The Jérémy Doku Dilemma

This week it's all about getting the ball into the box.

I started building the feature story of this newsletter after Rafael Leão took the piss out of Feyenoord only to be knocked out of the UEFA Champions League. This was the final push I needed to build the foundation of the next SCOUTED Archetype.

Fortunately, Jérémy Doku decided to roast Trent Alexander-Arnold for his Sunday dinner only to be on the receiving end of a Mohamed Salah one-two (a goal and an assist) and a 0-2 defeat to Liverpool. This turned out to be the perfect segue into the segment I had planned to explore before the Belgian’s display. That’s because it was born out of the same premise: getting the ball into the box.

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SCOUTED Stats

This week's appetiser is your update for the best single-game tallies recorded by players under the age of 23 across Europe's Big Five Leagues in 2024/25.

The Doku Dilemma

I will say from the off: I thought Jérémy Doku’s performance against Liverpool was incredible. I am also fully aware plenty of people will disagree.

They may argue it was the quintessential Doku display: unfathomable amounts of ball-carrying leading led to underwhelming end product. After all, for all the feats mentioned in the SCOUTED Stats section, he finished with just five Shot-Creating Actions, two Key Passes and two Shots. Therein lies the Doku Dilemma: how much dribbling is too much dribbling?

First, it is important to try to comprehend just how much dribbling Doku is doing. Against Liverpool, he became the youngest player since 2017/18 to record 15 Successful Take-Ons in a Big Five European League game. In fact, only three other players across all ages have done it - one of them is Lionel Messi.

Looking at Take-Ons from the Liverpool POV, Trent Alexander-Arnold lost 12 out of his 14 Challenges against Manchester City, the most ever recorded in a Premier League game since 2017/18 and the joint-most in a Big Five European League match. Doku was responsible for 11 of them.

Moving on to ball-carrying, Doku’s 23 Progressive Carries - which include all Carries into the Penalty Area - is the most recorded in a Big Five League game across the past eight seasons. Doku broke Eden Hazard’s record and became the only player to record 20+ multiple times, first doing so against Chelsea in February last year.

I mentioned in the SCOUTED Stats section that Doku broke his 2024/25 single-season record for Progressive Carrying Distance, it turns out this is a Stathead-era Premier League record by a forward. Across Europe’s Big Five Leagues, only Rémy Cabella and Kenny Lala have broken the 500-yard threshold. You will notice Hazard once again pops up, too.

If we combine Take-Ons and Carries, we unearth the following stat:

So, the answer to the question 'how much dribbling did Doku do against Liverpool?' is more than any player has managed in the last eight years.

So, how on earth did that only result in four Shot Involvements? The simple answer is that Liverpool have two elite centre-backs that create a near-impenetrable penalty area. This is a major issue when the majority of Doku’s dribbles were completed with both centre-backs set. The Belgian received 22 Progressive Passes on Sunday, at least eight more than any other City player and 14 more than Mohamed Salah, Liverpool’s stat leader. But the scenario that presents each player upon reception of these passes could not be more different.

Take Salah’s assist. The Egyptian makes a trademark burst in-behind and is found with a trademark pass in-behind by Trent Alexander-Arnold - TAA’s ability to do this is why I would not not care how many times he gets dribbled past. Salah then uses his hulking strength to protect the ball from Gvardiol, gain full control of it and then carry it into the City box. No take-ons needed. His passing options take the form of Szoboszlai’s supporting run, a box-crashing Curtis Jones and a far post Luis Díaz: this creates is a 4-v-4 inside the penalty area. You know what happens next. The process for Salah getting the ball into the box and providing the assist for Szoboszlai were: Run In Behind + Received Pass In Behind + Carry into the Penalty Area.

As for Doku, due to City’s style of play and how the opposition sets up to counter it, the Belgian scarcely rarely the ball in such a way. Despite the huge volume of Progressive Passes Received, it is often on Doku's shoulders to inject value into the pass. It launches up a mini-game: Doku vs. Full-Back, or even Doku vs. Full-Back + Winger at times. Meanwhile, it seems as if the remaining players have been frozen out, forced to stand and watch. If you are defending, this is good, it means you’re set and comfortable. If you are attacking the area, this is bad. Unlike the Salah scenario in which there were three different runs being made at three different speeds, the fact that Doku has to run a Gladiators-style gauntlet before even thinking about releasing the ball means that there will be limited space for any potential supporting runners due to being outnumbered. There is also a lot more distance to cover before reaching the area, both for Doku and the runners.

The contrast between these two scenarios is why we will continue to see teams fall out of love with control through possession. Liverpool were completely confident in their ability to defend their box, especially after taking the lead; it is extremely difficult for any player to create meaningful opportunities when the opponent has fortified their area with their preferred block. This is reflected by the fact that the two Key Passes that Doku did register against Liverpool were both outside of the box. The first was a lay-off for an Omar Marmoush potshot. The second, however, was straight from the Salah playbook.

In this scenario, Doku declined the Take-On side quest. Instead, he played a Pass into the Penalty Area. Before you ask 'why does he not do this more often?' take a look at Ibrahima Konaté’s positioning. The below screenshot took place in the 57th minute, by which point Doku had completed 10 out of of his 15 Take-Ons. Konaté is expecting number 11 to happen imminently so over-covers Alexander-Arnold.

Marmoush is intelligent enough to move into that gap - this was the only shot City’s No.7 registered inside the box. The fact that Doku spotted and picked out his run instead of defaulting to his dribbling is what makes me believe he will discover the end product currently missing. In fact, the City duo attempted to combine in this fashion a few times during the game. But it was not until Konaté over-compensated that enough space to execute the pass appeared; the space was created by the threat of Doku's ball-carrying. Without that, Konaté does not take his place as the final boss of the Gauntlet and intercepts the pass.

