I have seen many people wax lyrical about Lucas Digne since the season ended. How he will be a instant buy no matter the price. How he will be in teams from day one of the season. Personally the jury is still out for me as to whether I would want him all season. However given Everton’s opening games and how winnable they are he is serious contender for my final FPL draft.

The comparison to Baines is an easy one to make. Both are fullbacks who like to get forward. Both have an eye for goal although Baines was also the penalty taker in his prime.

Digne did great numbers in FPL, he ended the season on 158 points which isn’t too shabby for a fullback. He went on a great run in the last ten weeks of the season. 71 points was scored in this time, a little under half of his total points scored for the season. An impressive number of points, backed up by a consistent run of Everton clean sheets.

Everton do have very winnable games in their opening 6 fixtures. Their fixtures also don’t stiffen till December. I think Lucas Digne looks a very interesting prospect for this period. However we need to take his attacking numbers into consideration. Are they somewhat inflated or is he the real deal?

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The Numbers

The appeal with Digne is his attacking potential, he gets forward with ease and gets the ball into the box. He averages nearly 5 crosses attempted per game with an average accuracy of 31.8 percent. He also averages 4.03 passes to the box per game with a success rate of 49%. Digne’s contribution to the attacking phase is clear. He Totalled 6.53 xA with an average of 0.18 per game, with 4 assists to his name he was a little let down by his team mates in this sense to finish the chances he created.

How does he compare with some of the other marauding wingbacks in the league. Trent Alexander-Arnold created 16 assists registering 11.87 xA in the process a big over performance but easy to do in a team as attacking as Liverpool. To again put this into context Marcos Alonso who had a poor season registered 3 assists and registered 3.22. Another fullback who was considered to have had a poor season was Ashley Young, Young registered 3 assists with an xA of 4.9. So for your £6m you are getting someone who can mix it with the best in the division when it comes to attacking contributions.

I think the potential issue here is Everton’s lack of a real striker. If you put Lukaku in this team I am sure that Digne’s assist potential would rise. I think if Everton do sign a decent striker Digne who is in my current draft will become nailed on till December if he isn’t already.

Goals Goals Goals

Lucas Digne accumulated 1.43 xG scoring 4 goals. The 4 goals can be broken down into 2 different categories. 2 of them were free kicks and the other 2 were shots outside the box from a poorly cleared corner. That is quite a big outperformance of his xG relatively speaking.

As you can see majority of shots that Digne took came from outside the box. If he is to continue to score goals he will continue to outperform his xG. This makes it very difficult to say whether he will continue to score goals.

Whilst I am not sure that the goals from poorly cleared corners are sustainable, I think the interesting prospect with Digne will be his threat from free kicks. The unique aspect of the free kick threat is that he and Gylfi give Everton the choice of going either side from any free kick on the outside of the box.

The fact that the keeper will not know which way the ball is going to go till it has got over the wall will be a massive advantage. We will undoubtedly see free kicks scored from both players.

FPL clean sheet points

I think when you look at the attacking threat you will see a swell in ownership for Digne.

They do not play a top 6 side till gameweek 7 as you can see by the graphic. Those fixtures represent a good chance at some clean sheet returns. With Crystal Palace currently missing both first choice centre backs and still haven’t replaced Wan-Bissaka at the time of writing the first fixture could represent great value in FPL terms.

Digne VS Coleman

I have seen people endorsing Coleman as an alternative to Digne so you can save £0.5m. But the big question is, is Coleman the better option? Let’s take a look.

Above is Seamus Colemans season long shot map, as you can see there is a noticeable difference in sheer volume of shots compared to Digne. Coleman had 12 shots over the course of the premier league season. Even accounting for the fact he played less matches that is still only an average 0.31 shots per game.

Coleman did amass a higher total of xG (1.55), and he did manage to do this with less shots. However let us not forget xG is a measurement of the difficulty of the chance. It does not dictate if the player should score or not. Even though Digne recorded less total xG he still scored more goals than Coleman. I would also expect that to continue this season given Digne is on free kicks with Sigurdsson as discussed earlier.

Assists

Is it possible that Coleman is the more creative of the pair? The short answer is no but I am sure you are much more interested in the long answer. Coleman recorded 2.28 xA averaging 0.07 per game, he created 2 assists so he performed as expected in that regard. These numbers are significantly less than Digne (6.54 xA, 0.18 average), Coleman not even beating the likes of Alonso and Young in this regard too.

Let us also take a look at their positions on the pitch and the players around them.

As you can see Digne getting forward than Coleman did throughout the season.

I now want to take a closer look at the Everton versus Manchester United game. Everton ran out 4-0 winners and it was probably their best performance of the season. Digne did score in that match but that’s not really what I want to analyse.

Above is the individual passmaps for Digne (top) and Coleman (bottom), although Coleman has more passes they’re some distance from the goal. They’re short inside passes back to the midfielders. He has one attempted cross that was not accurate

Digne recorded significantly less passes than Coleman in this match. There was some similar inside passes back to the midfielders but he also got 4 balls into the box. One was a key pass and the other 3 were inaccurate.

This is just one example of the attacking threat that Lucas Digne and how he represents a much better pick. For the sake of £0.5m you are getting so much more bang for your buck.

To further back up this point Digne averages 4.03 passes to the box per game with a 49% accuracy whilst Coleman only averages 2.73 passes to the box per game with an accuracy of 45%. So on average you’re getting more than one more pass to the box per game which potentially could be an assist. This is also not even considering Digne’s superior crossing output (4.96 vs 3.06 average crosses per game).

The Everton Team

Despite Digne receiving less of the ball in the game against Manchester United, the higher quality attacks came down the left flank. But don’t just take my word for it here is the positional attack and xG map for the game. Everton attempted 32 positional attacks in that game, 13 of those coming down the left generating 82% of the xG. In the last 12 games Everton lost twice. The left hand side would out perform the right hand side in positional attacks 6 times in these matches. In 3 of the matches that the right hand side would outperform the left the gap was only within 0.04 xG.

A big factor in Digne’s attacking threat will be Richarlison. He has spent much of the season playing off the right and also up front. Now when he is playing on the right Digne has him to aim for with his crosses and cut backs from the left hand flank. Whereas Coleman has Bernard who is a good technical winger but is not known for his aerial prowess or winning aerial duels.

When Richarlison is playing central both full backs have him to aim for. I think Everton may go in for a striker in the market as they have not made many moves currently. I am not sure Silva is sold on Tosun and although Onyekuru has returned from his loan spell he is probably not ready to be Everton’s main striker despite his obvious potential.

Here is one final takeaway from the Coleman and Digne debate. When it comes to corner kicks, Digne hangs around outside the box. I came across this footage by accident when checking some of Coleman’s shots. This was an Everton corner and he was covering the striker on the halfway line (he is the circled player). With Everton averaging 5.66 corner per game in the Premier League last season that’s more chances Digne has to score that Coleman doesn’t. All this for 500k more almost feels like they’ve either underpriced Digne or overpriced Coleman at this point. For me there is only one winner in this debate and i’ll happily take on any of my fellow community members as this debate ensues.

The Verdict

I think its fair to say that the case I have outlined favours Digne. The French international fullback really came into his own last season. He offers so much to this Everton attack as I have also shown. It’s not that Coleman is a bad player he is not. He was a great FPL asset a few years ago but Digne is the new heir to Baines’ throne. As a long time FPL player it feels great going into the new season with a premium Everton full back it is just like old times.