Caio Henrique 2021/22: Monaco’s flying left-back peaking the interest of Europe’s giants – scout report

Caio Henrique is a 24-year-old Brazilian left-back currently playing for AS Monaco in the French Ligue 1. Henrique joined the french side in the summer before the 2020/21 season commenced, and was brought in for just €8 million. Since this transfer, Henrique has gone about growing his reputation as one of Europe’s up and coming left-backs, and just this previous summer he admitted he was flattered to be linked with Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain.

Whilst the title is all but a formality, given PSG’s 13 point lead at the halfway point in the season, the rest of the league is incredibly tight. Monaco currently sit in sixth position, four points off of second but equally four points ahead of 12th place. Monaco have a team littered with exciting young talent, but failure to qualify for Europe this season would likely see many move on, and Henrique will be on plenty of teams’ shortlists ahead of this summer, or perhaps even this month.

This tactical analysis and scout report seeks to highlight Henrique’s key qualities, providing an analysis of some of his individual talents as well as those that fit in with Monaco’s tactics.

Defensive

Henrique is a positive and pacy attacking full-back, and as such could perhaps be lazily characterised as a modern-day full-back who places too much emphasis on attacking rather than defending. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While it is true that Henrique places an emphasis on consistently providing height and width in attack he is a committed defender, who drops back instantly on a loss of possession, and is bullish in defensive duels.

To look at some of Henrique’s data in context we have looked at every left-back to have played 500+ minutes in Europe’s top five leagues this season.

We can see from glancing at the graph below that whilst his 6.119 defensive duels is below the average for the dataset, however, his 64.49% win rate on these duels is very strong, and is in itself above the average for this group of players.

Admittedly there is one glaring flaw in Henrique’s game which will need considerable work which is his heading. He stands at 1.79m, or 5’10”, which is quite tall for a full-back, but performs abysmally in aerial duels. 

The graph below shows that he is one of the weakest in Europe’s top five leagues, with a volume of 1.458, which is below the average, whilst his 24.24% win rate is incredibly low.