (£1.3m) with an €11m (£9.4m) conditional obligation to buy clause – in total, about the same as Napoli paid for him when he signed from French outfit Reims last summer.
The headline summary of Cajuste’s time at Napoli is that it was a disappointment – that he never settled, never established himself in the first team, never really convinced. But the truth may be more than he wasn’t able to do the job that the manager wanted him to do, because the underlying stats from his one-season stay in Campania show a player who did a lot of good work. And Brentford know how to identify talent from the stats - and they aren’t the kind of club who will look at the narrative over the cold, hard figures behind a player’s game.
A central midfielder, Cajuste is an aggressive ball-winner who generates a high number of turnovers and does a great deal of defensive work. While ‘underperforming’ for Napoli last season, he registered over three tackles for every 90 minutes he played, comfortably better than most midfielders can manage, and won plenty of battles up and down the pitch – his 54% one-on-one win rate is impressive, and heat maps show a player getting all over the midfield to close opposing players down.
That style of play may not have suited all of the four managers Napoli have gone through since Luciano Spalletti left after winning the Scudetto in the 2022/23 season, but he’s precisely the kind of player Thomas Frank loves – hard working, willing to run himself into the ground for the cause, and an indefatigable presser who can land his tackles time and again.
But there’s more to Cajuste than a player who ticks the same broad boxes as players like Christian Nørgaard and Mathias Jensen. His playing profile fits the mould, but he has another string to his bow which could elevate him above his rivals for a place in Frank’s starting eleven – he’s a powerful and dynamic dribbler who can confidently take on and beat players with the ball at his feet.
To put his work with the ball in perspective, he took and beat players almost twice as often as Jensen last season on a minute-by-minute basis, and seven times as often as the sturdy but technically limited Nørgaard. And he’s dynamic off the ball as well, receiving passes upfield three times more often than Nørgaard and twice as frequently as Jensen. In other words, he offers more options going forward without conceding anything in terms of his ability to do the grunt work Frank wants from his compact and aggressive midfield.
Assuming Cajuste can play to his highest level, he could help Brentford to build on what they have and begin to expand their game-plan slightly. He isn’t a talent of such enormity that he would transform the way they play, but he can represent the sort of incremental improvement that Brentford have built themselves up with successfully over the course of several seasons. Brentford didn’t have the easiest ride in the 2023/24 season, but this deal suggests that they haven’t lost their edge when it comes to recruitment.
For several seasons in a row, Brentford’s owners have operated using a data-first approach to recruitment that has transformed them from EFL also-rans into a solid Premier League side - and on paper, at least, the arrival of Cajuste implies that the same processes are in place. This is a deal which ignores the narrative which suggests that he struggled in Serie A and instead looks at some highly impressive raw numbers, which say that he didn’t do so badly after all and is more than capable of improving Frank’s team. Given how often Brentford get it right, it would seem foolish to bet against them this time.
Update: The day after this article was published, with contracts exchanged and the medical completed, the deal fell through and Cajuste returns to Naples. The reason is not yet clear, with the only explanation offered as yet being Fabrizio Romano’s claim that the two teams “had issues after exchanging paperwork” - which, let’s be honest, doesn’t clear things up very much at all. The transfer market is cruel, sometimes, but the points about Brentford’s intelligent use of data over narrative stands...