Timo Werner
Timo Werner
Current Club: RB Leipzig.
Previous Clubs: Chelsea, RB Leipzig, VfB Stuttgart.
Loan Clubs: N/A.
International: Germany 57 caps 24 goals.
Trophies Won: UEFA Champions League 2020/21. FIFA Club World Cup 2022. UEFA Supercup 2021/22. German Cup 2022/23. German Super Cup 2023/24. Confederations Cup 2017.
A few years ago Werner was one of the hottest prospects in the game, now at what should be his peak age of 27 he looks like a busted flush. He still has his pace and strength, still has an excellent goal tally for his country, but he is now struggling to hold down a first team place at RBL, when once he was their main man. Goals have stopped flowing and Werner just looks like a player who no longer has any real self-belief.
The way his confidence has vanished is astonishing. Werner's time at Chelsea has left him what looks the football equivalent of a broken shell of a man, no longer looking like he is even enjoying playing football. He was never a great goalscorer, though he did manage to score regularly in his first spell at RBL, that was more of a consequence of the number of chances and the quality of them than his deadliness in front of goal.
Werner was also very good at making runs in behind to latch onto a ball over the top or through in behind the defence, where his pace meant no defender was going to catch him. He still works hard, but now his lack of intelligent movement if a ball in behind is not on is catching him out. RBL are no longer the team they were when he left to join Chelsea and, just like at Chelsea, his inability to adapt his game to link and move around the box is being found out.
In his first spell at RBL, their main attacking focus was the quick counter, with Werner's pace being the only real asset he needed to get in at opponents. Off the ball all he needed to do was help hustle the opposition by pressing, as they rarely built up attacks with long, flowing, passing moves, so he was not having to provide more than that burst forward to catch out defences. Like Romelu Lukaku, when asked to step up and actually be able to play football, rather than just run very fast at goal and shoot the moment he gets a chance, Werner has been found out.
His touch, again like Lukaku's though not to the same degree, is not quite good enough, meaning that his shots are snatched as the ball is just too far away to get a clean hit. It is the same issue with his involvement in the build up, the ball is not quite close enough to enable Werner to be able to consistently pass the ball exactly where he intends. When you add that to the decimated confidence and you have a player who tenses up when in front of goal as he attempts to strike it, the exact moment when you want to relax.
That leaves him messing up chances he would normally bury, which lowers his confidence further and makes him tense up more, which makes his touch and striking of the ball get worse. Nowadays Werner's main use is as a warning to stat analysts and scouts that a player who scores regularly playing one style might not necessarily be able to translate that to a team playing a different way. His stats may have made him look like a great signing for Chelsea, but they did not take into account that he just fitted the RBL style so well that it emphasised his qualities and hid his deficiencies.
This is when his agent needs to go and find him a team that will suit his way of playing, even if it means stepping down a bit in terms of salary, if he is to recover his confidence and become once more a regular first team player for someone. That is if it is not already too late for his career to ever recover in any meaningful way from the hopelessness of Werner's Chelsea spell.
Requested by - Livebird31