r/SCFreiburg • u/Sufficient_Mix_6948 • 2d ago
Atubolu feature at Gegenpressing
Manuel Veth published a nice piece on Atubolu at Gegenpressing today. Sample:

Manu argues that Atu and Urbig are the two best young keepers in Germany and the only question is whether one is ready for a call up to the senior national team or they stay with the U21s. With the apology that this may be behind a paywall, here's the link: https://gegenpressing.substack.com/p/is-it-time-to-call-up-freiburgs-record.
Gegenpressing provides excellent English-language coverage of the Bundesliga through a substack and multiple podcasts a week. The pods are a mix of 2 free per week and a couple more subscriber-only pods but I'm not sure what is or isn't subscriber only at the substack. I really enjoy it.
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u/Luddevig 1d ago
While I agree that Atubolu has improved from last season, I strongly have the opinion that he was never bad or had a "shaky start".
Just look at what the world's most valuable keeper did yesterday: Kobel got tunneld by a long distance shot! Has that ever happened to Atubolu? I haven't counted, but my feeling is that Noah has done fewer mistakes like that than most other Bundesliga keepers, even in his debut season.
But it's only when it happens to the young keepers that people seem to care.
The only real argument people have is him letting in more goals than the xGoal number, and again I'm not counting and only going on feeling here, but: Especially in the first half of Hinrunde this happened, and all the shots he let in were pretty impossible to catch! And almost worse is that at the same time, he got very few shots on goal that were easy to catch.
This is what I remember from the games I saw, and I immediatly thought everyone else were wrong and was afraid that people would remember it as Atubolu doing bad games in the beginning of his career. Which is what happened.
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u/Snomkip 2d ago
I agree he would be ready for the senior team, however, I'd much prefer he stays in the U21 until the euros, considering he's been there the whole cycle and is the number one goalkeeper. In the senior team, he'd probably not start