Georginio Rutter: Why has Leeds target risen to a £30m price tag in two years?
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By Phil Hay and Mark Carey
If the lure of the
Premier League is ever in doubt, notice how often it crops up in interviews with players who have never played in the competition. Georginio Rutter was quizzed about it when he spoke to the
Scouted Football website last year, saying the Premier League “makes (young players) dream” and is, truthfully, where many prospects hope to go.
The division’s wealth and exposure have had that effect and as much as a young forward in Germany has Bayern Munich to think of, or potentially
La Liga in Spain or Italy’s
Serie A,
England is so often the draw.
During that interview in May, Rutter was speaking hypothetically about heading over the Channel some day but last week the dream became more than that. Interest in him from the Premier League, and
Leeds United specifically, had grown serious. His
Bundesliga club, Hoffenheim, reacted to it by leaving him out of a winter-break friendly against
Wolfsburg.
That was Friday and by Sunday morning, Hoffenheim announced publicly that Rutter was being stood down from first-team training and would play no part in a second friendly, arranged against Swiss side Servette yesterday.
The German season gets going again after their
World Cup hiatus in 10 days’ time and Hoffenheim were well into their preparations for the resumption. Quickly, they started to plan without the 20-year-old, assuming the clubs courting him would make good on their initial approaches.
Hoffenheim did not say if Rutter had asked to be excused from training, stating only that he was “concerned about the current situation” and that the club were “dealing with a young person responsibly”, but the whys and wherefores are merely semantics. Rutter plainly had an ambitious eye on the English leagues and Hoffenheim stood to make a huge profit on a player they signed for relative pennies two years ago.
The club’s statement knocked the ball back into Leeds’ court, effectively inviting them to tie up the deal if they had the money and the conviction to do it. If parts of the prose felt a little over the top — “we are not talking about a piece of furniture here” — it was no surprise that Hoffenheim wanted to expedite the issue.
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Last night, sources in Germany were indicating to
The Athletic that a deal with Leeds was on course for completion following talks over a fee which promised to break the transfer record at Elland Road set by the £27million ($32.9m) spent on
Rodrigo in 2020. Rutter was actively pushing for the move and ready to board a plane.
On Leeds’ shortlist of strikers for the January window, his had been the most exciting name, the one that stood out as a highly-calculated investment.
Rutter has been regularly referenced as one of the brightest youngsters in the Bundesliga, an all-rounder of a forward in a way which would naturally appeal to Leeds. There is a view in Yorkshire that what this team need, and what they have needed since
Patrick Bamford’s body began to fail him, is a bona fide No 9, but so many of their attacking targets — those they land and those they miss out on — offer versatility as part of the package.
Neither
Cody Gakpo nor
Charles De Ketelaere were out-and-out No 9s or narrow in their skill set. Willy Gnonto, their last-gasp arrival in August, can play anywhere across the line. Few of the names the club go after are quite as typecast as Bamford.
In early 2021, Rutter transferred from Rennes to Hoffenheim, without huge fanfare outside of France or Germany. He was a product of Rennes’ excellent academy, a team-mate and friend of
Eduardo Camavinga, who would soon leave the Ligue 1 side for
Real Madrid.
His departure was slightly acrimonious. Rutter had run close to the end of his contract and was not willing to sign a new one, unhappy that Rennes had barely used him in their first team. They then sold him at the last opportunity and according to sources in France, his price was around £500,000.
Over the two years since, Hoffenheim’s valuation has risen, by roughly 6,000 per cent, to more than £30million — a demand that prospective buyers in this window soon realised was no bluff.
How, then, did his price tag soar to such an extent?
Rutter is essentially the sort of footballer all club at a certain level are looking for — one who provides huge resale value for a relatively low-level outlay.
Leeds have tried to pursue that model themselves and even with Rutter, the hope would be that a fee of £30million-plus would be no barrier to his value increasing further, given he is 20 and still in the early stages of his career. Hoffenheim’s sporting director Alexander Rosen was quoted as describing Rutter’s development in Germany as “breathtaking”, and he
has played in every one of their Bundesliga fixtures this season, carving out the first-team chances which were harder to find at Rennes.
Talk about transfers out of Hoffenheim usually reference
Roberto Firmino’s switch to
Liverpool, because few have been anywhere near as successful, and latterly Rutter has listened to those comparisons.
He has elements of Firmino about him in that he can play through the middle and operate with his back to goal if necessary, providing a focal point to make possession stick and a target to play through. But his pace lends itself to wide roles too, in areas where a little more space allows his dribbling and direct running to take effect.
Hoffenheim’s willingness to blood him and to expose him to top-level Bundesliga opposition has brought him on rapidly and alerted other teams to him. It was always likely to be this way and if Hoffenheim wrap up a transfer, they will tell themselves that they played the process perfectly.
Rutter is not the only attacking option Leeds have been talking about or looking at.
They have analysed
Coventry City’s
Viktor Gyokeres, despite the Championship club’s vocal reluctance to sell him, and there were suggestions of interest in Sebastian Driussi, the former River Plate forward who plays for FC Austin in
MLS. Leeds’ head coach Jesse Marsch is an admirer of Wolves’ Hwang Hee-chan and has been for a while.
But the noise around Rutter indicated that he was the option they wanted to tie up and the one with the most potential to develop.
He would not be bringing prolific stats with him — 10 goals and four assists in 57 league appearances in Germany — but people see in Rutter the quality to blossom into a highly-influential attacker.
Beyond doubt is his comfort with the ball at his feet.
To see how he compares we can use smarterscout, which gives players’ games a series of ratings from zero to 99, a bit like the player ratings in the FIFA video games but powered by real data and advanced analytics. These ratings — adjusted for Premier League standard — relate to either how
often a player performs a given stylistic action (for example, volume of shots per touch), or how
effective they are at it (for example, how well they progress the ball upfield) compared with others at their position.
As the chart below shows, Rutter is in the highest percentile for his volume of carries and dribbles, making him a good bet as a wide forward.
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His relatively high rate of expected goals from ball progression — the extent to which movement of the ball up the field helps to increase the danger of his side — indicates that quick and direct sprinting can be effective in forcing openings. But the xG of the shots he creates shows room for improvement, even if his own shot volume is at an acceptable level.
The more Leeds were to use him centrally, the more chances are likely to present themselves.
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Rutter has seen a fair number of opportunities in the Bundesliga this season, with the average chance dropping to him 15 yards from goal.
What is apparent from the breakdown of his shooting is that it casts him as very two-footed: stronger on his left but only marginally, and just as happy striking the ball with his right. As a runner, the data indicates that Leeds would be signing a gifted protagonist in take-ons and one-on-ones. His success rate in them (below) is extremely high, as is the quality of his tackling by the standards of an attacker.
At his young age, it provides plenty to build on and vindicates some of the hype around him.
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With Max Wober already signed and therefore a defensive crack ostensibly dealt with, this is where Leeds’ attention now lies — on the forward they know they have to recruit.
Rutter has only so much experience, far less than someone like 51-cap South Korea international Hwang, but he is fresh, he is widely admired and his evolution at Hoffenheim is why recruitment departments have homed in on him and why his value is shooting up.
His estrangement from Hoffenheim’s first-team plans did not bounce Leeds into action immediately on Sunday but they like the Frenchman, he likes England, and Hoffenheim’s actions over the weekend created a shop floor where the only obstacle was the thing that gave the Premier League its glitz in the first place — money.
for his second half… even emu begrudgingly 
