Transfer windows are always endlessly packed with transfer rumours. This year’s January transfer window has been and will be, no different. One name that will be mentioned frequently over the month is the name of Lille midfielder Boubakary Soumaré. This tactical analysis will examine Soumarés role within Lilles tactical set-up, as well as his best qualities as a player.
Soumaré is a 20-year-old central midfielder. After growing up in Paris and developing as a part of Paris Saint-Germain’s youth academy, he moved to Lille in the summer of 2017, where he has been playing his football since. The French national has been capped at every level of international youth football, from under-16 up to under-21 level. He is yet to make his full international debut.
Soumaré has garnered significant interest from top clubs due to his impressive performances with Lille over the past couple of seasons. More often than not, he generally plays on the left side of the double-pivot in Lille’s 4-2-3-1 tactics set-up.
Soumaré is a skilled and very well-rounded footballer. He has shown himself to possess all of the qualities one would typically want in a modern box-to-box midfielder. We will analyse Soumaré’s well-rounded attributes in this scout report. We will look at his impressive passing, dribbling, tackling, interceptions, and aerial ability in this piece.
Calm, intelligent, quality passing ability.
Soumaré has shown to possess a lot of quality on the ball. He exudes coolness on the pitch and has the ability to control a game. Soumaré generally plays with a calmness on the ball. Furthermore, he likes to get on the ball as much as possible. As a result, you typically see him roam around quite a bit when Lille have possession. Much of Lille’s build-up play comes through Soumaré as he is comfortable spraying the ball around the pitch.
On top of that, Soumaré generally plays very calmly under pressure. We can see an example of this in the image above. In this image, we can see Soumaré in possession of the ball. He had just dropped between the centre-backs to receive possession deep and attempt to advance play up the pitch.
We can see him being pressed by both N’Golo Kanté and Mateo Kovačić. However, Soumaré is happy to back his ability on the ball here. He uses his large build to hold off the challenge of Kanté and manages to play past their press. He releases the ball to midfield partner Xeka, and continues his run forward off the ball. This begins an attack for Lille.
