Overthinking Transfers: Jeremy Doku
Manchester City have spent big on an attacker. We profile his Fantrax prospects.
Hello again. This transfer window just goes on and on, doesn’t it. The sums of money that seem to be flying this year mean that Manchester City’s announcement this week that they are signing an attacker for £55m somehow felt under the radar. But announce they did. Jeremy Doku is moving from Ligue 1 to the Etihad in a move likely to be as good for his trophy cabinet as his wallet.
But is he a man you want for Fantrax? Is he the sort of player worthy of FAAB and how might he fit in City’s attacking group?
Let’s explore.
Stade Rennais (Rennes) vs Manchester City
The first thing that we’re interested in looking at is “how similar the team Doku is leaving to the team he is joining.” The French side are familiar to many watchers of European football, having finished 4th, 4th, 6th and 3rd in Ligue 1 in the last four seasons. They’ve also been a regular supplier of Premier League wingers, with Raphinha and Kamaldeen Sulemana both having come directly to Leeds and Southampton, respectively, from Rennes.
Profiling them using MclachApp, we see a picture of a team that are strong defensively (fourth in Ligue 1 for xGA) and respectable attacking (8th for xG). And if you’re wondering why one of their primary exports to the Premier League has been wingers, they were joint first in terms of goals created via take-ons (with Lorient) last season with 15. The next best team was Nice with 10. This is something that was new for 2022/23 and we will come back to what might’ve led to that outsized number a little later (hint).
This is a team who excelled at creating goals by beating a defender, alongside being solidly good at creating via passing and set plays.
Moving to Manchester City, who most of us know well, generating their radar always has me thinking I’ve set something incorrectly. Basically this is a team that create and score at exceptional rates. So far, so obvious.
City were credited with 168 goal-creating actions last season (for those not used to this stat, this is higher than the number of actual goals scored because each goal can have two actions given credit). They had only 8 as the result of a take on. And of those 8, Joao Cancelo and Riyad Mahrez are credited with 25% of them. They just didn’t really rely on beating a player on the dribble to create last season. And it was even fewer the year before, with 6. We have to go back three years to find a season where they had double figures (17), with Mahrez and Raheem Sterling leading the pack on that occasion.
So it’s worth saying that Manchester City in 2022/23 created their chances fairly differently to Rennes. When you’ve got Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland, it’s maybe not overlying surprising that you’re probably relying on passing to your striker to create.
So who is Jeremy Doku?
Still a young man, but he’s been at Rennes for 3 full years, having moved from Anderlecht at 18. He had a promising debut season, then an injury curtailed second. Last season he only really won back his spot fully from January but has not looked back since. Based on everything you’ve read in the section above, can you guess what type of player Jeremy Doku is?
He is one of the most dynamic young dribblers in football right now. Of those 15 Rennes goals created by take ons last year, Jeremy Doku is credited with 7 of them. To really put that into it’s proper context, you need to remember that Doku played under 1300 minutes. Or just over 14 full games worth of minutes. Approximately every 45 minutes of play, he was creating a goal through his dribbling. Yes, that number is tied to him finishing well over his xG (6 goals to 2.7 xG). Yes, it’s a small sample. But find any clip of him dribbling and you’ll see why he’s so hard to stop.
For someone who likes to dribble, he’s got a pretty good success rate, too. Last season his success rate was at 60% and he was credited with 96 successful take-ons. That’s 96 Fantrax points. And again, we’d remind you he started 13 games. Across his non-injured games in Ligue 1, he has achieved 12 dribbles in a game on two separate occasions. No other player has achieved this tally in Ligue 1 (a league to have housed Neymar, Messi, and Mbappe). The Premier League’s best in this stat category last season was Eberechi Eze with 71 successful take-ons. He played 29.7 full 90s. Sure, Premier League defenders probably are better at defending. But this is a player that could have Adama Traore-like impact when it comes to dribbles.
He does have a bit about him in other stat categories, as his finishing dashboard below shows, but the dribbling really is the headline when it comes to projecting his Fantrax potential.
How does he fit at City?
Now the £55m question. Pep Guardiola typically cares little for size of transfer fee (or our Fantrax teams). Historically, he has not been hugely fast at integrating new attacking players into his lineups. That said, both Erling Haaland and, to a lesser extent, Julian Alvarez, did buck the trend last season. It’s definitely not fair to expect Doku to have a Haaland-like impact. The last player to move to City with such a dribble-heavy profile was probably Jack Grealish, and his dribbling days are largely in the past now. But this doesn’t feel like an apt comparison either, as Jack was also a prolific passing creator and was physically far less of an outlier than Doku.
We talked earlier on about how little City utilise the take-on to create goals. We mentioned that you had to go back three years to find a season where City hit double figures. But it’s notable that in those pre-Covid seasons, it actually happened a fair bit more. The season before that 17 take-on GCA season was a 16 GCA one. So you’ve got an open question whether Pep moved away from it because his player profiles shifted, or whether his player profiles shifted because he wanted to move away from it. Signing a player like Doku certainly suggests that he wants to have it available to him as an option, as you don’t pay £55m for this profile of player if you aren’t going to allow him to dribble.
Our suspicion is that Doku is not going to start a lot of games this season. But we also imagine that he might be used as a very effective plan-B off the bench (and as a rotation option). Make no mistake, the games he starts, you can absolutely start him. Based on his ability to beat a man, and City’s ability to get him opportunities 1v1, it wouldn’t surprise us if he was actually one of the higher scoring City players in the games he does play. But, as many Pep options have been in the past, he might be a very frustrating roster.
Whether you should spend your FAAB will come down to a couple of things:
Do you have a deep bench?
Are you willing to hold him through long stretches of not starting?
I’m probably going to steer clear, personally. But I’m delighted to see such an exciting player entering the game. And if Doku does manage to break into the side? Watch out, Fantrax.
If you like what you see here, there’s far more on the Paid Subscriber side. And let us know if you’re going to be picking up Doku.