Amine Bassi at Nancy 2019/2020

France has been a country where many young players have flourished and launched their careers to higher levels in recent years. Ligue 1 is the stage where a lot of those players show themselves to the rest of the world, but its not the only league with talented players in France, and if we go down a tier to Ligue 2 there is a lot of talent looking to take the step up.

Amine Bassi is 23-year-old Moroccan attacking midfielder that plays for AS Nancy-Lorraine. Nancy finished this season in 12th place and proved to be an average team all season, the numbers back up that statement, the team managed 6 wins, 16 draws, and 6 losses in 28 games played. When it comes to the goal record the picture is not more impressive, Nancy ended their league campaign with 27 goals scored and 26 goals conceded, ranking them in 15th place in terms of goals scored and 8th in terms of goals conceded.

This rather stale season from the team didn’t seem to affect Amine Bassi that much as the Moroccan had a very impressive season on a personal level all things considered. In this scout report, we will be showing just how good Amine Bassi was for Nancy this season with an analysis of his gameplay and stats. We will also try to find out if he is ready to take the step up to Ligue 1 and show his talent on bigger stages.

Player Profile

Amine Bassi is a very versatile right-footed attacking midfielder that can play in several positions. This season he has played has a CAM, RW, LW, CF and a few times as a CM as well depending on Nancy’s tactics and formations. He is a very creative player with great technique, vision, and spatial awareness and makes very good use of these strengths. The mentioned characteristics enable him to create chances for himself and his teammates, and that’s why he performs well when playing in advanced zones where he can face the opposition’s defensive line. From those positions he has a variety of ways in which he can hurt his opponent: play a through pass, dribble in a 1vs1 situation, or even shoot himself.

In the image below we can see Bassi’s heat map for this season. It clearly shows his versatility and ability to play in several areas of the pitch.

The heat map above also shows us how Amine Bassi operates mostly in the final third and in areas close to the penalty box. These zones of the field are the ones where creativity paired with great technique and vision can lead to goal scoring opportunities, they are also zones where most coaches allow their players to be more spontaneous and take more risks.

Amine Bassi averaged 1.93 deep completions (per 90min) this season in Ligue 2 which ranks him 1st place in this category. Deep completions are passes received (excluding crosses) in a 20-meter radius from the opposition’s goal line. This shows us how Bassi is able to receive the ball in those advanced areas quite often. In order to see what he can produce from those areas we created a graphic that can help us to compare the attacking output of wingers and attacking midfielders from Ligue 2 that played at least 1000 minutes this season.