Having signed Mahrez from the French second tier, Leicester returned across the Channel to sign Fousseni Diabate – it did not turn out the same though.
Leicester City were relegated to the Championship last season, which was the culmination of a nine year stay in the Premier League which saw one of the greatest underdog stories in the history of football.
The Foxes managed to win the league in 2016, despite narrowly avoiding relegation the season prior.
They never quite managed to reach those heights again, although they did win the FA Cup in 2021, for the first time in their history.
In the years after their Premier League win, key players like N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez had departed for bigger clubs, with Leicester needing to replace them.
Unfortunately though, the replacements did not live up to the heights they set – in particular the individual that the Foxes signed in a similar method to how they did Mahrez in the form of Fousseni Diabate.
Leicester City sought after Riyad Mahrez’s replacement in France
Mahrez was one of the most technically gifted players in the league at the King Power Stadium.
He was signed from Le Havre – in the second division in France at the time – in January 2014.
Having got promoted with Leicester later in his first season, he would then go on to become an integral part of their title-winning season, notching 17 goals and 11 assists in 37 league games.
The Algerian winger then spent another two seasons in the East Midlands, before leaving for Manchester City in the summer of 2018 for £60 million, although he was wanting to depart a year earlier and once again handed in another transfer request in January 2018.
At that point, Leicester needed to come up with a succession plan, and they decided to go down a similar route to how they recruited Mahrez by looking in the second tier of France once again – and that is where they came across Fousenni Diabate.
The then 22-year-old was picked up from Gazelec Ajaccio, signing a four-and-a-half year deal when he joined in January 2018 for an undisclosed fee.
Capable of playing on either wing or through the middle, Diabate was described upon his arrival as a ‘quick and talented attacker’ who ‘caught the eye with a series of influential and energetic displays’.
So, there was hope that Leicester had picked up yet another player at a bargain, who would go on to do great things for the club.
Fousseni Diabate flopped at Leicester City following 2018 arrival
The Malian started off his career in England very well, scoring twice on his debut, in a 5-1 FA Cup win over Peterborough United.
Unfortunately for both club and player, in the end, things didn’t work out.
In his first six months at the club, he was mainly used as a backup player under Claude Puel, making 14 league appearances in the Premier League and starting just five of those.
The next season he would only make one league appearance, before being shipped out on loan to Sivasspor in Turkey.
Puel was sacked and Brendan Rodgers was brought in during Diabate’s time away, but that did nothing to revitalize his career in the East Midlands and he was once again loaned out in the 2019-20 campaign back to France with Amiens.
The summer of 2020 would bring a permanent end to his Foxes career, moving to Turkey once again with Trabzonspor.
| Fousseni Diabate’s Leicester stats (all competitions, as per FotMob) | |||
| Season | Appearances | Goals | Assists |
| 2018/19 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017/18 | 16 | 2 | 1 |
Now at Lausanne in Switzerland, the Mali international completely failed to live up to the heights that Mahrez set – although they were very high ones.
Ultimately it was a bad move for all involved, and considered by most at the club as a flop – he was by no means one of the most expensive failures that City had invested in but it showed that not every France-based signing was going to be a Mahrez or Kante.
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