Karim 'Mercedes' Benzema is no Daniel 'La Ferrari' Sturridge

I have a mate who for years has been emphatically saying we should sign Benzema.  I just don't see it.  I don't think he's as good as advertised, but I've never crunched the numbers, so let's see how his stats from last season size-up with Sturridge.

	Benzema	Sturridge
npgp90	0.56	0.83
gcp90	0.85	1.1
ccp90	2.07	1.2
ap90	0.3	0.28
ccv	14.5	23.3
pass%	81.9	79.3
bp%	46.4	53.4
sacc%	45.1	42.4
shot%	16.7	21.2
TTI90	9.7	11
gap90	1.05	1.23
gsp90	2.75	2.7
gop90	1.7	1.47
tgop	1.74	1.32

Benzema's output isn't overwhelmingly impressive and definitely not worthy of £35-40m, which is his asking price.  Sturridge is the more prolific scorer and shows a higher football intelligence with his higher chance created value and shot percentage.  It's not that Benzema is wasteful in his pass and shot selection, he's just not as adept as our number 15.  Having superior pace than most forwards, Sturridge needs a set-up man with better pasing capabilities than Benzema, suprisingly we may already have that player in Rickie Lambert (18.6 ccv).

If we sign Markovic, I'm not sure we need any more attack-minded players.  We definitely don't need a player like Benzema, who does a lot of things well, but nothing in particular great.  The fact that he is surrounded by the caliber of player that he is at Madrid, his stats should at least show him to be more efficient.

Forget Benzema, forget trying to outscore our opponents every match, we need to go defensive.  One player we should try to buy is Real Sociedad's 21-year-old defensive midfielder Ruben Pardo.  He'll be the subject of my next post.