Scouting Lille’s academy – data analysis

LOSC Lille is an emerging club in France and has found a space amongst the good clubs in the country. Lille have been crowned champions of Ligue 1 three times in the club’s history, with the most recent title coming in the 2010/2011 season. A part of the club’s success in winning these and other titles comes from their very good academy which has produced some great talents such as Eden Hazard, Kevin Mirallas and Benjamin Pavard, who are now playing for big clubs like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.

In this data analysis we will use data and statistics to find the best talents currently in Lille’s academy that could potentially take the step up, earn a place in the first-team, and experience Ligue 1 football.

Methodology 

In order to make this analysis we need to establish what our data pool will be. Since Lille II is the only youth team that has data available on Wyscout for the 2019/2020 season, we must look at the players from that team but those who meet our required specifications.

Because Lille II play in National 2, a league that is not widely covered, the data available has its limitations, therefore, we will only highlight players who have played at least 450 minutes this season to make our analysis a more realistic one.

After analysing all the players we will compile a shortlist with the best talents.

Defending 

Starting with the defensive statistics, we have created a scatter plot that shows us aerial duels won% and defensive duels won% on each axis. The size of the dots was set to display the amount of PAdj interceptions per 90 giving us a view of the most important defensive metrics.

Looking at the graphic we can see that some players stand out and appear on the right upper quadrant, however, one player displays slightly better numbers than the others. Maxime Wackers is the player with the best numbers in this graph  he won 68.09% of his defensive duels and 66.7% of his aerial duels while also averaging 9.94 PAdj interceptions per 90 minutes. Arton Zekaj is another player who displays good numbers; the Serbian won 66.67% of his defensive duels, 57.14% of his aerial duels and averaged 8.95 PAdj interceptions per 90. With the best success numbers in the team when it comes to defensive duels, Ruben Droehnle pairs his impressive win rate of 80.36% with a 56.41% win rate when it comes to aerial duels while also boasting 7.32 PAdj interceptions per 90. Lastly, and although he is not in the upper right quadrant, Darly Nlandu appears with a high 65.52% win rate on his aerial duels but a slightly below average 56.31% win rate on his defensive duels.

Passing and ball progression 

In this section we will take a look at the best passers in the team; the players who are able to circulate the ball and do it well. We will also take a look at the players that are the best at progressing the ball up the field through passing or carrying.