What Wirtz, Gittens & Sancho drop-offs reveal about Liverpool target Yan Diomande

Mohamed Salah 's Liverpool career is over and there is one name coming up time and time again.

The £86million-rated Yan Diomande was rumoured to be on the Reds' radar as early as December, days after Salah's mixed-zone outburst at Elland Road had left the icon's Liverpool future up in the air.

Diomande is young, with just one full season of senior football under his belt. But has all the obvious tools to make it to the very top. The reason clubs like Liverpool and PSG have been credited with interest in the 19-year-old Ivorian is that his numbers this season have been off the charts.

For example, no other player in the Bundesliga completed more dribbles than Diomande's 118 this season. This, in a league that includes Michael Olise , Luis Diaz , Karim Adeyemi and fellow rumoured Liverpool target Bazoumana Toure .

At 19 and in his first season in Germany, Diomande scored 13 goals and assisted 10 from 36 appearances, including a run of eight goal contributions in 10 games from February to April to guide RB Leipzig to Champions League qualification.

Diomande is as close to genuinely two-footed as you can get, and is equally confident cutting inside to wreak havoc as he is beating players with pace and technicality round the outside.

There was a time when Liverpool wouldn't tend to move for players who they didn't have 100 games or so of data for them to interrogate. But the signings of Giovanni Leoni and Jeremy Jacquet have since put that idea to bed, and clubs now have access to more data than ever to make informed decisions about which players to target, even at such a young age.

Evidently, Diomande has been identified as the injection of quality Liverpool need in wide areas after a season of struggles in that department of the pitch.

Whether the club are willing to pay Leipzig's massive asking price, whether PSG's reported interest in him could force such a commitment, or whether Harvey Elliott - who was previously linked with Leipzig - could be used as a makeweight, are all questions for Liverpool's sporting director Richard Hughes and his recruitment team.

What supporters will want to know, however, is how well he could be expected to perform in the Premier League .

Machine Football data shows Dimoande has been much more broadly involved in creativity and build-up than Salah this season, recording 5.31 recoveries per 90 to the Egyptian's 2.61 and contributing more link-up actions (4.32 to Salah's 2.90).

This isn't just a question of Salah's drop-off, though it has been stark. Salah actually made more recoveries and defensive contributions per 90 this season than he did last season.

Diomande is, fundamentally, just a completely different type of winger. Most obviously, he's primarily right-footed playing on the right, and with his ball-carrying ability and creativity he's been as much a facilitator as a finisher.

He's far more comparable to Diaz or Rio Ngumoha in his playing style, only more mature off-the-ball than the latter. Liverpool will hope a player of his profile can bring the best out of Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz .

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But if Diomande's reputation is sky-high, Wirtz's was stratospheric when he signed from fellow Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen last summer.

Wirtz was already considered Germany's best player and had performed consistently for Leverkusen over five seasons before moving to Liverpool.

But in his debut season at Anfield, Wirtz registered his worst season in terms of goal contributions since missing the first half of the 2022-23 season with a cruciate ligament tear.

His adaptation to English football has not been smooth. Machine Football can help to explain this with league weightings data to predict what kind of a drop-off should be expected from players moving to the Premier League from other leagues.

These numbers take into account how much harder the Premier League is than its German equivalent. And the proof is in the pudding—even big-money stars like Jadon Sancho, Xavi Simons and Jamie Gittens have found that out the hard way.

The difference can be stark.

Players moving from the Bundesliga to the Premier League typically experience a drop-off in creativity metrics (28.10%) even greater than that of players who join the top flight from a Championship club.

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Players' finishing, similarly, typically sees a 25.22% drop-off when moving from the Bundesliga to the Premier League, while dribbling numbers can be expected to decline by 16.01%.

This is not to say that Bundesliga players can never reproduce their previous numbers in the Premier League, but an adaptation period is usually required for the faster pace and physical intensity of the Premier League.

Forwards, especially wingers, who are expected to create, dribble and finish, are the most likely to experience a regression in their first season moving from the Bundesliga to the Premier League.

So Liverpool must be patient if they succeed in getting a deal over the line for Diomande. Like Wirtz, he may need time to adapt.

Wirtz's price tag put a lot of pressure on the German to deliver from day one. But he is still only 23 years old and the justification for a spend that could reach £116million was always going to be more obvious in his second season and beyond, not the first.

Diomande, at 19, deserves even more patience. But that is not to say that his set of attributes, which Liverpool don't currently possess, can't make a difference from day one if he does step out at Anfield in August.