Nico Williams: the champion worth every penny
A comprehensive SCOUTED50(+1) breakdown of Spain's dynamic winger.
This profile was produced as part of a commercial collaboration with SkillCorner, SCOUTED’s official data partner. SkillCorner’s tracking and performance data is used by more than 150 of the world’s biggest clubs, leagues and confederations. Learn more.
All stats correct as of 9/7/2024 unless otherwise noted.
https://www.scoutednotebook.com/p/scouted50-nico-williams
At a big international tournament, players have a unique stage to announce themselves.
At EURO 2024, Nico Williams hasn't announced himself. He's just added some oomph. He’s kicked down a couple of doors, metaphorically cracked a few full-backs’ skulls, and left trails of fire along his sprints in transition.
I went into the Italy-Spain match hoping my Azzurri could announce themselves as contenders to go back-to-back. Halfway through the half, every time I saw Williams run at Di Lorenzo, all I could do was scream at the TV:
Whenever Williams has received the ball at this tournament, one can’t help, as an opposition fan, but feel an impending sense of fear and existential dread.
When watching as a neutral though, Williams has brought a nice helping of verve and eccentricity — alongside Lamine Yamal, of course — to a Spanish side that had become a little stale in the decade of international tournaments post-EURO 2012.
While Nico’s reputation belies his ability — almost a natural synergy for players developed in the unique structure of Athletic Club — those two things are now starting to marry. Everyone wants a Nico Williams in their team.
Heck, even Pedri has spent this week gushing over his team-mate in press conferences, clearly with the express intent to woo him to Barcelona. That’s always easier said than done for Athletic Club’s notoriously loyal Basque prodigies.
Onto the fun stuff. If, unlike his older brother Iñaki, Williams Jr. deems to ever leave Bilbao…just how good is he? And to what heights can he ascend?
Let’s find out.
In this profile:
He’s fast — but just how fast, exactly?
The run types that make him a triple-threat attacker
Assessing the details of his playmaking abilities
Unlocking an untapped font of finishes and goals
Is he worth the monster wage package?
ROAD RUNNER
beep beep.
Yes, that’s the sound of Road Runner, dashing away from Wile E. Coyote. It’s also the sound of Nico Williams exploding away from defenders. beep.
There’s a certain arbitrary cut-off speed where I believe a player goes from just being quick to possessing a truly difference-making asset.
There are less than 40 wingers, from a sample size of over 240 in Europe’s top five leagues, who reach my PSV-99 (Peak Sprint Velocity: 99th Percentile) difference-making marker: 31 km/h.
I’ll break it down a little further: 31 km/h is the 99th percentile, taken from a sample of all movement above 4.0 m/s. This means it is not a player’s absolute maximum speed, but a great indicator of a velocity they can consistently reach during games.
Here are Europe’s very, very fast wingers:
There are a lot of very good players in there, and as you see, Nico Williams slots in just ahead of my 31 km/h arbitrary cut-off.
Why have I chosen 31 km/h, you ask? I was thinking of players whose games are highly predicated on their ability to run very, very fast, and the name that came to my head first was Federico Chiesa.
Chiesa suffered a catastrophic ACL injury in January 2022, and it’s always felt to me he hasn’t quite been the same player since. So, I looked up his PSV-99 stat from the season prior to his injury, and this season, and noticed a 0.6 km/h drop form 31.4 km/h to 30.8 km/h.
That doesn’t seem significant, but it’s enough to take Chiesa from being what would be a top-10 fastest winger this season, to sitting just outside the top-40. This takes a player from being precociously fast, to just being ‘quick’.
Back to Nico. Not only is he very, very fast, but he can also continuously make these high-speed efforts throughout a game.
Even more importantly for wingers, we want to see how these efforts translate to the time during a game when their team have the ball — TIP, or Time in Possession.
This is all quite self-explanatory, but it’s very fun. We all love players like Nico, and as we’ve seen at this EUROs, having a player like this can be a true point of difference. We’ll touch on this more later, but pairing this skillset with the traditional Spanish style, while still holding the option to play rapid transition/isolation-ball with Williams, is a very dangerous combination.
Pertaining to his dribbling, another thing you may notice watching Spain is his change of pace. He stops and starts, then stops and starts again - completely bamboozling his marker in the process.
Fortunately, we have metrics to measure what this looks like at a macro level: High Accelerations and High Decelerations per 30 TIP.
