Timo Werner might well have kicked his last ball in a Tottenham shirt.

Having hobbled off half an hour into the North London Derby last week, the Spurs medical team has since ruled the German out of a return from his hamstring injury before the end of the season.

This effectively brings Werner's audition at Tottenham to a premature end, lowering the curtain on a brief and divisive loan spell, leaving Ange Postecoglou with a decision to make as to whether to push the button on a reported £15m option to bring the forward in on a permanent basis.

His record in lilywhite reads a fairly lukewarm 'played 13, scored 2, assisted 3', doing little to shake off the lingering perception of him as a striker who can't score goals.

Tottenham are currently limping their way to a Europa League spot with a series of anticlimactic performances that scream 'we've settled for 5th place'.

In the process, they have often struggled to make the most of threatening passages of play and have discernibly lacked a killer instinct in the final third. This is a problem that has pervaded the Spurs attack for large parts of the season and something Ange Postecoglou himself has highlighted as an area in need of improvement.

It's not hard to see then why the prospect of tying down a man perhaps best known in English football for missing sitters, is less than appealing to many Spurs fans hoping to see a more clinical attacking side in the new season.

To simply cast Werner aside though as an asset to Spurs, purely because he is a poor goal scorer, in my opinion, does him a huge disservice and doesn't give nearly enough weight to everything else he does with and without the ball.

In this piece I will look at why I believe Spurs should sign Timo Werner permanently and the value he can add to the squad going forward.

Can't teach an old dog new tricks?

As previously mentioned, it's easy to understand why some draw the obvious connection between a side lacking in end-product and a player notorious for missing big chances. As far as Timo's prowess in front of goal is concerned, nothing much has changed there since his maligned Chelsea days.

His 2 goals this season have come from an xG tally of 4.21 and he has recorded similar under performances year-on-year ever since his ill-fated move to the Premier League back in 2020/21.

Why exactly a man who, at the age of 24, was one of the hottest properties in European football - and devastating in front of goal - managed to fall so far, is a mystery.

The easy answer is simply, 'confidence'. Whatever your explanation though, with Werner now 28, and still consistently putting up  underwhelming scoring figures, there is a feeling that you just can't teach an old dog new tricks, with a return to Werner's 2019/20 output of 28 goals in 34 matches feeling ever increasingly unlikely.

Perhaps a slow return to confidence might go some way to bringing the old Werner back but if we assume there's no way to fully mend his shooting boots, it becomes vital to focus on what else he brings to the table.

Taking a deeper look

There are eleven players in every team and not all of them score regularly. Sure, the 'forwards', as we tend to label those who play in a front 3 or 4, are the players we typically look towards to provide the goals, but ultimately all that matters is that the sum of those 11 parts adds up to a more effective team performance, and one that hopefully scores more than the opposition.

Whether it's a pace-setting metronome who helps a team control the flow of the game from deep, a clever false 9 who drags defences around to open up space for others or a quick ball-carrier who can execute transitions and create dangerous situations, every successful team has players that don't directly contribute to goals but who are crucial in fostering goalscoring play.

I believe Werner is one of those players.

We should start by acknowledging that 5 goal contributions in 13 appearances (actually just 815 minutes or a little over 9 full 90s) is, by no means, terrible. In fact, it's actually quite good. A small sample size it might be, but Werner's combined goal and assist figure per 90 minutes puts him in the very respectable 71st percentile compared with other wingers in the league across the season (according to FBRef).

His rate of a goal contribution every match and a half would amount to 20 across a 38 game season so, even if that is literally all Werner can offer, that alone is far from the hopeless output some Spurs fans will have you believe he provides.

But this is not all Werner does - far from it in fact.

The first statistics people always look to, particularly in forwards, are understandably goals and assists. To properly understand the value of a player though, you really need to watch him play and especially how the team plays with him in it - paying close attention to what he does in between all the highlights to gather context around the data.

Anyone who has truly paid attention to Werner's appearances for Spurs this season will have seen that, whilst he doesn't always make the right decisions and whilst his finishing does leave something to be desired, Spurs have rarely looked more threatening this calendar year than when he is running at defences from the left, eating up space and putting opponents on the back foot.

A quick look through the underlying data backs this up and shows you that whilst he might rarely be the one to put the finishing touch on moves, Spurs are a more dangerous attacking unit with Timo Werner on the pitch and he has been indirectly responsible for a lot more goals and chances than the headline statistics or highlights packages would have you believe.

