There are numerous players who are linked to a particular club for years and years, window after window, without the deal ever being completed. Liverpool are no strangers to this phenomenon.
In the last week, the Reds have been rumoured to be considering a move for Inter Milan’s Marcelo Brozovic, and links with him date back well over two years. There have been stories suggesting that Watford’s Ismaila Sarr has been on Liverpool’s shopping list for just as long, yet it seems their interest remains elsewhere.
As the ECHO has reported in the past, Sarr is a talent who has previously been on Liverpool's transfer shortlist having been likened in some quarters to Sadio Mane.
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The two players are certainly close. Back in 2019, Mane asked Sarr’s club captain Troy Deeney to ‘look after my boy’ when they visited Anfield, while the youngster referred to the Liverpool forward as his ‘big brother’ after the return fixture.
From the perspective of a potential transfer, any comparison between the international teammates is now largely moot. The Reds’ style has already evolved somewhat since Mane left in the summer, thanks to the acquisition of Darwin Nunez. However, Liverpool’s history of signing attacking talent from lower ranked Premier League clubs offers an interesting numerical coincidence against which we can benchmark Sarr.
The Reds bought Mane from Southampton in the summer of 2016, after he had spent two seasons in the top flight of English football. Per Understat, across that period he averaged 0.40 expected goals and 0.17 expected assists per 90 minutes.
Southampton finished seventh and sixth in Sadio’s campaigns with them, and two years ago Liverpool signed another forward who had spent his first two seasons in the Premier League battling for European qualification. Diogo Jota is the man in question, and remarkably his xG and xA averages with Wolves were 0.40 and 0.16, so within a hair of exactly matching Mane’s figures.
Even a more obscure metric like xGChain (which measures the total expected goal value of every possession sequence in which a player is involved) had Mane and Jota dead level on 0.61 per 90 minutes too. How does Sarr compare?
He had the creative side of the game covered, with an average of 0.17 expected assists per 90 across Watford’s last two campaigns in the Premier League. Sarr maintained this aspect of his game in the Championship too, with the 11 big chances he created in 2020/21 a total bettered by only three players (one of whom was Harvey Elliott, per SofaScore ).
However, Sarr fell short on the expected goals front in the top division. While there were highlights – his best performance came in the 3-0 win over soon-to-be-champions Liverpool – his average of 0.24 xG per 90 was only a little over half of what Jota and Mane had offered.
They had played for teams that finished in the top seven, though, not 19 th as Watford did in their previous two seasons in the Premier League. The transfer target analysts for the Reds will no doubt have complex formulas to account for this difference. We shall take an easier approach.
If we look at the 2021/22 season, there were only 17 players at teams that finished in the bottom half of the table who recorded better non-penalty expected goal and assist averages per 90 minutes than Sarr (among those that at least matched his playing time).
Interestingly, his figure was identical to that of Wilfried Zaha, and their dribbling numbers were similar too. Perhaps he makes a better comparison than Mane? Either way, on some basic statistical profiling the Watford man fell a little short of his international colleague and Jota’s efforts from their early Premier League careers. Perhaps this is why Liverpool have never made a move as many assumed they would?
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