Player Focus: Ligue 1 Disappointments

Every season in every league there are players that come from nowhere to play their best football. Emerging kids breakthrough from the youth team and give fans an exciting look into their youth set-up. Unfortunately there are always players that just fail to live up to pre-season expectations. It can be summer signings that just don’t click at their new side or a player that ended the previous season on a high failing to continue where he left off.

It’s all part of football’s rich tapestry, so here are three players in Ligue 1 that have failed to deliver this season after promising so much.

M’BAYE NIANG – CAEN (6.05)

It feels slightly wrong to be picking out a 17-year old kid for criticism, but last season Niang finished the season so well that it looked like there was nothing that was going to stop him from being a huge success this season.

Niang pushed his way into the Caen first team and helped Franck Dumas’ side avoid relegation; scoring three goals in the last five games, including an impressive run and finish again Marseille and Steve Mandanda. Those days must feel so far away for the young striker, with only one goal to his name – although it was a stunning striker again Evian – he has struggled.

He has featured 16 times for the first team and has only managed 17 shots on goal, in fact he has managed to give the ball away more times than he has either found a teammate with a key pass or managed a shot on goal.

The silver lining is his age; he has still got a long way to go before we begin to worry. However, the rating of 6.78 last season seems miles away from the 6.05 rating he averages this season. With Caen lacking a real goal-scoring threat and Niang to look to for inspiration, you hope his progress doesn’t stall in Normandy.

ABRAHAM GUIE GUIE – NICE (6.16)

When Olivier Giroud made the move from Tours to Montpellier the Ligue 2 club brought in Ivorian striker Abraham Guie Guie to fill the massive void in their attacking line. They couldn’t have asked for much better as the relatively unknown forward found the net 13 times in 28 games.

His time in Ligue 2 was cut short when Tours were raided again as OGC Nice made a move and took Guie Guie to the Cote d’Azur hoping to add some much needed fire power to their attack.  The striker started behind Mouloungui, Xavier Pentecote and Franck Dja Djedje in the pecking order, but his chance would come.

Disaster struck when Pentecote badly injured his knee, and he will be lucky to see any action again this season. Mouloungui went to the African Cup of Nations and Guie Guie had his chance. He has now made 7 starts and 11 substitute appearances to the grand total of one goal. With 23 shots at goal his conversation rate stands at 4%, which isn’t exactly clinical.

His first goal came two weeks ago away at Nice. In fact, to call it a shot on goal is being very lenient. His shot was saved by Cedric Carrasso only to rebound back off Guie Guie and roll into the net. Averaging only 1.3 shots per game, his form is just not good enough for a club trying to avoid relegation. Those 13 goals for Tours were obviously not a fluke, and maybe with a full summer and a shot of confidence from Rene Marsiglia, Guie Guie can bounce back next season.

SLOAN PRIVAT – SOCHAUX (6.18)

It may seem like “pick on the failing strikers” week on WhoScored.com but they are the players wherein success and failure usually rests. Teams tend to spend the majority of their money on forwards in the hope of scoring goals. In Sochaux’s case they spent most of the summer trying to hold onto their strikers and hope that they could emulate something close to their fifth place finish last season.

Brown Ideye took his 15 league goals to Dynamo Kyiv and Modibo Maiga threw his toys out of the pram when he wasn’t allowed to take his 15 league goals to the team making the highest bid. Sochaux needed a replacement for not one, but two goal scorers. In steps Slovan Privat.

While Ideye and Maiga were scoring goals for Les Lionceaux, the 21-year old Privat was doing his best to impress on loan, and though his 20 goal season was impressive, it was not enough to fire Clermont Foot up to Ligue 1. All the talk was of Privat bringing his talents back to Ligue 1 and becoming Ideye’s ready-made replacement. For both player and club, it has just not played out as they would have hoped.

Privat has made 22 appearances this season, and with only nine starts perhaps just two goals isn’t the worst of records, but surely he should be averaging more than 1.2 shots per game and completing more than 57.8% of his passes. Of those completed passes only six have been counted as “key” in all of his in 950 minutes of Ligue 1 action.

Perhaps the step up is just a little too much for the striker, averaging 6.18 in the WhoScored rankings. He has also played seven games for Sochaux II down in the 4th division and has four goals. If Sochaux fail to beat the drop with new Coach Eric Hely, perhaps Privat will be the man to lead his team back from Ligue 2.