BK Häcken were the Swedish champions of 2022, as Per-Mathias Høgmo led the team to glory, but in the summer, both of their starting wingers — Ibrahim Sadiq and Lars Larsen — moved abroad after winning the Svenska Cupen 2023. The 2005-born Momodou Sonko grabbed this opportunity and challenged for a starting left-winger position. He gained the coaches’ trust, playing 23 Allsvenskan games this year, scoring seven goals and providing four assists for his teammates.
Sonko’s performance was among the best in the Swedish top flight this season and attracted interest from abroad. According to rumours, Liverpool and several Bundesliga clubs have been closely monitoring Sonko. This tactical analysis is a scout report that profiles his qualities and explains why we should look forward to his performances in 2024.
Dynamic offensive player
Under Høgmo, Häkcen played the 4-1-2-3 formation very strictly; they almost held the same formation every game, according to Wyscout, with 89% of their game time spent using this system or one of its variations (4-5-1, 4-1-4-1). They did not make a lot of interchanges, so it is clear that their winger is what we expect from a wide player.
Despite being young, he had continental experience playing in the UEFA Champions League play-offs and UEFA Europa League.
The first viz summarises Sonko’s winger actions in all competitions and outlines his style of play. At first glance, we could notice he has a lot of dribbles on the left flank. He averaged 7.06 dribbles/90 in the Allsvenskan with a 57.8% success rate, which was quite good. As the viz displays, the closer Sonko got to the final third, the more the density of green dots increased.
Sonko could take a wide starting position as a winger and exploit the flanks in Häcken’s possession game. Attacks from the flanks were one of their greatest threats, and Sonko was not only doing it against domestic opponents but also showed his quality against opponents from abroad. Let’s take this Mølde example as a reference.
Sonko received the ball from the wide. The opponent played with a back three, so he took on the right wing-back. Sonko was good at cutting inside, which we are going to explain later, but he is dynamic — when the opponent only showed him the outside, he demonstrated some serious pace to exploit and burst forward in this scene.
The Mølde wing-back was not able to keep up with this pace, so Sonko earned himself some crossing space with his speed. Some wingers might insist on using their stronger right foot to put the delivery in, but the extra adjustments could delay the action and give the marker time to track back. Meanwhile, Sonko could cross with both feet. In this scenario, he confidently put a cut-back high ball in with his left foot way before the opponent came back to shut down the space.
The second viz is a summary of Sonko’s shot assists. He accumulated 2.59 xA and four assists this season. The trend was clear: Sonko has a tendency to play cut-backs instead of putting deep delivery into the six-yard box. Since Häcken were a side pushing the opponent down and played against many deep defences, exploiting the long shot space could be beneficial. But in the long term, Sonko could also develop his delivery to the far post and near the penalty spot.
But Sonko showed he is not just a wide player and could provide more. Since Häcken could push their full-backs high and wide, sometimes Sonko drifted inside, and he could also make an impact here. This strength shows his potential to fit into more roles under other teams or coaches.
In this example vs Malmö FF, Sonko moved inside to receive when his left-back, Tomas Totland, was attacking from the side, and his teammate found Sonko.
As Sonko received in space, seeing how he continued his play became interesting, as this could show the difference between mediocrity and talent. Some players might just want to play the ball down the line to receive his overlapping full-back — despite Pontus Jansson anticipating that pass while Martin Olsson was aware of it as well. It would become very predictable if Sonko released Totland.
Then, Sonko showed his ability to adjust directions with small steps. Now, he turned inside and faced the goal. Instead of finding Totland, he had a more open angle to play, and the threat was more direct for Häcken as a team. If Edward Chilufya attacked spaces behind diagonally to draw away the centre-back, he could provide a through pass option for Sonko while possible to exploit the left centre-back’s defensive position by Pontus Dahbo’s run. It is more difficult for Malmö to predict the direction of the attack.
Threat to goal
On top of dribbling and creating chances, Sonko possesses goalscoring ability as he revealed he has worked hard on his finishing. And it has been rewarded; Sonko is quite a complete winger in this sense.
Again, we start with the viz. Here, all shots from Sonko were shown in this map; most of them were made on the left side as he is a left-winger, and he has a decent consistency in finding the bottom corner, mainly to the far post.
Sonko is a player with an excellent cut-in ability to finish an action. This is an outstanding trait for a team like Liverpool, as the likes of Mohamed Salah, Luis Díaz, and Diogo Jota have all shown the ability to do that — or even adapt to an environment like that of the Bundesliga, where he’d have more space to attack into.
He has already scored several cut-in goals this season, and Sonko’s package would make him a reasonable threat in transition. As we are going to show in this example vs Mølde, Häcken were counterattacking from the flanks and exploiting the space behind the right wing-back.
As Sonko received and progressed, the Mølde wing-back recovered, but it was not a problem when the winger has the ability to unlock defences with his 1v1 ability. Sonko is generally brave to take on the defender; this time, he cut in by exploiting the defender’s overcommitting.
And see how far Sonko went from the side to the centre to find himself shooting space to finish the action.
Apart from cutting in to score goals when his team was attacking from the other side, Sonko also had the good sense to finish from the far side, such as exploiting the defender’s blindside.
Here against IFK Norrköping, the Häcken attack came from the right, and they put the cross in. Daniel Eid was caught ball-watching, and Sonko smartly read the cutback and finished the action with just one touch; the shot was kept low and went into the bottom-right corner, which gave the opponent no chance to save.
Defending
However, if Sonko wishes to play at the top level, he would still have to work quite a lot on his defence. If you checked Häcken’s stats this year, they conceded 39 goals in 30 league games, which was more than one goal per match. Or if he had to settle in a team like Liverpool or a fast-paced league like the Bundesliga, the defensive output would also be significant.
As shown in this defensive territory, Sonko had some interceptions and a good number of defensive actions in the attacking half. But near his own third, at least the frequency of interception significantly reduced as he was not the type of player that helped his full-back a lot.
Or when you played against Häcken, exploiting the wide spaces is a good solution, as their wingers were not helping much in this phase. Sonko was staying quite high and sometimes narrow, as we have highlighted in this example vs Kalmar; he was trying to defend both Lars Sætra and Melker Hallberg.
But when the opponent distributed the ball to the wide space, unlike his former teammate Sadiq, Sonko needed more intensity to make a recovery run to track back and follow the right-back. So, in this action, he gave Johan Karlsson a lot of space to carry on, and Häcken could not stop the opponent until Deniz Hummet scored the winning goal.
Conclusion
As we have covered in this analysis, Sonko is one of the best talents from Sweden in his generation. This season is his breakthrough year at Häcken. Although they failed to defend the title, they still qualified for the UEFA Europa League group stage and beat both Malmö FF and Elfsborg in the Allsvenskan. It would be an interesting 2024 for Sonko as he might leave in winter, or he could follow the steps of his predecessors or national peers like Hugo Larsson — having a solid spring season and moving to a top league in the summer transfer window.
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