The 22-year-old Senegalese forward Amadou Sagna (173cm/5’8”, 63kg/138lbs) joined National 1’s Stade Briochin on a season-long loan from one of Belgium’s biggest teams, Club Brugge, last summer. While the versatile attacker, who’s primarily a centre-forward but has also regularly featured on both the right and left-wing for his team in 2021/22, has only scored three league goals this term, it wouldn’t be wise to overlook his overall performances for Stade Briochin throughout his loan spell, which have been rather promising.
As a result, Amadou Sagna is the seventh and final player to be profiled in our National 1 scout report series, here at Total Football Analysis, which has seen us provide in-depth analysis of the following: Florent Da Silva at Villefranche (on loan from Ligue 1 side Lyon), Godson Kyeremeh (on loan at Annecy (on loan from Ligue 2’s Caen), Sagna’s Stade Briochin teammate Ahmad Allée, Avranches’ PSG academy product Harold Voyer, Sète’s Walid Jarmouni (on loan from Ligue 2’s Sochaux) and SO Cholet’s Ryad Hachem.
This attacker’s parent club, where he’s been developing since 2019, has been home to players such as Inter’s Ivan Perišić and Borussia Dortmund’s Thomas Meunier in the past, among plenty of other notable names, with the highly-rated Charles De Ketelaere and Noa Lang among Blauw-Zwart’s current crop of budding talents. I’m not saying Sagna will reach the levels of Perišić or Meunier, nor is he secretly a talent at the level of De Ketelaere or Lang. However, the 22-year-old has been a bright spark for Stade Briochin this term, albeit while showing some notable weaknesses at the same time that could put some off him — perhaps making him a potential coup for clubs looking to use the National 1 / Belgian market in the transfer window.
Indeed, Sagna’s contributions have been recognised by his club despite the forward only bagging three league goals this term, as he is one of five nominees for the club’s ‘Player of the Year’ award (alongside Ahmad Allée, who we previously looked at in this scout report series), with the club describing him as their “defender on the front” in a tweet announcing that fact. I feel this is a fair moniker for the attacker but one that could also do the player an injustice, as he’s far more than just a pair of legs defensively, as we’ll go on to highlight in this tactical analysis and scout report piece that aims to provide in-depth analysis of Sagna and his role in Stade Briochin’s strategy and tactics this term.
Movement
We’ll kick this scout report off by looking at the forward’s off-the-ball movement. While Sagna has scored just three league goals in 2021/22, he’s done that from a far better xG of 6.11. This does average out to 0.3 xG per 90, which is, again, less impressive and ranks the forward just above average in terms of xG per 90 when compared with other National 1 forwards this season. However, the big picture here is that the attacker has significantly underperformed his xG this term and has actually been managing to get himself into promising offensive positions far more frequently than his actual goalscoring record would suggest.
Part of the reason for this is the player’s runs and off-the-ball movement to find space in high-value positions where his teammates can find him to get a shot off. We’ll analyse some of the key traits and attributes in his game that have helped him to achieve this so often this season in our first section of analysis.
In figure 1, we see the attacker arriving into the box as his teammate on the left-wing gets past his man, the opposition’s right-back, to progress further up the wing into a better crossing position. As the wide player beats his man, Sagna is not in an ideal position to give him an option as he’s just behind an opposition centre-back who’s effectively controlling the 22-year-old at this point, blocking the passing lane into him.
However, moving into figure 2, we see how Sagna proved to have been comfortable in this position just behind the centre-back at that moment, as the attacker pulled off a sharp movement towards the left-wing that caught the defender off-guard, helping the 22-year-old forward to get around the centre-back and into a better position where he can get onto the end of this low cutback cross.