Unless City are able to engineer more transition opportunities, as they did against Chelsea, then Doku (and Sávio) appear to be their only means of breaking open the deep blocks they are likely to face. Marmoush’s off-ball movement combined with the return of Haaland’s box presence should give Doku more opportunities to pick up the assists his record-breaking dribbling deserves. It also introduces an idea I have been stewing on that the perfect winger-forward will have opposite preferred feet. In the example above, Marmoush receives and strikes with his left foot, as he should from that angle - perhaps Erling Haaland would have fired a cleaner effort on goal? That is for another time.

Keep Dancing, Doku

Highlighting the Salah-style pass and the parallels with Vinícius Júnior’s output does not mean I am predicting a similar explosion of goal involvements from Doku. However, getting the ball into the box is one of the most valuable skills in football and, through carrying, the Belgian is undisputedly one of the best at it. What happens next still needs work, but I have no doubt that facing packed-out penalty areas compounds the issue.

Also, it’s important to highlight that Doku has clocked 2,000 league minutes in just one of his eight senior campaigns, his debut season at Rennes in 2020/21. Not only is he still young based on actual age - he will turn 23 in May - but he is even younger in football age. Even so, since that 20/21 season, he ranks in the top 10 Forwards for Progressive Carrying Distance despite playing fewer minutes than any player in the top 20.

Ousmane Dembélé and Raphinha - who have both experienced an output explosion this year - feature on this list, while the likes of Jack Grealish, Rafael Leão and even Adama Traoré are perhaps examples of wingers that have failed to make the final evolution. But the verdict on Doku, and in fact all the players on this list, should be reserved for when they have finished playing.

But that does not stop us from trying to find the next Mohamed Salah.

The beginnings of the Button Masher

Players that accumulate ridiculous volume and have no concerns about Conversion Rate or Pass Completion dominate the goal-scoring or assist-providing charts - or, in Mohamed Salah’s case, both. In 38 games across all competitions, Salah has scored 30 goals and provided 20 assists: 2024/25 should go down as one of the greatest individual seasons in the sport’s history. The Egyptian is the inspiration behind this Button Masher profile, for three reasons:

1. I am fascinated by the challenge of trying to reverse engineer this insane output
2. Finding a replacement for Mohamed Salah is one of the most challenging (and most fun) recruitment thought-experiments
3. The man lives inside the Penalty Area

In the most recent SCOUTED Squad, I introduced Penalty Area Entries: Successful Passes into the Penalty Area + Carries into the Penalty Area. Although it is an extremely basic metric, I believe it is an extremely powerful one, too. Whether carrying the ball into the box or playing it to a teammate, Penalty Area Entries is one of the quickest ways to discover the most dangerous forwards. The Button Masher Archetype is about discovering which of those forwards do it in their sleep.

For continuity, I have used the dataset in the Doku section for the following plots: since 2020/21, 536 Forwards - as defined by Stathead - have logged at least 38 90s across Europe’s Big Five Leagues. Below is the top 10 Penalty Area Entries in total and Penalty Area Entries per 90.

Mohamed Salah blows away his competition when it comes to total output - this should never be ignored - and also ranks in the top 10 for Per 90 which is even more impressive when you consider that he has played the third-most minutes in this dataset. To average this level of per 90 output across 14,052 minutes of football is astonishing. That is why he is the Poster Boy of this Archetype.

But we need to explore the Button Mashing concept a bit further. That name came from a desire to highlight the players that not only get the ball into the box often, but do so relentlessly and as quickly as possible. To try to measure this, I looked at Penalty Area Entries per Touch: Doku again tops the list, Salah ranks in the top five.

Another player in the top 10 for this metric that is berated for a perceived lack of end product is Rafael Leão, whom I mentioned in the introduction to this newsletter. All I will say is that he is approaching Salah-to-Liverpool age: his next move could decide whether he becomes one of this decade’s best wide-forwards or a nostalgic what could have been… favourite. It’s time to evolve.

The final part of this intro to the introduction to the Button Masher Archetype is to consider Penalty Area Entries alongside Non-Penalty Expected Goals and Expected Assisted Goals (NPxG+xAG) as a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the Button Mashing. I have championed volume above all else for this profile but we need to be able to assess who is the greatest Button Masher of them all. The below graph (which requires you to visit the brand new site to see in all its glory) plots Touches per Penalty Area Entry with Penalty Area Entries per 90 in order to discover the Button Masher profiles, the most extreme of which will be in the top left. The size of each datapoint is based on the NPxG+xAG per Penalty Area Entry value. Immediately, we see the issue with Doku’s Button Mashing.

Despite Doku recording 6.6 PenEntries per 90, each one is delivering just 0.05 NPxG+xAG. Towards the other end of the size spectrum is Mohamed Salah, of course. Salah not only averages 4.9 Pen Entry per 90 - a 98th percentile figure from out 536-player dataset - but each one is worth 0.17 NPxG+AG - three times more than Doku. This takes us back to all of the points made about the anatomy of each player's Penalty Area Entries in the Doku Dilemma section. To explore that with data, we will have to wait for the SkillCorner deep dive. Stay subscribed!

The multi-million dollar question I am looking to answer through exploring this profile is: what are the key markers we can use to project a Salah-like take-off? I am humble enough to admit that this will likely remain unanswered through quantifiable means, especially the ones I am able to, but I can try to get as close as possible. I will be back.

That’s it from this week’s Monday Night SCOUTED.

If you want to hear what I have to say, I discussed the Power Forward Archetype with Joe on the latest SCOUTED Football Podcast.

Here's links for those reading in-email: Apple / Spotify.

Have a listen and let me know what you think about the Durán x Adriano comparison. Enjoy your week!

Jake