Oumar Diakité has scored 12 goals in 12 games for Sturm Graz, and Lincoln City came closer to signing him this summer than many of us would have believed.
When reports of a bid worth around €3 million, including bonuses, first came out of France, it was the sort of story you read twice before deciding what to make of it. Here were the Imps, newly promoted to the Championship, being linked with a 22-year-old forward who had just been to the World Cup with Ivory Coast. By the end of the window, he was on his way to Austria, but for a little while there was a genuine prospect of seeing him at Sincil Bank.
You could see the appeal even then. Diakité had scored seven league goals in 25 appearances on loan at Cercle Brugge the previous season and had already delivered on a much bigger stage, scoring the winner in stoppage time at the end of extra time against Mali as Ivory Coast went on to win the Africa Cup of Nations on home soil in 2024. He had also scored 12 in 35 league appearances for FC Liefering, Red Bull Salzburg’s feeder club, before joining Stade de Reims.
How Close Did Lincoln City Get?
As Jez George told us in September, the opportunity came through an intermediary with a mandate to bring Diakité to England. City did their homework and felt he fitted the way we wanted to play. Talks with Reims reached the point where George was confident we could do a deal at a fee the club thought was fair, and the early conversations with the player’s representatives suggested his wages would be within reach too.
It was reported at the time that Diakité had turned down a move to the Championship. George had been due to meet him after the World Cup and recalled how quickly the terms City had been working with went out of the window.
“I was actually due to meet him in France, but he changed his agent. The agent we were negotiating with no longer had the representative contract with the player. Looking at the other players the agency he joined moved in the summer, we got the initial feeling that maybe they weren’t looking at Lincoln City in quite the same way as his previous representatives.
“It went from almost not being able to believe Lincoln City were going to sign this player, to suddenly there being talk of teams in the Bundesliga and wages of more than £1 million a year. Once that type of talk happens, we know we’re out of the race.”
English interest resurfaced towards the end of the window, with Bolton Wanderers reportedly making an offer and Queens Park Rangers and Preston North End also linked. Diakité went back to Austria on deadline day, joining Sturm Graz on a season-long loan that includes an option to buy. After playing in the Austrian second tier with Liefering, he now had a chance in the top flight and a Europa League campaign to look forward to.
Twelve Goals And Counting
Diakité scored on his first appearance, a 2-1 win over LASK, but it was in October that the goals really started to come. He got both in a 2-0 win away at Austria Wien, hit a hat-trick in a 6-1 derby win over Grazer AK and scored twice against his old club Salzburg last Sunday. That last pair came in a 4-3 defeat, one of two games in four days in which he scored twice and still ended up on the losing side.
The other was against Celje in the Europa League. Diakité equalised five minutes before half-time and got his second in added time, but Sturm lost 3-2. His first European goal for the club had made all the difference a fortnight earlier. He struck from outside the box in the 13th minute against Marseille, and it was enough to win the game 1-0.
Nine of his 12 goals have come in the league, where he has played 447 minutes across seven appearances. That’s a goal roughly every 50 minutes. Across all competitions, he has scored 12 from 10.24 expected goals, with 18 of his 35 shots on target. The finishing has been good, but the volume and quality of the chances stand out too. He’s averaging 4.18 shots and 1.22 expected goals per 90 minutes, which gives you an idea of how often he’s getting into positions to score.
The two European games show how different that can look from one night to the next. Against Marseille, he had two shots worth 0.27 expected goals between them, and the one he put on target won the game. Against Celje, he had eight shots worth 2.42 expected goals, a much busier night in front of goal that brought him two. Salzburg was more like Marseille. He put two of his three attempts on target and scored with both.
There are other parts of the profile worth looking at when you think about how he might have fitted in here. He has played centre-forward in all 12 appearances, with no assists and just under 13 passes per 90 minutes. I suspect we wanted him to play in the wide forward roles, but this was before we signed Mikkel Ladefoged, so perhaps the aim was centre forward.
He contests nearly 18 duels per 90 and wins just under a third, with a similar success rate in the air. The clearest evidence of what City saw in him is what he’s doing at the end of moves, getting shots away regularly and scoring against some of the strongest opposition he’s faced since the move.
We’ll never know what those numbers would have looked like in a Lincoln City shirt, but you can see why George thought he was worth a trip to France. Every time he scores for Sturm, it’s a little harder to resist wondering what we might have had at Sincil Bank.
Leave a Reply