Video Scouting Report: Andre Dozzell
An in-depth look at DC United's newest central midfielder
So far, DC United has brought in two major players during the World Cup break. Young attacker Nathan Ordaz is one, but today we’re going to do a deep dive on the other, Andre Dozzell. What has he done, what kind of player is he, and how might he fit into DC United’s system?
To better answer these questions, I watched three of his games with Portsmouth last season. As part of my experiments with including voiced-over video in articles, I’ve made videos with most of his touches from those games, overlaid some vocal commentary, so you can get a feel for how he was playing yourself instead of just taking my word for it. To be honest, putting these videos together was a lot more work than I thought it would be, so I probably won’t be able to do it for Nathan Ordaz, but let me know what you think.
Note: Paid subscribers got a preview of part of this article all the way back in May, but this version is greatly expanded and, of course, has the videos.
Videos
The videos will probably make more sense after having read the article, but since some people aren’t going to want to read a long article, I’m just going to embed them here at the top. Two of them, anyway. I’m going to save the third for the paid subscriber section at the end.
I watched three games. Two recent games were against top Championship sides, one where they got crushed (losing 1-5 to eventual league winners Coventry) and one where they won an upset victory (2-0 over league runners up Ipswitch Town). I also went back to an earlier game against one of Portsmouth’s rivals in the relegation race, West Bromwich Albion.
These aren’t “all touch” videos. I don’t show routine situations where he’s part of defenders passing it around under no pressure. But they have most touches. In particular, every bad touch, missed pass, and even missed assignment I could find are in there, so it’s not just highlights, you’re seeing the good and the bad.
One other note, the video quality is far from perfect. We’re very fortunate that Apple’s MLS game broadcasts are so crisp. So while my commentary is optional, I did these expecting you’re listening to it so it’s going to be much easier for you to follow with the sound on.
We’ll start with the January game against WBA. Dozzell has a very nice assist in this game, along with a few other nice moments:
Now, for some contrast, here’s Portsmouth taking on Coventry. It was a very rough game for the whole team, but of the five (!) goals Portsmouth gave up, Dozzell was only culpable on one of them:
The Basics
Andre Dozzell recently turned 27. He came up through the Ipswitch academy, where his father, Jason Dozzell, made over 400 appearances and earned a place in their Hall of Fame. The younger Dozzell was a highly rated prospect and featured for the England youth national team at many levels.
But whereas his father played for Ipswitch in their Premier League glory years, Andre Dozzell would break through into their starting lineup while they were down in League One. This was in the 2020-2021 season when he was 21 years old. That season earned him a move to QPR, initially a midtable Championship team, where he was a rotation player as the team’s fortunes faded and it dropped into relegation danger. After three seasons at QPR, he briefly went on loan to Birmingham, another Championship bottom feeder, and then moved to Portsmouth.
Portsmouth was another relegation-threatened Championship side, but there Dozzell finally cemented a place in the first XI, starting 36 games in the past season. Championship teams play even more games than that (46) but I believe injury is the only reason he missed starts.
Fan comment from his teams before Portsmouth is quite critical, complaining about how he only makes safe, sideways passes (apparently fans of bad teams’ number one complaint about midfielders all around the world) and about how little impact he has on the game. At Portsmouth, however, fans were much more positive and his departure to DC United was considered a real setback. He wasn’t seen as irreplaceable, but he wasn’t someone who would be trivial to replace either.
How Good is the Championship Anyway?
The big question with transfers like this is how does the level compare? Generally speaking, the better teams in the Championship are thought to be better than the best MLS teams, while teams like Portsmouth who are below average are probably still better than below average MLS teams. A separate factor is that because Championship sides play considerably more games, they tend to be much deeper than MLS teams, but that’s orthogonal to individual player quality.
Championship/MLS player transfers have been a mixed bag. American forward Pat Agyemang went from averaging 0.44 non-penalty goal contributions per game for Charlotte in 2025 to 0.43 non-penalty goal contributions per game for midtable Derby County. On the other hand, Emmanuel Latte Lath famously had two very good seasons with another midtable Championship team, Middlesbrough, but has been ineffective for Atlanta United.
For DC United fans, the most relevant comparison is Lewis O’Brien, who played 17 games for DC as a pseudo-DP back in 2023. Technically he came from a Premier League team, Nottingham Forest, but the reason he was available was Forest had decided he wasn’t up to that level, and sure enough he’s made 200 Championship appearances in his career, including 29 starts for Wrexham last season.
O’Brien mostly played in central midfield for DC United, so a similar position to where we expect to see Dozzell, and he was very good. He only notched one goal and one assist, but I thought he was one of DC’s best players and was sad to see him go. The comparison isn’t perfect, however. O’Brien has mostly played for better Championship teams than Dozzell has, and as we’ll see, their profiles as a player are very different. O’Brien was young, fast, and had a very high work rate, but he wasn’t all that technical of a player. Maybe that’s changed as he’s matured, since he seems to have been playing more like a #10 for Wrexham this past season and so suddenly had more goal contributions than in the previous four seasons combined.
