ROBERTSON VS SCHMELZER
It struck me when watching a Robertson video how similar he looks to Schmelzer, so after looking at a couple of videos of each of them I did a little comparison on Sqwuawka...
https://www.youtube.com/v/HkHmfV8SiCkhttps://www.youtube.com/v/cZafqxzD434Turns out that the two players aren't only similar visually, but also very similar statistically as well...
What's promising is that these stats are for Schmelzer in his prime years under Klopp, whereas Robertson can probably still improve significantly under Klopp's guidance. It's highly probably that Robertson will have every opportunity to increase his attacking outputs, as well as his defensive performance (in terms of successful tackles for example), by playing for an aggressive pressing and possession oriented team.
Also, the main weakness in the stats against Robertson is aerial duels, but he's not that far off Schmelzer in terms of aerial duel win %, and is a similar height (1.78m vs Schmelzer 1,80m) so perhaps that is something that can be worked on. It should also be noted that Robertson played large chunks of these seasons as a LWB, thereby most likely not contesting as many duels (a win % of around 40% but much lower number of aerials won suggests that to be the case).
All-in-all, Schmelzer comes out as slightly better defensively, but Robertson looks like more of a threat with the ball as evidenced by his greater number of take-ons (and take-on %), as well as from his number of forward passes which is impressively similar to Schmelzer (in Robertson's PL season) despite the fact that he played for a worse team.