Ozziel Herrera is a 23-year-old Mexican winger who plays for Tigres in Liga MX. Herrera has had a major breakout since moving to Tigres from Atlas, with 11 goal contributions in 880 minutes.
Herrera is right-footed but his appearances are fairly evenly spread between playing on the left and right wing. Herrera, when playing for Tigres, generally plays a lot wider and deeper than you would expect from a player with such high attacking outputs. Generally, Herrera does his damage by creating a small number of very dangerous chances. When setting up teammates it’s usually either a lofted cross to the top of the 6-yard box or a cut-back. Herrera is very good at placing these crosses so when they come off they usually create a high-danger chance. Herrera is good at popping up unmarked at the back post which is how he usually gets shots for himself. He arrives late in the box from his wide starting position and often finds himself unmarked. Herrera’s dribbling is ok. He is not a player who is going to dribble from one end of the field to the other but if he gets isolated against a defender in a wide area he is capable of beating him. Despite being slight (though not short, he is 6’0), Herrera is relatively good in the air and in physical battles. Tigres play a lot of diagonal balls to the wingers and Herrera often has to fight for the ball against a defender. He comes out on top a lot more frequently than you would expect considering his build. Herrera’s role obviously requires him to stay wide quite a lot. His biggest weakness on attack is his first touch, which is not very good. In fairness, he has to deal with some quite difficult passes but even when accounting for this his touch is pretty clearly below average. Conceivably his skillset could lead to him being effective in a more central position but I don’t think he would be quite as effective because that would limit the main way he creates chances for others. He hasn’t shown a lot of ability to play defence-splitting passes from central areas in the matches I have seen.
Herrera is very active defensively. Tigres often deploy him quite deep in the defensive phase, looking to cut out passes playing into opposing wide players rather than close down the first player playing a pass out of the back. Herrera is a really good 1v1 defender for an attacking player and has the speed to cover a lot of ground. He probably could play more of a pressing role with this skillset. But he’s so successful defensively in Tigres’ system that I am pretty confident you could make him work in some sort of quasi-wing-back/wide midfielder role. He basically defends like somebody who plays that role already anyway.
Figuring out a conceivable step up for Herrera is hard because Liga MX teams don’t need to sell and therefore their players are very expensive. Tigres bought him for 7 million euros so any team in Europe that wants him is probably looking at an 8-figure sum. This limits Herrera’s possible destination to teams in the top 5 leagues and a few dominant clubs from other European leagues. I don’t think Herrera could play for one of the truly big clubs in Europe but he could be worth the high fee for a smaller Big 5 team or top club in Belgium or the Netherlands. His offensive production in Liga MX is extremely similar to Santiago Gimenez’s (though obviously, Herrera is a very different style of player) who has been a smashing success for Feyenoord.
Target Scouting 