Andre Dozzell is almost his inverse. Both of them are a bit short, but that’s the end of the similarities. Dozzell has a good first touch and is a very good passer, but his athleticism and work rate are average at best.
Role at Portsmouth: Defense
Like DC United, Portsmouth was defending in a 4-4-2 shape with Dozzell as one of the two central midfielders. In attack, it seemed to vary a little bit. In the game I watched from back in January, I think the formation would shift so that Dozzell was the lone defensive midfielder, while towards the end of the season they stayed in a double pivot.
Regardless, Dozzell’s role was to sit back, often right in front of the back line. He seemed to have almost no license to go forward except in moments where the opposition was completely pinned back, but he would mark midfielders and follow the ball to one side of the field or the other as needed. If a centerback went forward for any reason, he would rotate in to cover. Since he’s short and has no aerial presence to speak of, he would stay back on attacking corner kicks.
Now, the Championship has a reputation as a grinding, physical league, so I was expecting to see something similar to what I see from DC United, except maybe a bit better executed, so maybe similar to last season’s Philadelphia Union. I can’t speak for the rest of the league or even other games, but in the games I watched, Portsmouth didn’t play with anything like the defensive intensity I was expecting. Compared to DC United, their defense is much less compact, much less aggressive, and much more focused on positioning than on winning duels. I’m not totally sure what to make of this. Maybe MLS actually is more athletic? Or maybe the absurd number and pace of games in the Championship forces teams to play more conservatively?
I say all that because if, like me, you’re a bit concerned with how Dozzell can fit into a team like DC United that demands a high work-rate and aggressive defending from its midfielders, you’re going to see some concerning things in my videos. It’s pretty clear that Dozzell isn’t the superior athlete that Lewis O’Brien was. He runs when necessary, of course, but he mostly jogs around. In the three games I made videos for, he slides once, fouls twice I think, and puts in literally zero crunching tackles.
But in his defense, his teammates don’t seem to be doing this either. It seems like this is just how Portsmouth was playing. Does that mean he can easily start covering lots of ground and running for the whole game now that he’s on DC United? Uh, it’s possible, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I do expect to see more intensity in defense, but we’ll have to see how effective he can be.
Role at Portsmouth: Offense
What about on offense? After all, we all assume Dozzell has been brought in to upgrade Brandon Servania and provide more going forward. There I think the prospects are better. Dozzell had a good touch, was very press-resistant, and hardly ever turned over the ball in the games I watched, and that includes the game where Portsmouth was getting destroyed by the best team in the league. Even better, when he passes forward, he seems very accurate with both progressive passes and through balls to attackers. His crosses were all accurate as well.
Again, though, there’s a catch. As you’ll see in the videos, he doesn’t make many forward passes. And that explains something you might be wondering: If he’s so good at through balls, how come he has only five assists? And not five assists last season, I mean five assists total in his entire career! He’s played almost two hundred games-worth of professional minutes, the majority in the Championship, but a quarter of those were in League One, and he’s scored nine goals and notched five assists. Brandon Servania has seven assists in about half the minutes at the MLS level, including two for DC United just last season.
So what gives?
First, I think there’s a big tax on things like goals and assists when you play for a bad team. Portsmouth was in real danger of relegation for most of the year and ended up finishing 18th in the league. And that’s the highest finish for one of Dozzell’s teams since QPR finished 11th back in the 2021-2022 season. Last season he had over 3 expected assists, but his teammates only managed to find one goal out of those chances.
Second, and more importantly, with Portsmouth his usage has been low. He averaged 45.84 touches a game last season and completed 29.96 passes per game (83.8%). When I was making the videos, sometimes twenty minutes would pass with no meaningful involvement in the game. When he did get the ball, good things happened: possession would almost always be retained and sometimes he would pick out a great progressive pass.
The last few seasons of Gabriel Pirani getting extremely few touches have meant I’ve thought about this statistic a lot. For a player like Pirani who was supposed to be a creator, maybe the primary creator, low usage is very bad. And of course, when Pirani did get the ball, turnovers often resulted, so maybe his teammates weren’t thrilled about passing it to him. Then again, attackers are expected to be aggressive and lose the ball a fair mount.
From what I can tell, in possession Portsmouth expected to work the ball out to their wide players, not up through the center of the field. That’s also been true of DC United in the past five years, it’s the typical way for bad teams to play. But unlike DC, I often noticed Portsmouth’s opponents staying narrow and having their forwards man-mark Dozzell and his partner in the double pivot to prevent them being easy options. Sometimes Dozzell would have both forwards marking him. When marked, he was content to tie up the opposing players and allow his team to work the ball to the sideline without his involvement.
