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Norwich City’s form may have suffered after a bright start to the 2024-25 Championship season, but Borja Sainz remains on course for campaign to remember.
When Borja Sainz first started being linked with a move to Norwich City towards the end of the 2022-23 season, it’s fair to say the vast majority of Canaries supporters will have been unfamiliar with the young Spaniard.
But he’s taken the opportunity that presented itself in Norfolk with both hands, showing frequent flashes of quality last term before elevating his game and becoming one of the Championship’s standout players in 2024-25, if not the standout player.
Norwich have cultivated a strong reputation in recent years for polishing rough diamonds and selling on for profit. It was a cornerstone of Stuart Webber’s time as sporting director, earning him significant praise at times. And with the club’s financial situation rather more testing than it was while yo-yoing to and from the Premier League, player trading remains an important aspect of their strategy.
Considering his impact at Norwich, it seems likely Sainz will – sooner or later – fetch City and incumbent sporting director Ben Knapper a hefty cheque. But before that happens, it could be that he inspires something even more valuable: a return to the Premier League.
Sainz joined Norwich on a free transfer from Turkish club Giresunspor following their relegation from the Süper Lig in 2023. While hardly a household name on English shores, when Norwich supporters saw the links and started doing some digging, they liked what they saw.
A confident left-winger who was capable of beating his man, offering creativity and scoring (spectacular) goals, Sainz was a player the fans quickly took to. Upon the completion of the deal, the level of anticipation around it was such that Norwich’s own official communication accepted it was “a surprise to absolutely nobody”.
The deal was a coup for Norwich. Sainz had been linked as a potential target for some of the bigger clubs in Turkey, while a return to Spain certainly wasn’t out of the question after a positive – on an individual level, anyway – season.
After all, Sainz had spent two seasons in La Liga with Deportivo Alavés, totalling 40 appearances in Spain’s top tier, and he had been highly regarded as a teenager, representing his country up to Under-19 level.
But Norwich persuaded him to move to Carrow Road, with the deal now looking like a masterstroke from the perspective of both parties. Sainz has played plenty of football, with the club quickly recognising his vast potential, and his development has transformed him into a decisive attacker who could almost singlehandedly impact the Canaries’ ambitions.
Nevertheless, despite promising flourishes last term after an injury-interrupted start at Norwich, there’s no doubt 2024-25 has seen Sainz find another level. The headline fact is that he’s the Championship’s top scorer through the first 15 matchdays, having netted 11 times.
That’s already five more than he tallied in 35 Championship appearances last term and two more than Sainz has ever managed in a league campaign in senior football. It’s an impressive start to the season whichever way you slice it – even more so when you consider he’s not an out-and-out centre-forward.
But as any regular watcher of Norwich or the Championship will tell you, it’s not just the volume of goals Sainz is scoring that’s making people take note; it’s also about the quality of them.
You can already imagine Norwich’s social media team in May deciding to run with a ‘Goal of the Season’ competition consisting entirely of Sainz’s strikes, and then a separate category for everyone else.
Genuinely, you’d do well to find a better catalogue of goals from a single player at any level of professional football in Europe this season than Sainz’s.
There was the remarkable dipping screamer against Cardiff; arguably an even more emphatic long-range strike to open the scoring at home to Middlesbrough; then he picked out the top-right corner again with a curler from a difficult angle a little later in the same game as Norwich fought back from 3-1 down to draw 3-3; there was also the impudent lob in the Carrow Road thrashing of Hull.
It might not come as a huge surprise, then, that Sainz’s 11 goals comes from 5.7 expected goals (xG). In the top four tiers of English football, only two players have overperformed their xG by a greater margin than Sainz (5.3). When looking at the Championship alone, Watford’s Edo Kayembe is second for xG overperformance at 2.9, only slightly over halfway to Sainz’s 5.3 (and one of Kayembe’s goals came directly from a corner).
This begs some obvious questions: Is this sustainable form? Will he endure a barren run as the numbers balance out?
Who knows, perhaps he will. But that doesn’t make his form and improvement any less worthy of celebration – if anything it should highlight just how brilliant he’s been over the opening months of the 2024-25 campaign.
