So… listen to this… in 2018, less than 2 months after winning the World Cup… Kanté left a Premier League match in a rush, hoping he could get on a train to go visit his family in Paris but… you know what he did when he missed it? He grabbed his phone, looked for the nearest mosque and went there to pray… and that is already pretty wholesome but then, a few young men worked up the courage to approach him, asked him if he wanted to have dinner at their house and an hour later… the same man that had just placed 8th in the Ballon D’Or, the one that made a living humiliating the best forwards on the planet . .
. was in their living room, eating curry and playing FIFA like a… “normal person”. .
. but the reality is that… that’s exactly where he belongs… Kanté never believed for a second that he even had a chance of becoming a superstar… these days, football is stacked up with wonderkids, seemingly ready to make a run for the Ballon D’Or the moment they turn 20… but… when Kanté was closing in on his 23rd birthday, he was training to become an accountant… and… it had been like that his whole life… Back in 98, while everyone in France was out celebrating their world cup win, Kanté was wandering the streets with his father, collecting metal cans and glass bottles they could trade in for some cash at a recycling facility… matter of fact, when, at 11 years of age, his dad passed away, making things even harder for Kanté and his 8 siblings, he kept collecting trash on his own, supposedly walking twice as long on his route to make up for the absence of his father… Back then, he had already been playing at a tiny club for about 3 years but he looked to be half the height of his teammates and whenever they won something, even if Kanté had done all the leg work, most times he’d just stand aside watching them celebrate… and with every scout looking for the next Neymar, someone as shy as him never had a chance to stand out… later, he even tried out for the famous Clairefontaine academy that gave us Anelka, Henry and Mbappé… but again… they rejected him… Regardless, no matter how many scouts deemed him “unremarkable”, those at the club who watched him everyday knew damn well that Kanté was special… at 16, they had already bumped him to the first team, in France’s 9th division… and 3 years later, he hadn’t just carried them up two tiers… he had led them to a cup trophy, beating a team that played 4 tiers above them… already back then, they were claiming that “Kanté could face entire teams all by himself”. .
. and with his talent seemingly going to waste with no real offers on the table, the president of that tiny club decided he’d make it mission to make things right… For months, he picked up Kanté in his car and drove him to one club after the other, begging them for a shot… In a surreal turn of events, he even asked Arséne Wenger for help as, somehow, they were actually really close friends… but with Wenger being too busy, he didn’t pay much attention to it and though he’d go on to claim that aside from Cristiano Ronaldo, Kanté was the one transfer he wished he wouldn’t have lost out on… eventually, their whole quest to find Kanté a club just… worked out… After many rejected him at first sight, insisting he was just too short… U. S.
Boulogne, the same team that had given Ribery his debut 10 years earlier, allowed Kanté to come in for a try out… in which they put him through some physical tests, one of them… long distance running… as a staff member explained: “as soon as he arrived, he blew all the metrics away… You wouldn’t have a hard time convincing someone he was an olympic marathon runner”. . .
and so, they signed him on an amateur contract and after almost two full years with the reserves, keeping to himself despite living in a youth hostel, they called him for his first team debut… right the moment they were relegated to the third tier… Any other player would see this as reason to be upset but Kanté… well… he is not like others, instead he kept his head down, left everything on the pitch and by the end of that season, he was named the club’s player of the year… but yet, again, he was sent out for trials at Rennes, Sochaux and Lorient… and no one would take him, they’d all claim they weren’t looking for “a player of his profile”. . .
as one newspaper would write years later: “Most clubs are too busy looking for the next Messi, when the next Kanté would be the one that would truly fix all their problems”. . .
and thankfully for him, no matter how many critics had deemed him “clumsy”, claiming all he did was run around like a headless chicken, one club was able to see through all of that and realize they had struck gold… About 200 miles away, SM Caen had just finished 4 points off promotion when Kanté came into their radar… and despite him insisting that he “didn’t think he’d have the ability to play at the professional level”, the moment they saw him, they were convinced he could be the difference maker they needed, so they went… all-in… and by the end of the season, it wasn’t just that the rookie had been the only player in the team to plate every league match, or that indeed he had led them back to the top tier… no, he was in the team of the season and had been named as the league’s best new player… and still his manager insisted that “he was not surprised by any of this”. . .
