Ligue 1 2021/22: How ‘desired’ Ludovic Blas can hone his game amid Lille, Rennes and Benfica links – scout report

Ludovic Blas (180cm/5’10”, 69kg/152lbs) was a key figure in the Nantes side that achieved Coupe de France glory last season, with La Maison Jaune beating Nice 1-0 in the final thanks to a Blas penalty kick, securing UEFA Europa League football for 2022/23. Only goalkeeper Alban Lafont and centre-back Andrei Girotto accumulated more minutes for the Brittany-based club in all competitions than the influential attacking midfielder managed in 2021/22.

The 24-year-old joined Nantes from Guingamp back in the 2019 summer transfer window for a near-club record fee of €8m. Now valued at double that by Transfermarkt, the former France U20 international has been the subject of much speculation in recent weeks, as reports have linked the desired player with a move to Nantes’ fellow Ligue 1 competitors Lille, Brittany rivals Rennes and Portuguese UEFA Champions League side Benfica of late.

At present, Blas remains part of Antoine Kombouaré’s side but for how much longer remains to be seen, following a highly-rated and influential campaign at Stade de la Beaujoire which did wonders for the 24-year-old attacking midfielder’s reputation.

Amid this intense transfer speculation, we’ve decided to produce a tactical analysis rundown on Blas’ key strengths and weaknesses, along with the player’s role within Kombouaré’s tactics via an in-depth scout report.

This analysis will have a specific focus on four areas of improvement/potential weaknesses within the 24-year-old’s game, explaining how the Nantes man can yet improve and continue to hone his game to be the best possible version of himself, ultimately. All stats and data used in this scout report come from Wyscout.

Data analysis

We’re going to kick off this tactical analysis piece by providing some data analysis on Blas. The aim of this data analysis is to indicate clearly and concisely the key responsibilities he performs within Kombouaré’s Nantes system and highlight some standout areas of interest within the player’s profile through the data.

Firstly, we will briefly explain what is being shown by some of the more ambiguously labelled metrics on the visual. We must stress that these weren’t created as a result of some intense fine-tuning, but rather just a basic combination of some raw metrics to create what we believe to be some helpful metrics for use in this analysis.

‘Possession involvement’ is a combination of passes per 90 and passes received per 90, which we’ve combined to try and get a measure of how involved, overall, the player is in his team’s possession phases in relation to other players in the data set labelled in figure 1 — while Blas is a versatile player who’s occupied various positions over the last calendar year, including the wings, deeper in midfield and even the centre-forward position, he’s primarily played as a central attacking midfielder or ‘10’, so these are the players we’ve compared him with.

‘Positive passing’ is a combination of forward passes per 90, progressive passes (A forward pass that attempts to advance a team significantly closer to the opponent’s goal) per 90 and passes to the final third per 90. These were combined as a means of looking into how aggressive/forward-thinking the player is with the ball in relation to his peers, particularly designed to highlight his effectiveness in the ball progression phase of play.

‘Penetrative passing’, meanwhile, is a combination of through passes per 90, passes to the penalty area per 90 and smart passes per 90, designed to look at the player’s defensive line-breaking nature, particularly with a view to looking at the player’s effectiveness in chance creation.

‘Creative passing’, then, is a combination of xA per 90, shot assists per 90 and key passes per 90. This one is designed to show how effective the player is at directly creating goalscoring opportunities for his teammates.

We hope that these explanations have made the labelling clear and the visual easier to interpret.

So, with all of that out of the way, let’s get stuck into the analysis! Directing our attention to figure 1, some aspects of this chart stand out immediately. It’s clear that Blas is not among the most defensively active attacking midfielders in Europe — certainly not proficient in this area, anyway.

On the attacking side of things, he takes a lot of shots while maintaining a respectable shot accuracy rate, considering the high volume of shots that leave his boots. Additionally, he engages in heaps of offensive duels — a statistic that’s not surprising from watching the player on the pitch and being familiar with his style of play at Nantes — though his offensive duel success rate leaves a lot to be desired. He does, however, draw plenty of fouls too.

In terms