For instance, Sainz’s 55 shots in 2023-24 were worth 4.9 xG. He’s already bettered that xG total in 2024-25 despite registering 11 fewer attempts.
So, while it’s certainly fair to suggest he might not maintain his current goalscoring rate over a full season, it’s still easy to argue he’s made real strides this term with respect to his positioning and awareness in the final third.
Not only is he simply shooting more often, but the average xG value of his shots has increased from 0.09 to 0.13. That might not look that significant in isolation, but it equates to a 44.4% increase in average shot xG value.
Generally speaking, then, Sainz is shooting from more dangerous positions. A look at his shot maps from 2023-24 and 2024-25 highlights the point quite well.
Of course, one of the biggest differences – and not just one that has impacted Sainz – is the change of manager. David Wagner was jettisoned at the end of last season following failure to earn promotion, with Johannes Hoff Thorup brought in from relative obscurity after roughly a year and a half in charge of FC Nordsjælland in his native Denmark.
Wagner wanted Norwich to play “intensive, aggressive football where you are brave and chase opponents”, but by the end of his tenure, a common criticism among supporters was that they didn’t really have an identity.
Thorup has tried to implement a greater focus on possession, and there are signs of this. For example, their average share of possession is up from 48.7% to 56.5% and passes per game are up to 532.3 – the second highest in the Championship this season – from 452.1.
Norwich are more controlling than before, and one of the knock-on effects is that it helps Sainz operate closer to areas where he’s more of a threat.
As such, he’s touching the ball considerably less in his own half and much more often in the attacking third. The touch zones map below shows how many more, or fewer, touches Sainz is having in every area of the pitch.
And the following heatmaps further support the point that Sainz is operating in a role that prioritises his attacking involvement.
The fact Sainz is recording an additional two touches in the opponents’ penalty area per 90 minutes helps contextualise his greater shot frequency and the considerable increase in his average shot xG value.
There’s more to it than just “more touches in attacking third is good”, however.
A feature of Sainz’s game that pre-dates his move to Norwich is his tendency to continue running towards into the box after cutting in from the left flank and offloading to a teammate.
But now, there’s arguably an even greater urgency and desire to those runs. He’s getting deeper into the box than before, more regularly finding threatening pockets of space to exploit.
It seems as though there’s even more thought being put into where he ought to be after passing; he’s been involved in eight passing sequences in which he’s both participated in build-up and had the shot, which is the third most in the Championship this term and already two more than in the entirety of last season.
Two of them have led to goals, including his strike against Preston North End as he diverted a Kellen Fisher cross home just two passes after initially finding Anis Ben Slimane.
But this off-ball mentality isn’t just relevant for sequences in which Sainz has been involved and been the shooter. The fact he’s scored three of his goals from inside the six-yard box (and another about a yard further out) rams home the point, especially when you consider he only managed a single shot inside the six-yard box last term. Similarly, Sainz has already received 20 passes played into the box, just five short of his 2023-24 total.
His on-pitch relationship with Josh Sargent has certainly played a role. Three of those four close-range goals have been set up by the American, whose recent injury absence has coincided with Norwich losing three in a row.
Sargent is a big miss up front. Not so much because he’s a prolific finisher, but he works tirelessly, links up with teammates well and is such a well-rounded Championship player. He alone can occupy multiple defenders, but if he’s missing, teams are able to focus more on Sainz.
It might not be that surprising then that Sainz managed just one shot apiece against Bristol City and Sheffield Wednesday in Norwich’s two most recent matches.
Such is the brutal nature of the Championship that Norwich’s six-game winless run has seen them slump to 14th after a promising start to the season. Nevertheless, returning important players are beginning ease their injury crisis, and in a league as unpredictable as this, fortunes can change in an instant.
With Norwich majority shareholder Mark Attanasio adamant the club “don’t need to sell Borja in January” and sporting director Knapper announcing talks regarding a new contract for Sainz are progressing, fans can be hopeful of their star player sticking around a little longer yet.
The Premier League might feel like a distant dream currently, but Sainz makes the implausible rather more attainable.
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