Boubakary Soumare: The Lille lynchpin linked to Leicester City – scout report

With the end of club football season, its time for the most exciting part of the year for football fans  Transfer window. A lot of changes have been happening at various leagues across Europe but in the Premier League it has been surprisingly quiet for the moment. But teams like Leicester City have already started making noise with their imminent purchase of Boubakary Soumare from 2020-21 Ligue 1 champions Lille. 

After missing out on a Champions League spot, for the second consecutive year, on the last day to end a mixed season that also saw them win a FA Cup, their first major trophy in 5 years, Brendan Rodgers is determined to add substantial squad depth to his side and lead them to their goal. He has identified the French U-21 midfielder as his prime target for the summer and the foxes are almost close to finalising the deal with few negotiations still left. 

This scout report will discuss Soumare’s ability as a player and a tactical analysis as to how he will fit into Brendan Rodgers’ tactics. Lets begin the analysis.

Player Overview

Under Chris Galtier, where Lille mostly played in their 4-4-2 system, Soumare was deployed as one of the central midfielders in the system and he would mostly start on the left side of the double pivot. We can see that in the image below which shows the regions where he has mostly received passes from his teammates. As we can see in the plot most of his locations are constrained to the left side horizontal and also vertically there isn’t much difference as they mostly come in the middle third. 

At 188cm, he is tall and well built to sustain physical challenges and also apply pressure to the opponent. His ability to carry the ball at a raw pace and with very good acceleration is one of his strongest attributes about which we will be discussing in this article.

Attacking Abilities

When we say “attacking abilities”, we roughly refer to his role for Lille when they possess the ball. Mostly Lille look to build out from the back against almost all the teams in the league. For this, they use their 2 centre-back to help them play out. But if the opposition decides to use 2 players to press the centre-back either high or in a mid-block, where they would essentially block passing lanes to the CMs, Lille would be struggling to progress. For this, they would often ask one of their CMs to drop to form a 3-1 shape and mostly it would be the other midfielder while Soumare would be sitting in front of them. We can see an example of that in the image below where they are in a similar setup.