In the summer of 2017, Benjamin Mendy joined Manchester City from Monaco for a fee of €57.50 million.
However, the Frenchman has had two very tough seasons at Manchester City.
In the ‘Centurion’ campaign, he picked up a cruciate ligament rupture and was out for 198 days; in the ‘Fourmidables’, he had undergone knee surgery, then suffered from a meniscal injury, then, again, a knee problem.
He was unavailable until late September of 2019 and played his first game of this season in the Carabao Cup game against Preston.
In general, Mendy is a lot healthier this season.
So far, he has started 20 games in this campaign while playing the big games like, for example, at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium vs Real Madrid.
He has trained under Marcelo Bielsa tactics, Leonardo Jardim and of course, Pep Guardiola.
Bielsa said Mendy had the potential to become the best left-back in the world, so, after all the difficulties he has encountered at City, has the Frenchman still got the potential to be the best?
In this tactical analysis scout report, we will show you the strengths and the role of Mendy in Guardiola’s tactics.
It is an analysis that focuses on the performance of Mendy in 2019/20 campaign.
Statistical breakdown
The graph below sums up the strengths of Mendy in different domains.
Playing in the possession-based playing style of City, the Frenchman has an 85.56% pass success rate this season.
Meanwhile, there are two figures that are quite high that we should pay attention to.
Mendy has made 6.02 crosses per game in the Premier League, more than any other player, with the completion rate of 38.75%.
The dribble success rate of Mendy is also high at 62.96%.
We will investigate the above traits with game examples in the coming sections.

Below is the heat map of Mendy for this season.
While Guardiola’s inverted full-backs tactics are famous now, Mendy has played more like a conventional offensive left-back instead of inverting to the centre.
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