The underlying data

One thing Werner does exceptionally well is carrying the ball - or 'dribbling' as we called it back in my day. He might not pull out tricks like Ronaldinho or weave in and out of tight spaces like Messi but, combining his excellent athleticism and clever understanding of space, he is outstanding at running with the ball at pace and progressing it into dangerous areas to generate attacking threat for his teammates.

His ball-carrying numbers since joining Spurs have been virtually without peer in the Premier League as evidenced by his 98th percentile placing for progressive carries per 90 minutes when compared to other wingers/wide forwards in the league - averaging a staggering 8.79 per match.

Meanwhile, his total carrying distance places him in the 93rd percentile and, even more importantly, his progressive carrying distance sits in the 94th. The German places in the 84th percentile for carries into the final third and, crucially, in the 96th for carries into the opposition penalty area. 

He is also particularly adept at finding the space to receive the ball higher up the pitch before driving deeper into those dangerous areas, having placed in the 94th percentile for progressive passes received.

Add to this the fact that he makes the 97th percentile for avoiding being dispossessed and it's clear by the numbers that Werner has a handy habit of leaving the ball in a much more useful place than where he found it.

When it comes to eventually releasing the ball after progressing it so well up the pitch, Timo's numbers shine there as well. He places in the 88th and 94th percentiles for passes and crosses into the opposition penalty area respectively.

One area that's harder to quantify, on an individual basis at least, is his value off the ball in pressing opponents up high. Spurs have enjoyed a good degree of success under Postecoglou in regaining the ball in the final third and Werner's pace and industry are no doubt undervalued weapons in achieving this.

Bringing this all together, perhaps the cherry on top of all of these encouraging FBRef statistics is his 92nd percentile placing for goal-creating actions - those being essentially any contribution to a phase of play that leads to his team scoring a goal.

Drilling deeper into this and we find his goal creating actions specifically from passes in open play hit the 99th percentile. In other words, when a move starts with or goes through Timo Werner, statistically, it is much more likely to lead to a Tottenham goal.

Put simply, he might not score many goals himself, he might not even assist that many goals but one way or another, his presence in the line-up just makes goals happen.

Admittedly, I am cherry-picking some particularly impressive stats here to suit an agenda but also to back up my own perceptions. It's only fair to point out that when you start looking at Werner's numbers for taking defenders on, and of course for taking his chances, then the percentiles drop down significantly.

Frankly, if you could somehow drag his take-on percentiles up into the high 90s alongside some of his others and then teach him to shoot like Son Heung-Min, what you'd end up with is Kylian Mbappé. There's a reason wide forwards with the ability to do it all are in such high demand and such short supply.

Unlike Kylian Mbappé however, Werner is available to Spurs at the reasonable price of £15m. There's still the matter of his wages too of course but, all things considered, in today's market, to sign a player in his prime years with the ability to add so much even from the bench has to be considered really good value.

A squad option, not the solution

The backlash from some against the prospect of signing Werner permanently would be much more justifiable were it actually the case that his £15m acquisition ends up being the one and only attacking addition to the squad, making Werner the undisputed first choice on that left hand side.

ENIC has developed a reputation for choosing the 'cheap' options over those who could make a real difference in the push for silverware and, while I clearly see value in a player like Werner, I'm not necessarily advocating for Tottenham to build an attack around him, or even for him to start games regularly.

He is a player with clear limitations but, more importantly, he doesn't solve the problem Spurs still have of being able to take defenders on in one-on-one match-ups to slice in behind low-blocks.

Whether that solution ends up being Nico Williams, Petro Neto, Eberechi Eze or, as is the more likely scenario, someone who hasn't even been mentioned yet or someone that you have might have to google, to quote former Tottenham defender, Danny Rose, this remains a problem area for Spurs and should be a priority in addition to, not instead of, securing Werner's services permanently.

So much emphasis is often placed on the starting eleven. "Who does he get in ahead of?" is a question you will often see posed in response to rumours of a player signing, when really to ask that is usually to miss the point entirely.

In a game that is becoming more and more about having a squad of options to rotate through, in a season where Spurs will have even more fixtures to navigate, it's vital that they have a variety of attacking threats at their disposal.

Whether or not Werner joins permanently may ultimately come down to the other options on the market and/or Spurs' eventual quota of home-grown players but, as it stands, I believe adding him to their repertoire of attackers should be a no-brainer.

There will always be opponents, moments and game states that are perfect for someone like Timo Werner and given how much he has already shown he can add on the pitch against a range of opponents, from the start or from the bench, I suspect one would be incredibly hard-pushed to find a better pound-for-pound squad player, willing to accept a spot as a rotation option or impact substitute for a team like Tottenham.