Crystal Palace look set to bring Ismaïla Sarr back to the Premier League after a miserable season at Marseille, but will they be the club to final bring some consistency to the Senegalese winger’s game?
Ismaïla Sarr is a player that really should have achieved more in football. An exciting winger who has been linked to some of Europe’s biggest clubs in the past, Sarr’s talents – and career – are in danger of passing him by.
Still, at 26 years old, there is still time for the Senegalese international to prove his quality at the top level, with Premier League side Crystal Palace reportedly willing to spend the money needed to bring him back to England following a desperately disappointing year at Marseille.
Sarr’s time in France was a frustrating one for everyone involved. He started well enough, playing in their first six competitive matches to start 2023-24 and providing two goals and two assists. However, a hamstring injury saw him miss nearly three weeks of action, and when he returned to the side it was under a new manager. Marcelino, who’d only taken over at the club three months earlier, resigned and was replaced by Gennaro Gattuso.
A hamstring injury came back to affect Sarr later in the season and kept him out for a further eight games. Another six-game absence between December and January due to Senegal’s Africa Cup of Nations campaign meant that Sarr ended up appearing in just 35 of Marseille’s 52 competitive matches in his only season at the club, and starting fewer than half (21) of them.
Marseille’s problems last season mirrored those that Sarr had experienced as a Watford player across his four seasons in England. With Marcelino (7 games), Gattuso (24) and Jean-Louis Gasset (19 games), the Senegal international had to deal with three different head coaches in a single season – his first back in France for five years. While at Watford, he played under 10 different permanent managers in his four seasons, each with a different playing style and idea of how the side should play. This confusion really didn’t help Sarr, while he was hardly ever deployed in a position that suited his skills the most – as an out-and-out winger.
Under Marcelino at Marseille, the team started in a 4-4-2 in all seven games he took charge of, with Sarr playing 94% of minutes in either a right midfield or right-wing position (when formation shifted to 4-3-3 in-game). When Gattuso came in, Sarr played in six different positions, with 80% of his time on the right (38% as a right winger, 42% at right midfield) and 13% on the left and the remaining 7% through the middle either as a striker (5%) or in central midfield (2%). When Gasset came in, he played a quarter of his minutes as a striker, with Marseille’s final coach of the season consistently changing formation throughout his tenure.
It’s no coincidence that Marcelino got the best out of Sarr. His four goal involvements in six games under him was the same number as he got in twice as many appearances under Gasset, while Sarr only scored twice and didn’t assist a single goal in 17 competitive games (788 minutes) under Gattuso.
He showed flashes of brilliance during his time at Watford, but ultimately disappointed considering he had become their club record signing back in August 2019 after arriving from Rennes for a reported fee of around £30 million.
His first season at the Hornets was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which came at just the wrong time for him.
After an unsettled season in which Watford were already on their third permanent manager by Christmas, the side put in an exceptional performance to defeat a Liverpool side on a 44-game unbeaten run.
Their 3-0 win at Vicarage Road was powered by an excellent Sarr, who scored twice and assisted Troy Deeney’s third goal. He played just one more game before the Premier League was stopped due to the pandemic, and then he struggled to make much of an impact when the season resumed and Watford were ultimately relegated.
#OnThisDay in 2020 (sort of)!
They were unbeatable, they said…
Watford 3-0 Liverpool 😍 pic.twitter.com/1fjLdRVlrc
— Watford Football Club (@WatfordFC) March 1, 2021
He stuck around, though, and as would be expected of a player of Sarr’s obvious quality, he took the Championship by storm in 2020-21. He won Watford’s player-of-the-season award as he helped them to automatic promotion with 13 goals and four assists, forming a formidable second-tier attacking pair with a teenage João Pedro.
But another Premier League relegation followed in 2021-22, with injuries and his AFCON participation limiting his playing time. Sarr then ended his time in Hertfordshire with a 10-goal season in the Championship.
In truth, his final season at Watford – another that ended with three different managers at the club – was one year too long at the club. Watford, thinking that Sarr could help get them promoted once again, kept him despite numerous offers from other clubs. There were points when he looked like he didn’t want to be there – and you couldn’t really blame him. Sandwiched in there was the 2022 World Cup, where Sarr was arguably Senegal’s best player. He wanted to be playing at a higher level and was clearly capable of doing so.
Throughout his career in England, Sarr caused countless opponents problems with his pace and acceleration which, coupled with his 6-foot-1 frame, often proved impossible to defend against. Across his four league seasons in England with Watford, 45% of his chances created in open play came following a ball carry of at least five metres (55/123) while six of his 17 assists came following a carry (35%). It was a similar story for his shots, too, with over a quarter of his 246 non-penalty shots coming directly following a ball carry (26% – 65 shots).
In between 2019-20 and 2022-23, only five players to play at least 9,000 minutes of league football across the Premier League and Championship averaged more take-ons per 90 minutes than Sarr (4.2): Raheem Sterling (4.6), Marcus Rashford (4.9), Saïd Benrahma (5.7) and – possibly comfortingly for Palace fans – Eberechi Eze (4.6) and Wilfried Zaha (6.2). His 3.3 take-ons per 90 at Marseille last season was lower, but still the fourth-highest at the club.
His direct running at opponents was something that attracted him to Watford back in the summer of 2019, with Palace also rumoured to have been interested in him at the time. In his final Ligue 1 season at Rennes in 2018-19, Sarr’s average progressive carry distance per 90 (151m) was only surpassed by one attacking midfielder or forward to play at least 1,500 minutes – Rémy Cabella (171m) – while he was also level with Allan Saint-Maximin.
His speed consistently causes opponents to mistime their tackles in dangerous areas of the pitch, so it’ll come as little surprise to learn that only Ivan Toney (12) won more penalties across the top four tiers of English league football than Sarr (9) between 2019-20 and 2022-23. He also ranked second in Ligue 1 across his two seasons with Rennes, with his five penalties won fewer than only Nicolas Pépé’s six.
Now, Sarr will be looking to get his career back on track at Crystal Palace after a couple of years of underperforming at club level. But any Palace fans hoping for a direct replacement for the departed Michael Olise might be disappointed, with Sarr’s confidence much more brittle than that of the new Bayern Munich star, while Sarr is much more direct in his dribbling style than Olise. This doesn’t mean he can’t be as successful at the club, though.
Sarr will bring much needed attacking quality to a side that have, over the years, had some of the best dribbling talent in the Premier League.
Since OIiver Glasner’s first game in charge of the Eagles on 24 February, Palace have won 24 points in the Premier League, with only Chelsea (28), Arsenal (34) and Manchester City (35) winning more. Expectation levels may therefore be higher than usual for Palace, and Sarr will need to hit the ground running – something the data suggests he’s great at.
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