Marc Guéhi: The Aerial Question

Reported Liverpool target Marc Guéhi has a lot of selling points which are undermined by a weakness in the air. How bad is his aerial performance?

Liverpool are on the verge of selling Jarell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen. Ibrahima Konaté is reportedly no closer to extending his contract which expires next summer. The Reds need a centre-back, with Marc Guéhi the man they are claimed to be targeting.

The player is said to be keen on the move. This sort of news feels pointless 99 per cent of the time. Guéhi captained Crystal Palace to their first major trophy in 2024/25, making it the best season in their history. He didn’t win the Premier League or play in the Champions League, though; of course he’s keen to join a club that did.

The 23-cap England international has a lot of selling points. Turning 25 this summer, Guéhi has over 200 senior games under his belt, is a homegrown player and - like Konaté - has one year remaining on his current deal. These basic facts tick a lot of boxes for the brains trust at Liverpool.

There are problems which are drawing a lot of attention. The Palace man isn’t the tallest and his aerial duel statistics are poor. These seem to be the main talking points around him.

Even though official player heights should be approached with caution, Lisandro Martínez was the only centre-back shorter than Guéhi to make more than 14 starts in the Premier League this term.

His relatively diminutive stature makes the reported Reds target an outlier among his positional brethren. Assuming Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez are regular starters in 2025/26, they are shorter than the long-standing Liverpool full-backs they will replace too.

The Premier League’s reputation as a battleground in the air may be a touch outdated. Ligue 1 was the only other of the big five leagues to feature fewer aerial duels per match this season.

Liverpool journalist David Lynch has suggested this needn’t be a defining issue for Guéhi, on the basis that Joe Gomez isn’t that strong in the air and played over 2,000 minutes when the Reds won the league five years ago. The Eagles only conceded two more headed league goals than the Reds this season too.

It remains clear that if the Palace defender has a problem, it’s aerial. He isn’t a king of the mountain like Virgil van Dijk. The Dutchman has lost 38 fewer aerial duels than Guéhi across the previous four campaigns despite contesting an additional 217. If height isn’t everything here, it likely explains a lot.

Like almost all metrics, raw aerial statistics are hampered by a lack of locational information. A defender losing a duel on the edge of the opposition’s six-yard box matters far less than them being beaten on the corresponding line within their own.

Using Stats Zone, it’s possible to see where Guéhi won and lost aerial duels in the 2024/25 Premier League. It’s also valuable to establish how many of the lost duels led to shots or, worse, goals. He didn’t escape the latter.