Ibrahima Konaté: An outstanding bit of business by Liverpool
Yesterday, Liverpool announced the signing of French talent Ibrahima Konaté for a reported 36m (@_pauljoyce). The signing comes after a season marred with injuries in the CB position with all three senior CBs out with long-term injuries, leaving Schalke loanee Ozan Kabak, Rhys Williams & Nathaniel Phillips to cover for an extended period of games.
Jurgen Klopp did initially experiment with the experience of Jordan Henderson and Fabinho at CB, but both succumbed to injuries and in general affected the balance of the side.
Here I took a look at Konaté’s strengths and weaknesses.
Attribute Analysis:
Tackling
1v1 defending is Konaté’s forte, using his pace and physicality to get into the right defensive positions and using his build to outmuscle forwards and his 6’4 frame to nick the ball away.
2 instances of his tackling in 1v1 duels can be seen below.
1) Vs Bayern Munich
Here a reverse pass is played into Coman with Konaté on his shoulder:
Konaté gets tight, but not tight enough to allow Coman to use his body to roll past the defender:
Then, Konaté uses his body to apply pressure to Coman, forcing the winger to leave the ball behind him, open to be nicked away by Konaté, which the defend gladly does:
2) Vs Paris Saint-Germain
Here, Neymar could run in behind the Leipzig defence where he was picked out by an Ander Herrera pass:
Konaté proceeded to jockey Neymar wider, away from goal:
After Neymar was able to shrug off attempts at winning the ball by Willi Orban, the Brazilian cut inside, towards the goal. This, however, was met with a perfectly-timed challenge by the French CB, winning the ball back for his side:
Full clips of Konaté’s tackling can be seen below:
Aerial ability:
A benefit of Konaté’s 6’4 build is aerial ability, where he has won at least 70% of aerial duels in the four seasons spent at Leipzig:
Liverpool have had issues in this department this season where they have been unable to defend crosses into the box as adequately as previous seasons & have been susceptible to long balls being played into the box.
An example of this was seen in Liverpool’s game vs Newcastle United where a long ball was lost in the air by the Liverpool player, leading to Joe Willock’s goal and Newcastle taking a point at Anfield:
![Twitter avatar for @btsportfootball](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/btsportfootball.jpg)
Konaté’s signing also gives Liverpool a threat in both boxes as seen by the graphic below from @Twenty3sport:
![Twitter avatar for @Twenty3sport](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/Twenty3sport.jpg)
![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FExobm0sWYAAc-Py.jpg)
Pace
The most evident part of Konaté’s game is his ability to cover ground at a freakish pace. This combined with Virgil Van Dijk’s nonchalant ease at which he covers ground and the speed Joe Gomez gets to (as seen below), Liverpool can adopt their high pressing, very high defensive line for next season.
His pace has got his side out of trouble in a few instances, one of which can be seen below.
As Paris Saint-Germain developed a counter-attack in the CL game vs Leipzig, Neymar led the charge down the left with Dayot Upamecano the defender rushing out to defend against him. Sloppily, the Frenchman lunged in allowing Neymar to breeze past:
You can also see the foot race between Konaté and Kylian Mbappé developing in red below:
As Neymar plays a pass across intended for Mbappé, Konaté is able to use his pace and 6’4 size to stretch and cleanly win the ball ahead of the pacy French forward:
The full clip alongside other interceptions can be seen here:
Bringing the ball out of the defence:
Konaté has the ability to perform this style of play to a similar degree to current Liverpool CB, Joel Matip. In the clip below you can see Konaté evading two PSG players before attempting a pass to the free Leipzig man on the far side which was slightly off target:
Passing
With reference to Konaté’s passing, this is one part of his game he must develop and improve under Klopp and in the Premier League. Developing consistency in passing is a necessity for a CB under Klopp, especially the ability to play long passes over an extended period of time. In the graphic below, you can see his long-ball success (passes over 30y) vs Werder Bremen:
However, this long passing has to be embedded over a consistent basis. From the graphic below, you can see highlighted in orange, games where Konaté’s long passing has not been up to the high standard required by a Liverpool CB:
Conclusion
After undergoing surgery on his hip last summer, Konaté has seemed to have overcome the injury with no adverse reaction seen almost one year down the line.
At Liverpool, Konaté will be competing with Gomez in the short term while the long term could see the Frenchman be Van Dijk’s replacement, but that will unfold as time goes on.
For now, he’s at the perfect place to make the next step up in his development, where he can and undoubtedly will work on his weaknesses under Klopp as well as utilising his strengths in his pace and aerial ability in future seasons for Liverpool.
Liverpool have a top CB on their cards.