Mounir Chouiar
This is the second piece in the “Treasures of the Turkish Süper Lig” series.
We continue our series of analysing players who have the potential to go from Süper Lig to the TOP-5 European leagues with Başakşehir’s 23-year-old left winger Mounir Chouiar.
The player, who was on the radar of Başakşehir with his successful performance for Yeni Malatyaspor, who were relegated last season, has made a direct contribution to 5 goals this season with 1 goal and 4 assists and has managed to attract attention again in his 2nd year in Turkey.
The first half of the league is over and Mounir has played 948 minutes, which is 58% of the minutes played by his team in the league.
What kind of player is he with his pros and cons?
Mounir is usually positioned close to the touchline, where, he attempts to take the opponents on, and he can cut inside.
Looking at his overall style of play, it is his actions with the ball in the wide area and the take-on attempts that positively distinguish him from other wingers. He also has a lot of defensive effort for a winger.
Led by Emre Belözoğlu, Başakşehir prefer to have possession and play the game in the opposition’s half. Mounir’s role on the pitch is to provide more width.
Mounir’s pass reception zone is usually in wide area. We can see both the advantages and disadvantages of this preference. His positioning on the touchline forces the opposition to spread out and not stay compact. Even when the attack is on the other flank, Mounir is consistently positioned on the line and when the opponent is compact, he gives his friends the option of long diagonal passes on the other side.
However, this also causes weaknesses in team defense.
In case of possible turnovers, Mounir is wide, leaving his left-back partner alone for a while.
We can say that the young player compensates for the problem of positioning by tracking the opposition fullback and his concentration. He regularly follows the opposition fullback and contributes to the defense. When he is caught out wide or makes a positional mistake, he doesn’t stay forward and tries to regain his position with runs. This is a very important detail defensively.
Mounir also contributes to the team in terms of high pressure. When his team prefers to press high, he dynamically initiates the pressure and prevents the opponent from build-up. In these moments, the opponent has to either pass backward or make long passes, causing turnovers.
However, his lack of positional knowledge leads to mistakes in shadow marking or positioning when pressing.
As seen here, his untimely pressing or shadow marking without controlling the opponent behind him sometimes causes the opponent to break the pressure and destabilize the defense.
And what about when he has the ball?
the Frenchman likes to run with the ball and cut inside.
He makes most of his progressive runs when he receives the ball in the away third. This is expected of a modern winger and he reinforces it with his dribbling ability. In this goal he scored against Antalyaspor, we can see his dribbling ability and positioning on the line more clearly.
When the team plays from the back, he stays on the line, forcing the opposition full-back to stay in this area, and after a pass from the center, he finds a free space in front of him. As soon as he dribbles the ball into the opposition penalty area, he scores with a first-class strike, beating the uncontrolled pressure of the opponent with great timing and quickness of foot.
When we look at the most successful dribblers, the fact that he ranks second after Emre Mor shows that he is very good at this.
After Mounir’s cutting inside, basically, some patterns stand out. He tries deep passes from half space to behind the opponent’s last line. However, we can state that his success rate is low due to the fact that his technique and passing quality are not at a very high level. Also, he can penetrate with the ball in the half-space with one-two passes.
In this kind of action, he can cause problems for the opponent.
Another style we’re used to seeing from Mounir is that after entering the penalty area, he shoots from the left side of the goal.
How efficient he is in terms of scoring is debatable. He has only one goal this season. In his last 4 seasons, he has scored 8 goals in 5864 minutes played. We think he needs to improve a bit more in this respect.
Final Word
Mounir, who performed well last season at Yeni Malatyaspor and this season at Başakşehir in teams with two different approaches to football, has a style of play that suits both the transition attack and the positional attack. Although he has some deficiencies in terms of positioning, he is only 23 years old, and open to development. He can be a good winger alternative in formations like 4–3–3 or 4–2–3–1. In our opinion, he is unlikely to succeed in formations like the 3–4–3, where the wingers are overloaded and responsible for a larger area. As mentioned in the blogpost, he prefers to provide width and be an attacking threat from wide areas.
His style of play is similar to Sterling’s, both in terms of his pace and dribbling ability close to the touchline.
The first piece of the series is available here — Miguel Crespo