The next season, with nearly 25 year old Kanté getting his first tier debut and suddenly sharing the pitch with superstars like Zlatan, Berbatov and Bernardo Silva, the media started catching up on just how odd… his behavior was… You see, Kanté had to be berated by his mom into buying a car… While everyone arrived to training in BMWs and Mercedes, he came in on a scooter, carrying his gear in a backpack… Even more endearing, as one of their players would tell the press: “Once I invited him for my birthday, but when he arrived he looked all shy… I went up to him, he handed me a box of chocolates and immediately apologized for the gift… He said he didn’t know what to get me because had never been invited to birthday party”. . .
Regardless, if he was shy to the outside world, inside the pitch he distinguished himself immediately, even going in by uncharacteristically opening the score in 2 out of first 3 games… and by January, with more and more people becoming convinced that Kanté was “the next Makélélé”. . .
Mali, the country where his parents were born, called him up for the African Cup Of Nations and, believe it or not, Kanté almost took it… had it not been for several of his managers going up against his belief that “France would never need him”. . .
which only became more… just obviously wrong… when he finished his season as the player with the most ball recoveries not in his team, not his league, but in all of europe… not only getting the attention of every stats analyst, but also that of Lyon, West Ham and Marseille who immediately put down a 6 million euro bid… that seemed damn near guaranteed to tied down his signing, if not for one man… Welcome Steve Walsh… also known as one of the best scouts in England, the kind of guy that all the way back in 2017 came to Everton with an offer: 23 million pounds for 3 players… Harry Maguire, Andy Robertson and… Erling Haaland… So yeah… now that you get what stakes we’re dealing with, I’ll tell something even more relevant to the story, he was also the man that brought Jamie Vardy and Riyah Mahrez to Leicester City… meaning that, with Leicester having just managed to hold on to their place in the Premier League just as legendary Esteban Cambiasso decided to leave the club… Steve Walsh was handed the job of finding him a replacement… He went through all the data, re-check it all over again and in the end, he had one conclusion: “He had found a blindspot in the system, something odd was happening, either the numbers were off, or this understated 5 foot 6 midfield was stuck playing way bellow his own level”. . .
so Walsh went to see it all with his own eyes and for the first time someone said the same thing that has been said hundreds of times ever since: “I could swear as I was watching the game, there were at least two of him on the pitch”. . .
So, once he made it back to England, he brought Kanté with him, so he could present him to Ranieri and though the manager struggled to believe what he was hearing was true, Walsh ordered Kanté to turn off his phone so he wouldn’t even be tempted to pick up any of Marseille’s calls, locked him up in a hotel and went back to Ranieri asking him when had he ever been wrong about a player… and 8 million euros later, with Kanté becoming SM Caen’s biggest ever sale… the heist was complete… And a few matches later, no matter how strange the other players found it that he barely ever spoke a word or that at one point, he insisted he could just run to training every day, as the staff once again had to persuade to buy a car… Only a few matches in, Ranieri was already calling Walsh, telling him “Steve, don’t ever listen to me again, I don’t know what I’m talking about! ”. .
. and by mid 2016… well… the impossible happened… We all know the story, Leicester had 5000 to 1 odds of winning the league, no club outside the top 6 had won it since the early years of the Premier League era… and suddenly they did it… many have called it a miracle but, as much as, 5000 to 1 is a bigger number… I’ll give you some more… That season, Kanté completed 175 tackles, 31 more than any other player in the league, 157 interceptions, 15 more than anyone else… put those two together and once again, all across Europe no one had recovered more balls than him… it was no joke when midway through the season Sir Alex claimed that: “Kanté is the best player in the league… by far”. .
