Adil Aouchiche Scouting Report At Lorient 2022/2023

Paris Saint-Germain academy product Adil Aouchiche (181cm/5’11”, 69kg/152lbs) had been linked with the likes of Arsenal and Juventus two years ago when he ultimately ended up joining French giants Saint-Étienne after leaving Paris after just turning 18 years old.

He hasn’t enjoyed the smoothest start to life in senior football, suffering relegation from France’s top flight last term.

However, while ASSE are set to toil away in the second tier this season, Aouchiche will continue to ply his trade in Ligue 1, as he joined Lorient towards the end of the recent summer transfer window.

Despite being part of a relegated team last season, Aouchiche, for no transfer fee, has the potential to be one of the deals of the summer from Ligue 1.

We hope to show why that might be the case in our latest tactical analysis and scout report which looks at three key strengths within Aouchiche’s game, provides analysis of the role he played in his previous side’s tactics and looks forward to how he may fit into Régis Le Bris’ Lorient project, with Les Merlus enjoying a very positive start to the 2022/23 campaign.

Adil Aouchiche Data analysis

Without further ado, we’ll kick off this tactical analysis piece with a little bit of data analysis.

The purpose of this is to provide some information on the right-footed winger/attacking midfielder’s playing style, as well as clearly point out some areas in which the player excels in the data relative to others in his position from Europe’s top five leagues and some areas in which he evidently doesn’t stand out.

Again, as previously stated, we like to use this as a tool to indicate player style more than player quality, but it can tell us at least a little bit about both to some extent in a very digestible way.

To explain some of the metrics from Figure 1 very briefly, ‘Possession involvement’ is a combination of passes per 90 and passes received per 90, which we’ve combined to try and get a measure of how involved, overall, the player is in his team’s possession phases in relation to other players in the data set labelled in figure 1.

‘Positive passing’ is a combination of forward passes per 90, progressive passes (A forward pass that attempts to advance a team significantly closer to the opponent’s goal) per 90 and passes to the final third per 90.

These were combined to assess how aggressively or forward-thinking the player is with the ball in relation to his peers, particularly to highlight his participation in the ball progression phase of play.

‘Penetrative passing’, meanwhile, is a combination of through passes per 90, passes to the penalty area per 90 and smart passes per 90, designed to look at the player’s defensive line-breaking nature, particularly with a view to looking at the player’s effectiveness in chance creation.

‘Creative passing’, then, is a combination of xA per 90, shot assists per 90 and key passes per 90.

This one is designed to demonstrate the players effectiveness in directly creating goal-scoring opportunities for his teammates.

Aouchiche has played a variety of roles and positions in his young career, but we identify him as a winger/attacking midfielder.

For the sake of this data analysis, we’ve compared him with these players.

From Figure 1, we see that Aouchiche stands out positively in some key defensive metrics, crossing, possession involvement, positive passing and long passing.

This doesn’t come as a surprise at all from being familiar with his game, as these are all clearly identifiable strengths within the player’s game — an observation with which the data correlates.