It takes an equally special athlete at full-back to have an answer for this (wink, Aaron Wan-Bissaka). One of the players who would’ve been an interesting match-up for Williams at this EUROs is Italy’s Michael Kayode, who we profiled a few months ago: a proper lock-down defender with the athletic make-up to at least get close to matching Williams. Sadly, Kayode was left at home, and Di Lorenzo was torn apart.
Michael Kayode: the duelling roadrunner
STEPHEN GANAVAS
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APR 17
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But many players with that archetype have their own limitations, so playing them to counter the Williams effect is not without its costs. These are the problems that having these athletic gifts, paired with his on-ball quality, pose for the opposition. It’s too much at once.
RUN, BUT WITH DANGER
Naturally, players that are fast make a lot of off-ball runs. It maximises their athletic abilities, obviously. But not all off-ball runners are created equal.
What makes an efficient off-ball runner?
Making a lot of runs is good: it helps to make an attack ‘fluid’, provides the ball carrier with options, and disrupts the opposition who needs to mark and track runners. But what if you can do all that and constantly make dangerous runs.
First up, let’s take a look at Williams’ overall off-ball running profile.
Dangerous Runs: A Dangerous Run is a Run with at least 2% chance to lead to a goal within 10 seconds if the player performing the Run was to be served.
Apart from the sheer volume, the interesting aspect of these numbers is the gap between his Runs and Dangerous Runs per 30 TIP. So he is an above average off-ball runner in terms of volume, but scales up really well in converting these Runs into Dangerous Runs.
In terms of percentage of his Runs that are dangerous, he ranks in the 83rd percentile amongst wingers in Europe’s top five leagues.
To get a sense of who is in front of him… it’s a cast of some very good, and lots of experienced players.
I added in the word ‘experienced’ there, because this is not a stat young players often thrive in. There are a lot of good, athletic young wide players that run a lot, but not many know how to run efficiently.
Here are how the top five league wingers born in 2002 (the year of Nico’s birth) and later stack up:
There are a lot of similar outlet-style wingers here who are not even close to Williams’ level. It’s a craft, knowing which spaces to pull into consistently. It also signals the style, intent, and ability of Williams to drive into those areas and make himself available.
Naturally, there are some wide players in these charts that don’t fit the same mould — Xavi Simons is an obvious one — who rank low because their role is a bit different, with more movements deep and inside. But that’s a topic for another day.
To dig a little further into Nico’s off-ball running profile, a few more things popped out to me as additionally impressive.
Firstly, it’s how amazing his dangerous run volume and efficiency is, despite not making lots of Dangerous Cross Receiver runs.
I’ve covered this before, but for first-timers, these types of runs are very threatening, but also very difficult for the passer to actually hit. Instead, Nico ranks extremely well for Dangerous Runs Ahead of the Ball, Dangerous Runs in Behind, and Dangerous Overlap Runs.
This is the triple-threat. And you can picture it: he’s been doing all three the entire EUROs.
You’ve got the Dangerous Run in Behind, where he sits on the shoulder of the full-back, or between them and the centre-back, and waits to latch onto a pass with direct line either on goal, or through the channel to square for a team-mate.
Then you have the Dangerous Run Ahead of the Ball, receiving in transition to then spin and charge at the defensive line, often looking to run or hold wide to isolate the full-back.
And lastly the Dangerous Overlap Run, going around Marc Cucurella to receive close to the corner of the by-line and the box, looking to find a free man in a shooting position.
Again, this further reinforces how many different ways he can do damage. He is constantly asking questions of the defensive structure by repeatedly throwing all these different approaches at them.
In Bilbao, the main issue for Williams is that his team-mates haven’t been able to complete passes to these runs at a well-above average rate.
While his Athletic Club team-mates do look for him keenly, they rank a touch below average for their ability to make these passes to Williams, in comparison to other top five league wingers.
Clearly, this is less of a problem when playing in a team as technically talented as Spain, and the results have been terrifyingly impressive.
POSITIONAL OPTIMISATION
Just to throw in some extra quirks, I want to look at a couple of other run types that explain Nico’s role.
This is the profile of a winger who looks to stretch defences wide, as well as deep (alongside the Runs in Behind we touched on earlier).
This is the dream winger to play with if you are a left-sided number eight that wants to crash the box/edge of the box. He plays the touchline, he makes runs in behind, and he looks to hit the byline. You can see why Luis de la Fuente has been extremely keen to carve out a role for a goal-scoring midfielder in his Spain team, first with Pedri and now Dani Olmo.
