Photo: Femke Kruize

As Pep Guardiola has just informed us, this weekend Manchester City will play one more time without their talismanic striker Sergio Agüero. As an Independiente fan, I’ve followed Agüero’s career since he was a teenager playing alongside the likes of Gabriel Milito and Daniel Montenegro. He’s 30 years old now and has never been the most durable player, so the question for Manchester City is inevitably how to replace him. Even for a star of his quality, it’s a much harder task than you might expect.

It’s easy to say that every player is unique. But Agüero is particularly different from his peers as a striker. He likes to take players on, regularly finds himself in good positions to receive the ball, gets his shots off, and also does an unusual amount of link-up passing. Despite being known for drifting in from the left side earlier in his career, and popping up on the right later on, his actual touches on the ball have always been fairly central.

In our database of thousands of players, only a handful of players have matched Agüero’s attacking style, even in a single season. Only a few are currently under the age of 25. And none of those have come close his attacking output. But under Guardiola, there is much more to a player’s game – even for a striker – than just scoring goals. So if we look at Agüero’s recent style holistically, including his defending, then the picture becomes a little clearer.

Using a matching algorithm across eight dimensions of playing style, these are the closest players under 24 with 10+ matches worth of minutes played as a striker and a reasonable amount of attacking output for their ages:

• Hwang Hee-Chan, RB Salzburg 2016-17
• Kasper Dolberg, Ajax 2016-17
• Timo Werner, RB Leipzig 2016-17 and 2017-18
• Neal Maupay, Brentford 2017-18
• André Silva, Porto 2016-17
• Kylian Mbappé, Monaco 2016-17
• Taiwo Awoniyi, Mouscron 2017-18

While these players are physically different from Agüero, they’ve had similar tendencies on the pitch. And from Manchester City’s perspective, they’re a mixed bag. Mbappé, Silva, and Werner certainly wouldn’t be cheap. Maupay started the season on a tear and will also have attracted plenty of attention in the Premier League. Meanwhile, Hwang still seems to be adjusting to the rigors of the 2. Bundesliga on loan at Hamburg, and Awoniyi has suffered a scoring drought and dwindling minutes in his second season on loan from Liverpool in Belgium.

That leaves the 21-year-old Dolberg, who’s been on Manchester City’s radar for some time. He’s taller than Agüero, and the Dutchman may never equal the Argentine’s dribbling. In terms of overall attacking output, too, he’ll need to be on a pretty steep curve to get to where Agüero was when he arrived in Manchester as a 23-year-old. But Agüero followed just such a curve at Atlético de Madrid; he wasn’t far above Dolberg as a 21-year-old. He did, however, have the benefit of playing in a much tougher league.

And what about the prospect of raiding South America directly, as Manchester City did for Gabriel Jesus? The pickings are slim. Lautaro Martínez left Racing for Inter, and Fluminense’s Pedro sprang a cruciate ligament. There are still a few players worthy of the English club’s interest, but not without substantial risk. In footballing terms as well as geographically, the journey from Agüero’s boyhood home is much longer than from the old Vicente Calderón.