Euro-Star: Deniz Undav assessed following star player display at Freiburg

 

In the second of our weekly series on WhoScored, we take a look at the stats of one of the top performing players outside of the Premier League to keep tabs on the in-form performers across Europe.  

 

Maximising our X account, our followers voted on the player they'd want to know stats on from the weekend's action, with Deniz Undav beating Edon Zhegrova, Benjamin Andre and Taylor Booth in this poll. 

 

Undav actually featured in the first poll of the series, but was pipped to top spot by Sporting CP's Viktor Gyokeres. The German forward was not to miss out a second time, amassing a whopping 56.3% of the vote. 

 

VfB Stuttgart's season could have unravelled in the absence of Serhou Guirassy, with the 27-year-old striker absent owing to injury before jetting off to AFCON with the Guinea national team. However, Undav has shouldered the goalscoring burden for Die Roten superbly. Indeed, Undav was directly involved in all three VfB goals as they secured a 3-1 win at 10-man Freiburg on Saturday afternoon. 

 

Freiburg were in for a tough enough afternoon even with 11 men on the pitch and they conceded twice in the opening eight minutes as Undav opened the scoring in the third minute before turning provider for Chris Fuhrich. Merlin Rohl's dismissal in the 18th minute compounded a miserable first half for Freiburg though to their credit, they remained in the tie and halved the deficit shortly before the break. 

 

 

However, VfB killed off the game with 15 minutes to play as Undav registered his second assist of the game, this time for Maximilian Mittelstadt, with his goal coming from one of five shots and brace of assists from two key passes. Undav has been an absolute revelation for VfB this term having now been directly involved in 17 league goals this season, netting 13 times, despite playing just 1140 minutes of game time. 

 

The on-loan striker didn't give the Freiburg backline a moment's rest off the ball either having made two tackles in the 3-1 victory, reinforcing a statistically calculated WhoScored strength of 'defensive contribution'. The performance on Saturday saw Undav land his fourth player of the match award of the season and marked his second best rated showing of the campaign, following up last week's perfect 10 performance in the 5-2 win over RB Leipzig. 

 

His form on the VfB frontline, particularly in the absence of Guirassy, means he is now the sixth best rated player in the Bundesliga this season and will leave supporters asking: 'SerWHO!?'. As he continues to rise both the goals and assists standings, Brighton would perhaps be wise to ensure his temporary return to Germany remains just that.

Euro-Star: Deniz Undav assessed following star player display at Freiburg