In situations where he wasn’t tightly marked, he was always moving to make himself an option, but even then, his teammates rarely took it. That was what I found most surprising. His passing really seems good to me, so why aren’t they using it as a weapon? It clearly wasn’t the gameplan, but why not?
The best answer I have is that the talent distribution in the Championship is completely different to what I’m used to in MLS. In MLS, the salary rules mean you have a handful of really good players surrounded by guys who are at best adequate. When you’re some guy playing for New England and Carles Gil shows for the ball, there is only one correct answer: pass him the damn ball, he is an order of magnitude better than you. MLS gameplans for both offense and defense have to take into account this lumpy talent distribution.
In the Championship, my sense was that players are much more similar to each other. To put this in MLS terms, I felt like every single player on the field for both teams in these games was better than Jared Stroud, but none of them were as good as Carles Gil or Hany Mukhtar.
Andre Dozzell seemed easily capable of hitting passes that, to be frank, I’m not sure anyone on DC United right now can reliably hit. But so could his teammates. The fullbacks and other midfielders could also find those passes when they had the chance. This means that when Dozzell hits a safe sideways pass, his team’s chances of a good outcome aren’t necessarily changing, and when a teammate looks him off in the buildup and passes to someone else, it’s likewise not a big difference.
Then again, in rewatching my three videos while doing a final editing pass for this article, I couldn’t help but notice how often Dozzell would connect a pass with a teammate who immediately lost it, either by getting tackled or by failing to complete their own pass. So I don’t know. Maybe Portsmouth just screwed up by not using him more.
Andre Dozzell with DC United
My big question is can he play defense with the intensity that DC United requires. All well and good if he simply wasn’t asked to do that for Portsmouth, but he’s definitely going to be asked to do that for DC, so can he elevate his effort? If he can’t do that for 90 minutes, he needs to at least do it for 60 minutes and then Brandon Servania or Jackson Hopkins can come off the bench.
I usually ignore defensive counting stats, but I think in this instance they do a good job showing the output gap Dozzell will have to close:
It’s possible that Weiler will arrange things Dozzell won’t have as much defensive responsibility as Matti Peltola. Sometimes people say this is already true of Servania, but I’ve never been able to see it. I think the stats above show that Servania is very active defensively. Anyway, DC could theoretically play more of a diamond with Dozzell playing in front of Peltola, but I don’t think Peltola has the speed to cover the whole field.
On the offensive side, I think the way DC has been playing, Servania and even Peltola are getting forward more than Dozzell was for Portsmouth so he should have more opportunities farther up the pitch. But I’d like to see Dozzell not just be slightly better than Servania, but someone who allows DC to play more on the front foot.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s definitely not the last missing ingredient to DC becoming a ball-dominant team. But I think he could become the first choice option in the buildup. Get him the ball and see what he can do with it. I’m cautiously optimistic he can do a better job than anyone on DC United finding guys like Tai Baribo and now Nathan Ordaz in the channels, and that he can combine with players like Peglow and Silvan Hefti as well.
Now, as we know from DC’s storied history of #10s, when there’s only one guy on the team who is a dangerous passer, unless the opposing coach is an idiot (a possibility that can’t be ruled out in MLS) the other team should be preventing that player from getting the ball by marking him tightly and fouling him when he does get it. And if that’s the gameplan, to be honest, I don’t see Dozzell has having the athletic qualities to get on the ball in spite of it. But if his passing potential drags the opposing team’s center of gravity toward the middle of the field, that ought to open up opportunities for his teammates that weren’t there before the World Cup break. Louis Munteanu in particular comes to mind as a guy who can hit good passes himself but hasn’t had a lot of space to operate.
But all this depends on Dozzell being able to take on a higher usage role and maintain his accuracy when attempting, say, fifteen progressive passes a game instead of five. I think he might be able to do it, but he hasn’t done it before.
It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens. A lot of fans were hoping for a third Designated Player to be added to central midfield, someone who could dominate games. The front office has filled the spot with a more budget-friendly move that preserves the extra DP slot. If Dozzell works out, that could put the team in a strong position since they’ll be able to add even more talent elsewhere, but there’s certainly a risk that he can’t handle the added responsibilities he’ll have on both sides of the ball.
I assume we’ll get our first look Wednesday as the team returns to MLS play against Houston.
Extra Time
For paid subscribers, here’s one more video. This one is Portsmouth, desperately trying to stave off relegation, taking on Ipswitch, near the top of the table trying to lock in automatic promotion. Dozzell doesn’t get an actual assist but is involved in one of the goals, along with the usual buffet of possession retention, nice passes, and a few miscues.
