Adama Traoré - the season so far

Adama Traoré is possibly the most divisive player in the Wolves squad at the moment, so I thought I’d take a look at how his stats this season compared to other similar players.

I don’t want to look at every player in the league, so limited it to players who have relatively similar playing styles. Using data from the absolutely excellent FBREF, I took 600 PL minutes this season as the cut-off, and only selected wide-forwards or attacking midfielders. I then narrowed it down a little more and picked players with one of the following three criteria:

• Two or more dribbles per 90 minutes;

• Two or more attempted crosses per 90 minutes;

• Three or more dribbles + attempted crosses per 90 minutes.

This gave me a list of 50 players, a nice round number, and I chucked in Allan Saint-Maximin as well, who didn’t quite make the 600-minutes threshold. I then looked at each of these 50 players in four different areas, which I view as crucial to Adama’s game: 1) dribbling, 2) chance creation, 3) goal-scoring, and 4) defensive duties.

Dribbling

Well, before I get to the data, you already know how it will look. Adama is absolutely elite.

He attempts more dribbles than anyone in the dataset and completes more than anyone other than Andros Townsend. And Townsend attempts less than a third of Adama’s dribbles.

Dribbling for the sake of it is not ideal. But Adama is one of only two players in the sample who carry the ball forward more than 250 metres per 90 minutes. This is maybe his biggest strength for the current team - the ability to move the ball up the pitch.

Chance Creation

But, for elite players, we want to see something at the end of it. The fact that Adama doesn't have an assist yet (unless you count being fouled for a penalty) is a stick that has been used to beat him. Obviously, he is missing Raúl Jiménez. But equally, assists are a pretty useless statistic because they rely entirely on another player's finishing ability. So, I’ve first looked at Shot Creating Actions - how many actions does each player perform per 90 minutes that lead to a shot (just to note, up to players can be credited with creating a shot. So, when Leander Dendoncker’s header hit the bar against Arsenal, Traoré got gained one SCA for the cross, but Podence also got an SCA for the pass out to Traoré in the first place).

Adama is bloody good at this - only Jack Grealish (his name comes up a lot), Riyad Mahrez, James Rodríguez and Rodrigo create more shots per 90.

Adama leads the league in terms of shots created from dribbles (with Daniel Podence following closely behind), and it pretty good in terms of creating shots from open play passes (which includes crosses).

He has been pretty unlucky that more of these shots creating actions have not yet resulted in an assist. His expected assists (the number of assists you would expect a player to have based on the chances created) is the 20th highest in the league, and no-one has a bigger difference between expected assists and actual assists. This is something that, to a large extent, is out of his control - it isn’t his fault if the chances he creates are not taken.

Shooting

But Adama is yet to score this season. Do I have a defence for this as well?

Nope, this is not good. The fact that he has not yet scored is not a huge surprise given that he has just 0.5 expected goals this season. The reason for lack of goals is typically due to either a) a lack of shots, or b) taking shots from poor positions:

And Adama suffers from both of these. He doesn’t take many shots; his 10 shots this season is level with Nélson Semedo and fewer than Romain Saïss or Leander Dendoncker (15 each). The shots he does take are of poor quality, with a non-penalty expected goals of around 0.05. This means that you would expect him to score from 5% of his shots, or score every 20 shots.

Traore isn’t a bad finisher - he has five league goals from 5.4 expected goals since signing. It’s more of a case that he does not get into positions to score goals - and if he did, it must be questioned whether it would take away from his creation.

Defensive Contribution

Finally, you do not get to play for Nuno Espírito Santo without contributing defensively.

First of all, his tackles and interceptions per 90 are about par for the course. SLightly down on Podence, but more than Neto. All three of them have similar numbers, suggesting that this is as much down to Nuno’s tactics as anything else.

And what about pressing? Well, he presses about the same as Podence and Neto but has an excellent success rate that is up there with the best in the league. I’m slightly surprised to see Neto so low on both defensive graphs - he might well be doing something that I have not looked at, or the data does not capture.

So, how is he doing?

I think that Adama is doing absolutely fine this season. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he is our most underrated player, if not one of our better-performing players. I fell into this trap when writing a review of the players this season, giving him a measly 5 out of 10. If I had looked at the data a little more, I would have upgraded that.

Perhaps part of the frustration is that he has not kicked on from previous seasons - none of his core underlying data has improved from last season. But equally, perhaps we should be more appreciative of what we have got, and hope that he gets that little bit of luck in the second half of the season to boost those assist numbers.