The first hour of Strasbourg’s 3-1 victory over Nantes on Sunday doubled as a personal showcase for the upward career trajectory of Chelsea loanee Andrey Santos.
Santos scored twice against Nantes, taking his tally for the 2024-25 season to five goals in eight Ligue 1 appearances. No other central midfielder in Europe’s top five leagues has begun the new campaign in such a prolific vein of form, and both of his strikes in the game underlined the main ways in which he is thriving in head coach Liam Rosenior’s system at Strasbourg.
In the 17th minute, Santos deliberately stood in an offside position as team-mates Dilane Bakwa and Sebastian Nanasi lined up a free kick wide on the right. Bakwa’s initial in-swinging delivery was cleared and Santos began to retreat, but remained alert and agile enough to react quickest when Habib Diarra clipped the ball back into the Nantes penalty area.
One sluggish Nantes defender played him onside and he kept his composure to connect with a downward header that beat goalkeeper Alban Lafont:
In the second half, Diego Moreira broke up a Nantes attack and the ball ran loose for Santos just inside his own half. He played a quick pass forward to Nanasi with his left foot and then set off, tracking the play as Nanasi moved the ball right to the feet of Bakwa and steadily arcing his run towards the back post.
He entered the penalty area at the perfect moment as Bakwa’s low cross trickled between several bodies along the six-yard box, and his reward was a tap-in:
“It’s a pleasure to work with Andrey Santos,” Rosenior said in his post-match press conference. “He listens and has a great character. We worked with him this week to get him on the ball even more. Tonight, he was rewarded. He has a good feel for shooting to be in the right place in the penalty area.”
Goals from midfield were very much part of Santos’ repertoire in his lone full season at Vasco da Gama; he found the net eight times in 33 games to help fire his team to promotion to Brazil’s top flight in 2022. There he specialised in arriving in the final third at the right time and place to convert chances, and also in weaponising his surprisingly polished aerial ability at set pieces.
The recipe is very similar at Strasbourg, where Rosenior has given Santos the freedom to support attacks with runs from a deeper midfield starting position — and in particular to attack crosses supplied by the dangerous Bakwa from the right flank.
Strasbourg’s thrilling 4-3 defeat away at Lyon in August yielded the first tangible returns on this burgeoning connection. Santos used Bakwa shifting the ball out of his feet to the left as his trigger to dart beyond his marker to the edge of the six-yard box, where he contorted his body to meet an in-swinging delivery with a brilliant header that looped into the far corner:
Three weeks later Lille were the victims of Santos’ sharp instincts for timing his runs into the opposition penalty area. He initiated the move from inside the Strasbourg half with a diagonal pass to his right, then continued his run upfield and broke into a sprint the moment he recognised that Bakwa was ready to cross.
This time the ball ran all the way through to Nanasi who was denied by a brilliant save, but Santos was perfectly positioned to lash in the rebound from point-blank range:
Santos’ first goal this season against Rennes offered a reminder of his potent set-piece threat. Starting from near the edge of the penalty area he attacked the back post and got himself into a position where, as the ball dropped in his vicinity in a scramble of bodies, he managed to meet it with an improvised left-footed volley that found the top corner:
What is particularly striking about Santos’ shot diet early in this season — illustrated by the graphic below — is just how many of his attempts are taken in or immediately around the six-yard box. All five of his goals have been scored close to goal and his average shot distance, according to Opta, is 11.8 yards:
The other notable thing about Santos’ goal return for Strasbourg is that it is far from the full extent of his contribution. A glance at his touch map so far this season — shown below — reveals that more of his touches of the ball are still coming in his own half as he helps to screen the Strasbourg defence, break up opposition attacks and build up his own team’s moves:
He averages just 1.6 touches in the opposition box per 90 minutes according to fbref.com; his five goals have come from just seven on target, and 14 overall in his eight appearances. That level of conversion is almost certainly unsustainable, but it does underline that his goal threat is based on quality rather than quantity.
That means Santos’ appetite for goals does not come at the expense of his defensive responsibilities. His 3.6 tackles per 90 minutes (of which 2.1 are made in his own defensive third) lead the entire Strasbourg squad according to fbref.com, and no player has won more duels in Ligue 1 this season.
The broad spread of those duels across the pitch — shown in the graphic below — highlights that he is helping Rosenior’s team in a wide range of areas and situations:
Santos profiles statistically as a versatile, athletic No 6 or No 8 with an impactful defensive presence, who is solid rather than spectacular in possession (he averages 45.7 attempted passes per 90 minutes this season with an 86.1 per cent success rate), and is better utilised in attack as a dangerous off-ball runner than as an on-ball creator.
It should come as no shock that one of the players who profiles most similarly to Santos according to fbref.com is Conor Gallagher, who scored eight goals from midfield at a similar age to the Brazilian during a productive loan spell at Crystal Palace. Santos is comfortably on track to reach double figures for league goals for the first time in his career.
The only true midfielder to achieve that feat for Chelsea since Frank Lampard left was Mason Mount in 2021-22. It is debatable just how important the goalscoring No 8 is in a modern elite team, but at the very least Santos is positioning himself to offer an intriguing complement to the current crop of midfielders in Enzo Maresca’s squad when he returns to the club next season.
(Top photo: Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images)
