Norwich City Transfers: 5 Summer Replacements For Wes Hoolahan

5. Hakim Ziyech (Heerenveen)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoU8x4XBWIk Norwich City are clearly operating in a very tough market these days, because in order to improve their squad they need top quality players. The problem here is that the sort of players they need to be targeting are already relatively well-known. The ambition of the club is clearly to keep progressing up the Premier League table, and becoming an established force within the top-half. However, that means that the sort of players that they will be targeting will already have plenty of other admirers. The days when the Canaries could go out there and pick up a rough diamond from the lower leagues is likely to be beyond them. Nevertheless, a modified transfer approach can still get the club a lot of success. One possible option is targeting players before they have become household names. This past summer, the club signed two Dutch players in the shape of Ricky van Wolfswinkel and Leroy Fer, and may be tempted to go back and sign a third. Hakim Ziyech is having a fine season in the Eredivisie where he has scored eight goals and also assisted eight, which are the kind of qualities that Norwich are in desperate need of. Further stats included 3.1 shots, 2.2 key passes, 1.7 dribbles per match as well as an average rating of 7.34. The player is just 20 years old, and has only made 30 league appearances in the Heerenveen first team as well as winning one cap for the Dutch U21 side. It€™s fair to point out that he usually plays as an orthodox central midfielder €“ but could surely adapt to an attacking midfielder with these sort of attacking stats. The advantage of the Dutch league is that the quality is very high, but it isn€™t consider one of the top five European leagues; this all means that bargains can be found, and players are a bit more under the radar.
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James Kent is a freelance writer published on Yahoo! Sports, Bleacher Report, FTBpro, Bloomberg Sports and many others. He has also been featured in the Daily Telegraph, Zoo Magazine, MSN Sport and the Manchester Evening News. His role on What Culture is currently to produce compelling football articles that nearly always use of combination of stats and strong opinion. Feel free to connect with James via Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.