Film Study: Randal Kolo Muani

Cast aside by PSG, is the €75m man right for Arsenal?

Happy New Year, and welcome to January! Starting today, Premier League clubs have until February 3 to make all their fans’ transfer dreams come true. For those of us whose replica shirts bear the Cannon badge, that of course means attackers are en vogue.

The month is younger than young, but one of the most prominent attacking names (non-Rashford division) that’s seemingly being shopped is PSG’s Randal Kolo Muani, who joined the Parisians for €75m plus add-ons in summer of 2023 but has so far failed to impress, compiling 13 non-penalty goal contributions in about 18 90s of league play. He’s also scored one goal in about 7 90s in the Champions League since joining the Ligue 1 juggernauts.

Despite the cost of the 26-year-old’s move from Eintracht Frankfurt, where he caught eyes by racking up 24 non-penalty goal involvements in his breakout campaign, Kolo Muani has so far failed to catch on at PSG in their post-Mbappe reconstruction. He has started just twice this season and has been behind other forward-looking options like Bradley Barcola and Désiré Doué in the fight for playing time, bringing about the possibility that he could be shipped off this winter.

Here’s the French international’s performance at Frankfurt on my CF template:

He did well at Frankfurt to find good shooting opportunities and generally executed his finishing well. You wouldn’t call him the most prolific shooter or scorer, but he made up for that by providing good creativity for a frontman, and lots of threat via his carrying. He was also quite useful in the air, where his 6’2” stature came in handy. The big negative here, though he is a direct player, is the turnover section in the top-left, where he did pretty poorly.

Moving to PSG, many of the numbers actually improve. He remains a creative attacker with a good knack for getting chances, both for himself and others. He remains direct and pretty strong in the air. And though they’re a little better in terms of dispossessions (losing the ball once he’s established possession), his miscontrols (most comparable to a first touch) remain very high. He also is finishing quite a bit worse at PSG despite averaging a very healthy npxG/shot, which overall is very likely one of the reasons he doesn’t play so much under Enrique. This season, for illustration purposes, he has just one non-penalty goal on nearly four non-pen xG.