The £15m wonderkid that could give Southampton an edge in the relegation battle

Southampton have cracked open the chequebook to sign a brand new midfielder who they will hope becomes a mainstay at St. Mary’s for years to come – but what kind of player is their £15m man Mateus Fernandes, and how does he compare to the players Russell Martin already has at his disposal?

The 20-year-old has a pretty straightforward backstory. A Portugal Under-21 international who came through the ranks at Olhanense before moving to Sporting as a teenager, he made his senior debut in October 2022 but didn’t really make his mark until last season when he impressed on a season-long loan at fellow Primeira Liga club Estoril, swiftly becoming a regular starter in central midfield.

In terms of playing style, he’s a pressing, ball-winning midfielder who patrols the middle third of the field from one side to the other and is especially comfortable playing in the channels or out wide, but he seldom gets into either penalty area – broadly speaking, he was used by Estoril similarly to the way Southampton use Will Smallbone or Joe Aribo. He isn’t meant to be a goalscorer or to get back and support the defence, but to press hard off the ball and progress play downfield when on it.

The question, then, is how he compares to Aribo and Smallbone and whether he can oust them right from the start – and a side-by-side rundown of the raw numbers behind the two players suggests that he has a chance, but it depends on which aspects of his team’s midfield Martin wants to emphasise.

The table above compares a few of the relevant statistics from the three players’ performance last season – it’s not quite so cut-and-dry, of course, and they were playing in different (if somewhat comparable) leagues, but they give us an idea of where Fernandes is right now. He’s behind Aribo in most key technical areas but does indirectly create more shooting opportunities, although Aribo also ranks much higher for different stats which denote quality of movement and ability to find space - in general, Aribo looks like the better ball player right now, which is perhaps fair enough given that the former Rangers man has eight extra years of experience under his belt. Fernandes does, however, compare very well with Smallbone on a technical level, forces more turnovers and makes more tackles, which could well be key for a team who are likely to be fighting a relegation battle. Importantly, however, Smallbone’s six goals and three assists in the Championship were rather better than Fernandes’ one and two, respectively. Fernandes has yet to add cutting edge in and around the box.

The numbers will be distorted slightly be the relative strength of their teams (it’s easier to rack up a high pass completion and create chances in a top six side than it is in a lower mid-table team like Estoril, for instance) but they do provide a fairly accurate pen portrait of the different midfielders’ strengths and weaknesses. That said, they do fail to highlight just how good Fernandes is getting in one-on-one situations.

Estoril’s 3-4-3 system condensed the midfield, meaning that Fernandes found himself in close quarters with opposing players a lot of the time and he developed that side of his game quickly and impressively. By the end of the 2023/24 season, he was beating his man with the ball at his feet about half the time and tackling them when off the ball at the same rate. A fifty-fifty hit rate might not sound all that amazing, but when you factor in the times a player keeps possession but can’t get past the player in front of them, it’s actually a pretty solid conversion rate. For comparison, Smallbone won the ball in such situations less than 40% of the time and only beat his man on the run a little over 30% of the time.

Given that Southampton’s 3-5-2 set-up, as employed against Newcastle United on Saturday, also condensed the midfield quite a lot, Fernandes’ skill in one-on-one duels combined with his impressive work off the ball and high turnover rate means he could easily shine more than a player like Smallbone, even if their own academy product is probably a better all-round technical player as it stands.

Of course, none of that factors in the period of adaptation that may be required coming into the Premier League for the first time – Fernandes is young and has never lived outside of his home country, and that can take time to get used to. Martin told the club website that Fernandes has the “key attributes” to help Southampton out “here and now”, which implies that he will be around the first team straight away, but it would hardly be a shock if he was eased in gradually.

Fernandes has the quality right now to potentially give Southampton a slight upgrade in the centre of the park but he’s not so far ahead of his peers that he is liable to make all the difference on his own. If the system is good and the squad as a whole is up to the standard required for the Premier League then they may well survive, but it would be a surprise if Fernandes tips the balance either way. But he could contribute effectively very soon, and if he continues to develop his all-round game as he did over the course of the last year then he could easily grow to be worth every penny of that £15m. It’s a sizeable gamble, but the worst case scenario doesn’t look too painful and the best case could be very good indeed.