Breaking down Yan Diomandé: an undiscovered gamebreaker
SCOUT NOTES on yet another top-level African talent
The future of football is Africa.
That’s a slogan SCOUTED have been pushing for a while now. More and more clubs are latching onto it too, and they’re starting to yield the high-upside results they first saw in regions like Scandinavia and at clubs like Red Bull Salzburg.
The latest African prospect to make an immediate impact in top-flight European football is Yan Diomandé, an 18-year-old Ivorian winger.
Since moving to CD Leganés in January, the winger quickly skipped through the B team to end the season as a regular for their senior side that were battling valiantly against relegation. He made his debut against Real Madrid at the Bernabéu and started his first LaLiga game against Barcelona a couple of weeks later, an appearance that kicked off a run of six starts in the final eight games. He racked up 542 minutes across 10 appearances in total, a solid return for his first three-month stint in European football.
His data profile – while extremely limited, obviously – has already sounded the alarm at SCOUTED HQ. Diomandé featured in Jake Entwistle’s massive end-of-season number crunch of the Big Five Leagues, and it was Jake’s message in our Slack channel that compelled me to watch him. I’m glad he did.
Jake Entwistle
I’m focussing this breakdown entirely on the final 63 minutes of his debut season. He played them in Leganés’ 3-0 win against Real Valladolid last Sunday. While it was an emphatic victory, results elsewhere sealed their fate in the form of relegation back to the Segunda División.
From the off, the basics: Leganés were playing a pretty standard 4-4-2 shape that was solid in defence and functional in attack. The spaces were close, the lines were tight, the onus was to get behind the ball and play with control once they won it back. Diomandé was the left winger, holding the width, seeking isolation.
As early as the second minute, Leganés’ intent was clear – they were going to feed Diomandé the ball as much as they could. Here they are transferring out to the left, where the Ivorian squares up with a neat Cruyff turn and slips in the underlapping runner with a quick outside-boot pass.
What the first five minutes demonstrated more than anything was his athletic level. You could see in the actions he did – jumping to press, recovering back in, a couple of on-ball touches – that Diomandé is a top-level athlete already. That will be why he’s played as much as he has in recent months, doing so in demanding wing roles.
