Barcelona: Eric Abidal monitors Lille’s Nicolas Pepe
Eric Abidal continues to scour Ligue 1 in the hope of finding talented prospects for bargain prices.
France showed at the World Cup that they have a wealth of young talent coming through their academies because they had the second youngest squad at the tournament, but were able to come away victorious. Players such as Alexander Lacazette, Aymeric Laporte, Anthony Martial and Adrien Rabiot didn’t make the squad due to the competition for places.
Clubs such as Lyon, Monaco and Rennes are acting as conveyor belts as they seem to produce talented prospects every year. Ligue 1 is also an ideal place to start in because it’s a top league but isn’t at the same competitive level as Italy, Spain or England, so it strikes the right balance for developing youth graduates.
According to Mundo Deportivo, Eric Abidal has been monitoring the progress of Nicolas Pepe after an excellent start to the season, and it’s also reported that Sevilla and Real Betis were interested in his signature in the summer.
Pepe has scored four goals and assisted three in the first five league games. This means he has directly contributed to seven of his team’s nine goals or 77.7%. He’s highly unlikely to keep this up over an entire season, and he’s overperforming xG (3.83) and xA (1.42), per Understat. Nonetheless, it’s still a very impressive start to the season and there is little surprise that Barcelona are interested.
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The Catalans signed Malcom from Bordeaux in the summer as well as Samuel Umtiti from Lyon in 2016, so this is clearly an area they are scouting extensively. There is a lot of potential to acquire players for bargain prices and it avoids having to pay steep prices to selling clubs such as Borussia Dortmund who bought Ousmane Dembele and sold on him within a year for 10 times more.
This is Pepe’s second season with Lille after a debut campaign in which he scored 13 goals and assisted five in 36 games as well as briefly working under the visionary Marcelo Bielsa, although his time there was a disappointment. The 23-year-old winger worked his way up through the lower leagues before being spotted by Angers who then sold him on to Lille.
His skillset makes him an attractive proposition for Barcelona because he could be a potential solution to a long-term need. He is capable of playing on the right-wing as well as a centre-forward, although his appearances this season have all come on the flank. Barcelona need to replace Luis Suarez in the next few years due to the fact that he is starting to decline, so a player who is comfortable playing centrally as well as moving wide to accommodate Lionel Messi is ideal.
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There is a significant jump up in quality between Ligue 1 and La Liga, though, so it’s best to continue watching him in order to see whether he is consistent over the season, for the time being.