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The Premier League’s reputation as a battleground in the air may be a touch outdated.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.

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We should take note of who Guéhi faced too. Hudl Statsbomb have a metric called HOPS (Header Oriented Performance System), which accounts for “the aerial ability of the opposing duellist in order to credit the winner of the duel appropriately.”

While I can’t factor that in, consider the following: against the 10 teams who challenged Guéhi to no more than three aerial duels per game, he won 64.7 per cent of them. He succeeded with exactly half when facing the other nine sides.

A sixth of the 24-year-old’s airborne contests were against Everton alone, over a quarter came versus the Toffees or Leicester. It was Nottingham Forest who owned Guéhi, winning nine of their 11 aerial duels against him. Defensive injuries notwithstanding, Arne Slot could pick specific opponents against which to rest the centre-back should he join the club.

Two other pertinent factors need acknowledging. Liverpool do not have to defend as much as Crystal Palace, neither do they have to do so as close to their own goal.

It’s not possible to get a breakdown of wide deliveries which were in the air or along the ground. Nonetheless, the Reds have faced 1,952 crosses since the summer of 2021, the duration of Guéhi’s top flight career. Palace conceded 2,831, an extra 5.8 per game.

They had to contest almost 10 aerial duels per match more than Liverpool this season too, no doubt in part thanks to the additional crosses launched towards their penalty area.

Similarly, the Eagles’ defensive line (as measured by Markstats using the average position of their actions) was at 43.7 metres this season, the sixth deepest in the division. Liverpool (48.4) were third highest.

This difference could be significant as far as Guéhi is concerned. He fought 36 aerial duels in both his own box and also the opposition half this season, with the latter marginally better for wins at 19 to 17.

However, 43 per cent of his duels were in the Palace half outside their penalty area. In this section of the pitch he was 9.3 per cent more successful than he was elsewhere. A higher defensive line should see Guéhi take flight for battle in this region for a greater proportion of his total.

As much as these factors highlight how Slot could mitigate against this weakness, Palace fans witnessed some costly duel losses this term. One occurred in a 2-2 draw with Manchester City, in which Erling Haaland beat Guéhi in the air to equalise.

(Double click the videos on the website to play them. It will show you just the clip in question).

Another lost aerial duel by Guéhi enabled Ollie Watkins to assist Morgan Rogers at Selhurst Park. The sequence leading to a Gabriel Martinelli goal in south-east London also began with Palace’s captain losing a header, albeit there were plenty of passes between that moment and the goal.

All three of these goals came in open play. Yet eight of the 13 shots conceded following lost aerial duels by Guéhi (that I could find) came in set play situations, six from corners specifically.

Both Ryan Yates and Ezri Konsa rattled the Eagles’ woodwork in instances of the latter, the former with an Opta-defined big chance. Everton’s highest value opportunity against Palace at Goodison came via James Tarkowski’s head beating Gúehi’s at a set piece.

Ipswich had three shots at Portman Road from closer than 11 yards, two thanks to the Liverpool target losing aerial duels. Tottenham’s sole shot on target in a late season defeat at home came in this way, as did two of Bournemouth’s four Dean Henderson-testers in a goalless draw at Selhurst Park.

Were it not for the Palace goalkeeper, Jørgen Strand Larsen might’ve settled a 2-2 draw at Molineux after he outduelled Guéhi in the final minute. Not even van Dijk is flawless in this regard, but the charge sheet against his potential new teammate (or even long-term successor) mounts up.

The Transfer Flow newsletter stated last summer that £50m would be “on the high end of a reasonable fee” when Newcastle were chasing Guéhi. Their position last week was “he doesn’t have any standout aspect of his game that I’d want to pay £70m for.” Yet a £30m price tag has been mooted this week, which would mean the Reds had essentially traded Quansah for the Palace man.

You can see why Richard Hughes would sanction the deal if it were to unfold in that way financially. Many Liverpool fans would likely be happy to see Guéhi join the club. Others would be saddened by his views on LGBTQ+ issues.

The relevance of his greatest on-field weakness appears divisive. In some aspects it isn’t as bad as initially feared, in others it has proven hugely detrimental. Slot can likely work around it to some extent but he is likely to pay a price at some point. There’s still too much aerial threat in good ol’ England.