Alex Badolato is a 20-year-old midfielder who plays for the Newcastle Jets in the A-League. The Jets are Badolato’s second A-League club, having left the Western Sydney Wanderers for more game time. Badolato has almost 30 youth appearances for Australia and was part of the side that won the 2025 U-20 Asian Cup. He made some headlines with an early-season hat-trick against Melbourne Victory, so I thought it was time to investigate if he is any good.
Badolato is listed at 5’7″ (1.70 m), though I suspect he is slightly taller, and has a fairly slender build. He is generally deployed as one of two #8s in a 4-1-4-1 for the Jets. Badolato generally drops fairly deep to get on the ball. His ball progression is mixed. He keeps things a little bit safe for my taste, with a relatively low percentage of his passes being progressive. That said, he pulled off a solid number of mid-range line-breaking passes in the games I watched. These good moments were significantly undercut, however, by how much Badolato struggled to receive the ball under pressure. His first touch is not strong enough to receive the ball with an opposing player at his back. He put his team in trouble frequently by losing the ball in the first phase of buildup. Despite his hat-trick heroics, Badolato gets surprisingly few shots. He does not make many runs into the penalty area, and most of the shots he does get are from long range. I went and looked at his stats from the semi-professional NPL (where he played for Western Sydney’s reserve team), and even there, he was only averaging 0.1 xG/90. So, that hat-trick was probably a one-off. Badolato attempted quite a few passes in behind the opposition defence in the games I watched, but none of them came off. This means that, overall, his final 3rd impact is underwhelming.
Badolato’s defensive contribution is also middling. He is not particularly strong or quick. But he does manage to get a foot in and disrupt opposition moves from time to time. I also thought he was surprisingly good in the air for a player of his stature.
Despite generating quite a bit of hype with his early offensive explosion, Badolato looks pretty mid to me. Of course, being mid at 20 might portend being really good at 23. But if Badolato is going to go beyond the A-League, he needs to start doing something, whether that is final 3rd contribution or ball progression, at an excellent level. If he can do that, I think he could follow the well-trodden A-League to Scottish Premiership pipeline. But I have a hard time seeing him being anything more than that.
Target Scouting 