Leagues like the Dutch Eredivisie, the Scottish Premiership, The Danisch Superligaen and the Portuguese Liga Primeira are great competitions to scout in for top 5 leagues, but where do those leagues scout in? There are few obvious options to look at, but in this post I will delve into the best young, central defenders in the French Championnat National – the third tier of French football.
The data I will look at to make a selection comes form Wyscout. I will make a shortlist via data and after that will look at the chosen players in a short scout report. Before I start, I have a few criteria they have to fit into:
- They have to be 25 years or younger
- They have to have played 700 minutes at the minimum in the current 2020/2021 season. I have chosen for this number as we are early in the season right now.
This will give me the following players to look at:
These five players all are 25 years old or younger at the time that I write this data analysis. I have lowered the amount of minutes to 700 minutes at minimum, because we are quite early in this season and the dataset is small because of it. I initially wanted to look at 900 minutes as a minimum, but that wasn’t feasable.
As far as looking at a shortlist, I will make a selection of the three best players out of the five who have been chosen above.
Defensive duels
First of all, I will look at their abilities to win a defensive duels as that will tell us a little bit more about their defensive attributes in a defending situation. You can see this in the image below where I look at the defensive duels per 90 minutes vs the defensive duels won in percentages.
What you can see in the image above is that the two players of Bastia-Borgo score high on the amount of defensive duels per 90. Barbet has 10,19 defensive duels per 90, while Buon has 7,96 defensive duels per 90. Mendy has 5,42, Karamoko has 5,31 and Ouaneh has 4,74 defensive duels per 90.
If we look at the percentage of defensive duels won, we get some other results in terms of ranking. Barbet comes on top again with 77,3%, followed by Ouaneh with 75,47%, Karamoko with 72,09%, Buon with 70,33% and Mendy with 68,25%. Barbet comes on top in both these metrics and he is a decent player in the defensive duels.
Aerial strength
After the defensive duels, I will look at the aerial strength of the selected players. A central defenders needs to be a force in the air, both in regular play as in the set pieces. In order to conclude which player is the best in the air, I look at the aerial duels per 90 and the the aerial duels won in percentages. You can see this in the image below.
Karamoko comes on top in this metric. He has 4,44 aerial dues per 90 minutes this season and he wins 66,67% of his aerial duels, which makes him the best. Ouaneh has 2,86 aerial duels per 90 minutes with a percentage of 62,5%. Barbet has 3,46 aerial duels per 90 minutes with 55,56%, Mendy has 3,7 aerial duels per 90 minutes with 48,84% and Buon has 4,46 aerial duels per 90 minutes with 43,14%.
Karamoko and Ouaneh are the only ones who have a win percentage that is higher than 60%, which makes them the best in the aerial duels of the players selected in the Championnat National.
Off the ball
We have now seen how well the defenders do in the defensive and aerial duels, but a central defenders should also be good without the ball and recognising danger in the defensive third of the pitch. We will look at the metrics of interceptions per 90 and shots blocked per 90, in this part of the analysis.
If we look at the graph above, we can see that every player has more than 5 interceptions per 90 and that they don’t differ from each other a lot in this metric. In the metric of shots blocked per 90 minutes, there’s a significant difference between the players.
Mendy leads the way with 6,37 interceptions per 90 minutes and 0,77 shots blocked per 90 minutes. Buon follows with 6,03 interceptions per 90 minutes and 0,61 shots blocked per 90 minutes. Then follows Ouaneh with 6,17 interceptions per 90 minutes and 0,54 shots blocked per 90 minutes, Karamoko with 5,31 interceptions per 90 minutes and 0,25 shots blocked per 90 minutes, and Barbet with 5,87 interceptions per 90 minutes and 0,19 shots blocked per 90 minutes.
Progressive passing
A modern central defender is not only good in the duels or knows how to position himself defensively. A modern central defender is an integral part of the build-up and constructing an attacking. In this part of the analysis I will focus on the passing and progressive passes in particular: Successful progressive passes per 90 vs Pass accuracy.
One think immediately comes to my attention and it’s that Karamoko scores beneath the 80% pass accuracy and the rest has a pass accuracy which is above the 80%. Now this doesn’t say a lot on it’s own, but when we look at the progressive passes it does tell us more. The more attempts at progressive passes you make per 90 minutes and the higher the percentage per game is, the more the quality of the player is in this specific quality.
Barbet has the most progressive passes per 90 with 9,9 progressive passes per 90 and a 81,63% pass accuracy. Ouaneh closely follows with 9,02 progressive passes per 90 and a pass accuracy of 82,84%. After that comes Mendy with 7,48 progressive passes per 90 and 85,42% pass accuracy. The last two are Karamoko with 6,38 progressive passes per 90 with a pass accuracy of 76,31% and Buon has 4,96 progressive passes per 90 with a pass accuracy of 87,53%.
Shortlist
Theo Barbet
- Nationality: French
- Age: 19
- Date of birth: 06/03/2001
- Length: 1,84 m
- Current club: FC Bastia-Borgo on loan from Dijon FCO
- Career: Dijon FCO, FC Bastia-Borgo (L)
- Position: Central defender
- Secondary position: Left-back
- Preferred foot: left
Peter Ouaneh
- Nationality: French
- Age: 22
- Date of birth: 04/04/1998
- Length: 1,84 m
- Current club: US Concarneau
- Career: Dijon FC Lorient (Y), FC Lorient B, FC Lorient, Le Puy Foot (L), FC Lorient, US Concarneau
- Position: Central defender
- Secondary position: –
- Preferred foot: right
Jules Mendy
- Nationality: Senegalese
- Age: 25
- Date of birth: 14/11/1994
- Length: 1,90 m
- Current club: Stade Lavallois
- Career: Dijon Olympique Marseille (Y), Olympique Marseille B, Fréjus-Saint-Raphaël FC, Athlético Marseille, Quevilly-Rouen Métropole, Stade Lavallois
- Position: Central defender
- Secondary position: right-back
- Preferred foot: right
*The data in the dashboards consists of the last calendar year. Data provided by Wyscout.
I think that these three central defenders could be good options for top tier teams in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Scotland, Austria and Switzerland. Obviously I will need to scout them during the season, but it’s a good place to look for talent.
