Moussa Diaby joined Aston Villa for a club-record fee in the summer of 2023. The English Premier League club is being managed by Unai Emery, and he helped them reach Europe after a poor start to the 2022–23 season. Diaby became the biggest signing for Villa in the summer. They also recruited a few other players like Youri Tielemans, Pau Torres, Clement Lenglet, and Nicolo Zaniolo. Diaby was the standout amongst these top players.
A speedy winger, Moussa Diaby is a regular member of the French national team. He played for a Bayer Leverkusen side that is managed by Xabi Alonso. The player was a threat on the counters and attracted the attention of many European clubs. Let’s take a look at why Aston Villa broke records to sign this young Frenchman.
Moussa Diaby starts in every game for Villa and has been deployed in two different roles. He naturally plays as a right-winger and has also been used as an attacking midfielder. The heatmap of Diaby shows that he likes to penetrate the opposition penalty box and has taken 35 touches inside it in the current season.
Decent start at Aston Villa
Moussa Diaby’s Aston Villa career started with a 5-1 loss to Newcastle United in the opening game of the Premier League 2023–24 season. Moussa Diaby was the only scorer for Villa in this match. Overall, the player has taken 22 shots this season and managed to hit the target 45.5% of the time. Diaby is a left-footer and likes to open his body to take shots from the right side.
This 24-year-old winger is also a creative force and has added two assists to his name. Averaging 23.28 passes per 90 minutes, the player has an accuracy rate of 84.6%. These include 2.4 passes to the opposition penalty box and have a high accuracy rate of 70%. This shows how threatening the player has been for Aston Villa.
The above viz shows the ball progression made by the player in the 2023-24 season. He likes to run with the ball from the midfield and has a high dribble success rate of 64%.
Diaby at Leverkusen
Moussa Diaby carried a lot of threats for Bayer Leverkusen in the 2022–23 campaign. He managed to score 14 times. With an average of 2.5 shots per 90 minutes, he took 110 shots in the season. The accuracy rate was on the higher side, at 47.3%. Once again, most of the shots were attempted from the favoured right side.
The Frenchman created clear-cut 62 goal-scoring chances and ended up with nine assists to his name in the season. Around 4.12 passes were attempted to the opposition penalty box per 90 minutes, but the accuracy rate was decent at 51.6%. All these assists landed around the six-yard box.
Moussa Diaby will look to achieve success with Aston Villa this season. He is playing in Europe and has a manager who has won the Europa League.
Visuals via TFA data viz engine