Transfer Targets: League One
With two weeks until the window opens, we highlight the League One performers who will be catching the eye of Championship - or even Premier League - recruitment teams.
Dylan Lawlor
Centre-back
Cardiff City
19
Huw Davies
Elephant in the room: you may have seen Dylan Lawlor pass the ball straight to Facundo Buonanotte in Tuesday night’s League Cup quarter-final, gifting Chelsea an opening goal that ended Cardiff’s impressive resistance. It was a careless and costly mistake.
Now let’s look at what happened soon afterwards, which revealed a lot about Lawlor’s mentality and movement – bouncing back by getting forward.
^Receiving a pass from his fellow centre-back, and without a great deal on, Lawlor adjusts his body shape so he can immediately bring the ball forward before the Chelsea striker can close him down.
^Having drawn a second opponent towards him, Lawlor slips the ball to left-back Joel Bagan and continues his run into the attacking third.
^Lawlor (No.48) has now taken up a position in the front line, so when David Turnbull receives the ball from Bagan (No.3) and plays a first-time pass into the young centre-back’s feet…
^…Lawlor has forced Chelsea right-back Josh Acheampong out of position, allowing him to flick the ball out to winger Chris Willock, who is now in plenty of space. Willock attacks the box and Cardiff almost create an excellent chance as a result.
It looks simple, but this is a) what top clubs want to see from a centre-back, and b) what centre-backs in League One don’t tend to do. Lawlor’s skill at progressing the ball is very exciting; he is positive in his passing and exceptional with his carrying. He makes more progressive carries per 90 than any other player in the division, and averages by far the furthest distance. He is still adept at the meat-and-potatoes of defending, but he’s different gravy on the ball.
The errors are actually quite rare – it’s unfortunate that this week’s was so high-profile – and they come with the territory of being a teenage centre-back with a development-focused coach encouraging him to show ambition on the ball. Lawlor is already capped by Wales, starting a World Cup qualifier one month after his senior club debut, and his future with the national team is bright. His future at club level is also bright… but is it with Cardiff?
Thanks in no small part to Brian Barry-Murphy, Cardiff are in an enviable position this January. They have saleable assets for the first time in years. Rabbi Matondo and Gabriele Biancheri flew the Bluebirds’ nest for Manchester City and Manchester United respectively when they were just 16, so the last time the club received a fee for an academy player with first-team exposure was in 2017, selling Declan John to Rangers; before him, it was Darcy Blake to Crystal Palace in 2012 (MK Dons paid for Rhys Healey in 2019 but he’d joined Cardiff as an 18-year-old). City rarely flip players for a profit, either. Now they have half a dozen aged 18 to 23 who could each feasibly fetch a seven-figure sum.
Of course, those players will increase in value if they win promotion. Cardiff have no desperate need to sell – but they could afford to lose one player if the right offer were to come in. Lawlor, however, won’t be going cheap. Realistically, the bidding would start at £5m with the reserve price even higher; if a Premier League club such as Brighton see him as a future prospect after a second-tier loan or two, they’d perhaps be content to pay double that. This is how highly Lawlor is rated, less than six months into his career.
Who fancies it?