Liverpool is reportedly interested in a midfielder who performs the best out of U23 midfielders in the Premier League and who is following Yaya Touré’s footsteps
With Fabinho looking likely to depart Liverpool, the club’s search for a midfielder has now widened. The Brazilian may not have enjoyed his best campaign for the Reds last season, but his experience and ability will still leave a major void to be filled at Anfield.
Who Liverpool will target now is going to be a fascinating watch. Jörg Schmadtke clearly needs a player who is a little bit more experienced than previous targets like Roméo Lavia, and who won’t necessarily be a major long-term project for the club, but who would be capable of coming into the first team straightaway.
In this sense perhaps one of the best possible targets currently being linked with the club could be Cheick Doucouré. The ECHO has reported he is a player who is under consideration by Liverpool.
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At 23 years old, he doesn’t have a huge amount more experience than Lavia, especially in the Premier League. However, he has the advantage of having played in a top-five league in France for several years prior to joining Crystal Palace last season. There is more of a sample and basis from which to analyze him.
It also helps that last season he was voted Player of the Season at Palace and has already caught the eye against Liverpool twice in the Premier League.
But perhaps the most exciting statistic when it comes to Doucouré is the fact that among U23 midfielders in the Premier League last season, the Malian international was the best performer when it comes winning his defensive duels.
Doucouré averaged 6.28 defensive duels per 90 minutes last season and won 67.48 per cent of them ranking him as the number one U23 midfielder in the metric as per Wyscout. He also averaged the most successful defensive actions per 90 minutes (10.79) among U23 midfielders and ranked second for possession-adjusted interceptions per 90 (6.47).
Undoubtedly, the best U23 midfielder in the league when it comes to defensive metrics, Doucouré is exactly the kind of profile Liverpool needs to replace Fabinho this summer.
The Reds were frail defensively last season and lacked a protective shield in front of the back four of Doucouré’s ilk
But it’s important to note, the Malian isn’t just a defensive engine. There’s a lot more to his game than just that.
A product of the JMG academy, back in 2021 I interviewed the club’s administrator, Mamadou Wad, for World Soccer to get an insight into how the academy functions.
Established by Jean-Marc Guillou, the academy first set up base in the Ivory Coast and helped develop Premier League icons like Yaya and Kolo Touré, Salomon Kalou, Gervinho or Emmanuel Eboué.
In the last decade, JMG moved its camp to Bamako in Mali and has continued a similarly impressive production line that includes not just Doucouré but a host of other top talent from Yves Bissouma, Mohamed Camara to Amadou Haidara as well as one of Red Bull Salzburg’s most exciting current prospects, Nene Dorgeles.
The academy uses some unique methods as well which bring out the technical quality of players, such as forcing the kids to play with their bare feet to ‘grasp’ the ball better, as Mamadou Wad recalled to me.
“His [Guillou] philosophy is that first and foremost the ball must be a player’s friend,” Wad told me for World Soccer. “It must become as natural to his players as using their left and right legs when they move.”
Doucouré is the beneficiary of those methods, and he is technically gifted as well as defensively boisterous.
In Ligue 1 during the 2021/22 season, while he was still at Lens, Doucouré was ranked in the top five among U23 midfielders for the best dribble completion (63.64 per cent) for players who averaged at least 1.5 dribbles per 90 minutes.
He was also in the top five for forward passes per 90, averaging 15.49, and ranked fourth for passes to the final third (8.36). At Palace, that side of his game didn’t always show while the club was fighting for relegation for the vast majority of the campaign.
But at Liverpool, if Doucouré makes the move, he could once again showcase that side of his game as well under Jürgen Klopp at Anfield.
