Castello Lukeba 2021/22: How the Lyon 19 y/o became a €20m-rated YPOTY nominee in his debut season – scout report

At about the midway point of the 2021/22 season, a tactical analysis piece was published on Total Football Analysis focusing on Lyon’s defensive difficulties during the early days of former Ajax, Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen (just to name a few) head coach Peter Bosz’s tenure in charge at Groupama Stadium. We spent a large chunk of that analysis dissecting issues with Lyon’s centre-backs, in particular, and their tendency to struggle in aggressive defending/1v1 defending situations.

Lyon’s main central defensive partnership in the first half of the season was Jason Denayer and Jérôme Boateng, with Denayer lining up on the left and Boateng lining up on the right. However, in the second half of the campaign, Lyon moved to address their problems at central defence and the aforementioned pairing being their go-to ceased to be the case, with 19-year-old left-footed, left centre-back Castello Lukeba (184cm/6’0”, 73kg/160lbs) becoming a staple of the defence, featuring alongside one of Boateng or Denayer, along with natural midfielder Thiago Mendes and Damian Da Silva at times. In our piece looking at Lyon earlier this term, we mentioned that Lukeba, in his limited minutes, appeared to have the potential to be a better fit for Bosz’s system than Denayer and Boateng. When given more game time in the second half of 2021/22, the young Frenchman took the opportunity to prove this point, delivering such good performances that he ended up being nominated for Ligue 1’s Young Player of the Year award, with his Transfermarkt valuation increasing from just €400k at the beginning of the season to €20m.

Now, Transfermarkt valuations are hardly the be-all-and-end-all for evaluating players’ performances but it does go to show how the Lyon teenager’s stock skyrocketed during the most recent campaign thanks to his performances in Lyon’s system, partly through a coming of age on his own behalf but also with a large part of the credit due to Bosz and his system, which Lukeba is clearly a great fit for (thankfully, given how the Dutch coach’s original central defensive duo are absolutely not a good fit).

In this tactical analysis piece and scout report, we aim to highlight how Lukeba became a crucial part of Les Gones’ backline in his debut season for the first team, looking both at the player’s natural individual qualities as well as those qualities that made him fit like a glove in Bosz’s system, with the Dutchman’s tactics undoubtedly accentuating certain aspects of Lukeba’s game. This analysis aims to show why we back Lukeba to form a base for Lyon to build around at the back next season and beyond. Additionally, we will put the spotlight on some of the young centre-back’s areas of improvement, as like any teenager, Lukeba is certainly not the finished article, despite how highly we rate him and his contributions for Les Gones this term. All stats and data used in this scout report come from Wyscout unless otherwise stated.

Defensive qualities

At 184cm, 73kg, Lukeba is a decent size but far from imposing — there are many more physically-imposing centre-backs in Ligue 1 than the teenaged Lyon man. However, what he lacks in physicality, Lukeba makes up for in defensive technique, composure, reading of the game and something of an all-around air of class in defensive situations. Notably, Lukeba is more comfortable defending proactively and aggressively than any of his fellow Lyon centre-backs. This has seen him complete the most successful defensive actions of any Lyon player in Ligue 1 this season (9.84 per 90 — just above average for all of Ligue 1). His comfort with defending proactively and aggressively made him a great fit for Bosz’s side, who were crying out for this kind of player in the first half of the campaign before Lukeba had fully broken into the squad.

Figures 1-3 show an example of Lukeba’s aggressive defending, which came in useful for Lyon both in settled defensive phases and in transition to defence. Figure 1 shows an example of the latter, with the opposition having just driven from inside their third, through Lyon’s midfield and towards the halfway line with a powerful progressive pass sent into an attacking player’s running path. As the attacker runs onto this ball, he’s followed closely by Lukeba, who’s happy to step out of the backline at this point and follow the player leaving his zone into a more aggressive position where there’s plenty of space.

Lukeba needs to remain calm, composed and positionally aware in this situation, which he does. As we see from figure 2, the 19-year-old’s main focus at this point was to stand the attacker up, give him no chance to turn and either run at the backline or link up with a teammate to play around Lyon’s defence, and buy his midfielders time to recover and assist him in winning the ball back by doubling up on the opposition ball carrier. Lukeba successfully achieved this by remaining tight to the attacker, getting physical to control the player’s movement and utilising the correct side-on body positioning to ensure the attacker found it more difficult to back into Lukeba and the centre-back could continue forcing the attacker away from a more valuable position all the while buying time for his teammate to get back and help out.