Everything Nico Williams does opens up space for that type of player, and even though it wasn’t the optimal role for Pedri, De la Fuente understands the importance of putting one of his best players in a position to benefit from Williams’ work.
THE FINISHING TOUCHES
For all the destructive elements in Nico’s game, one does get the sense he leaves some end product on the table when he finds himself in good positions in the final third.
I wasn’t overly surprised to see that he has only scored 11 goals in 6,300 minutes in La Liga, but at the same time I feel he could have scored more. Obviously there are some role limitations with playing very wide and stretching the pitch, but even then, with his ability to create shots for himself off the dribble… could he be doing more?
I think there is scope for him to morph into more of a wide forward-ish style at times. He can go both ways as a dribbler when he runs at defenders, and he can parlay that into shooting and scoring quite effectively with both feet. I don’t think he’s a ridiculous ball-striker, but he’s decent enough at cutting inside and finding the far corner. A lot of his senior goals come from these sorts of tough opportunities, so I do wonder whether he could make the angled run inside just a little bit more often and maybe bag himself and extra handful of ‘easy’ goals throughout the course of the season.
If he can do that, his value takes another massive leap. That’s when you start veering into the Mo Salah territory in terms of what his ceiling could be as the ultimate transition runner/dribbler/creator/goalscorer quadruple threat.
At the moment, most of his final third value comes as a creative player. As I touched on with Spain, his role maximises the runners from deep or the runners at the near post — the ‘next’ player.
We can see that with the types of runs he plays passes to at a high rate.
For Nico Williams, these passes are to Support Runs, Cross Receiver Runs, and Underlap Runs.
He could probably be a bit more efficient as a passer, but that must be balanced by how much pressure Williams attracts because of the gravity of his dribble threat. We’ve consistently seen teams throw multiple players at him to try to negate some of that threat, which also makes finding angles for passes, and threading through those angles, rather difficult.
Given he is a high volume crosser, it can be a little bit difficult to gauge on the macro level exactly how efficient he is, given that crossing is difficult and drags down standard ‘completion ratio’ metrics a fair bit.
For these kinds of players, I like to default to a different metric: Threat Generated per 100 Pass Attempts/Completions (the Threat generated by runs which Williams attempts/completes passes to). This gives us a good overview of whether a player is actually balancing out risk and reward as a creator.
Threat: represents the probability of the attacking team scoring a goal in the next 10 seconds if this player was to receive a pass from the player in possession.
As you can see, amongst top five league wingers, Williams is in the 87th percentile for Threat per 100 Pass Attempts, and 88th percentile for Threat per 100 Completed Passes. Athletic Club are getting a very solid return on investment on him as a creator. His efficiency is ok, and clearly the volume of Threat his passes generate is massive.
PUNTING ON NICO
Nico Williams is a player every big club could use. The dribbly, touchline-hugging winger is coming back into fashion, and his comfort in playing when the game slows down, as evidenced through his performances with Spain, makes him a natural fit in a range of systems and tactical approaches.
Extracting any player out of Athletic Club is an arduous task, given the high wages on offer, and Athletic’s inclination to point to large release clauses for any clubs keen to tempt them into a sale. But Nico is so talented there will be clubs attempting his purchase.
If he does move, it will be very interesting to see what his path becomes. Barcelona seems like a natural fit, and the dynamic of him opposite Lamine Yamal has already proven a devastating one-two punch at international level.
The scariest part is that both players have so much scope to grow and develop, with the best-case scenario being they are able to add high-volume goal-scoring to their arsenal. That will come more naturally to Yamal, given his ball-striking prowess, but Nico’s explosive athleticism does give him the potential to become a goal threat too — even if it's in a slightly different way, through off-ball running and movement first and foremost.
Nico Williams is the perfect young signing for big clubs. He has an already well-established floor, with two seasons of solid production for Athletic Club. But most importantly, his ceiling feels untouched - his performances for Spain at EURO 2024 have been just a teaser.
Oftentimes, you get what you pay for. Signing Williams won't be a cheap endeavour, but in this instance, it will feel worth every penny. This wouldn’t be an educated bet on future development, but a surefire acquisition of a player already polished and effective.
If he takes another leap, that ~€60 million release clause will look like a bargain.
This Nico Williams profile was an added extra to SCOUTED50, the latest of which to be profiled was Stade Rennais’ Désiré Doué — an emerging prospect that is very likely on your club’s transfer shortlist this summer.
Désiré Doué: before the big move
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