. because, come the end of it, he was the champion’s player of the year, the league’s best new player, he was in the team of the season,and of course, on France’s list for the Euro 2016… where right on his first match, he led the team in passes, tackles, distance covered and interceptions… he even assisted the winner… but… after being handed a second yellow card, he was forced him to miss the quarter finals and ended up being dropped from the team as they went on to shockingly lose the final… No matter what, what Deschamps had seen in him, had also been spotted by everyone else in Europe… PSG, Barcelona, City, Arsenal and Chelsea… but , in the end, it was those last two going toe to toe and with Arsenal refusing to pay up 10 million in agent fees and going with Xhaka instead, they opened the way for Chelsea… but what truly mattered is that one way or another, with the man Frank Lampard himself called “the best midfielder in the world” now among the ranks of one of the best teams in Europe…it was time to take over the world… With the number 7 on his back despite playing deep in midfield, the man whose role no one could quite point out, fit in like a glove… Only a year after Chelsea had finished 10th on the table, suddenly they were bringing the title back to London but as much as Kanté’s league performances were out of this world, as much as they made Kanté the first player since Cantona to win back to back titles with two different clubs… his best was in the FA Cup quarter finals… that one became known as the day Kante embarrassed Paul Pogba… as BBC's chief football writer said: “Kante was perpetual motion, starting attacks, breaking up moves and crowning another magnificent performance with the winning goal… Pogba simply could not get into the game”. .
. and so when the clock reached its final minutes, the fans, well aware that their 30 million dollar bargain had just outplayed the most expensive player of all time, began to sing: “what a waste of money”. .
. Pogba tried to cover his bases, telling the press that “playing against him feels like being ambushed, it feels like he could outrun an entire team of 11 players”. .
. but it was too late… as Alan Shearer predicted during the broadcast, when the awards were given out, there was no talk of Eden Hazard… N’Golo Kanté was the PFA Player of the year… In a couple of seasons, Kanté had gone from being virtually unknown to being one of the most admired players on the planet… he placed 8th in the Ballon D'or, he won French player of the year… after running it back FA Cup final, once again going head to head with Pogba… taking the man of the match award and handing Chelsea their only trophy of the season, they named him as their player of the year as well…but, as much as awards are a big thing… Nothing proved just how great he truly was as much as hearing the likes of Thierry Henry claiming that: “The first time I saw him, I went over and poked him in the chest… I just had to check if he was real”. .
. You see, for years in France, the more cynical football purists had refused to buy into the Kanté hype, but now with greats like Henry singing his praises, there was no denying him… and well… with his older brother passing away from sudden heart failure only a few months before… When Kanté was called up to his first World Cup, he had no choice but to go as hard as ever… and 7 matches later, he had recovered the ball 52 times and intercepted it another 20… again, a record in World Cup history… meaning that, by the end, even with everyone losing their minds over Kylian Mbappé’s performance and despite the fact that Kanté literally played the final while sick with food poisoning… There were a lot of analysts insisting on naming him as their player of the tournament… but no matter what, with Kanté being Kanté, despite all of that “leg work”, when it was time for celebration, he was once again standing to the side watching… hadn’t it been for Nzonzi, he might have waited till the morning to get his hands on the trophy… and speaking of Kanté being Kanté, shortly after all of this, when a hacker leaked tons of shady deals going on with contracts and all… everyone was shocked to see his name on the file until they noticed that… the only reason he was mentioned was that he had been one of the few players to say no when Chelsea proposed that his salary be paid through an offshore account… Regardless, with news of a possible move to PSG hitting the papers and a 100 million euro bid being rumored… Over the next two seasons, even though Chelsea won the Europa League, repeated injuries kept him on the sidelines… already slowing down all the hype around him… which only seemed to be getting worse when he shocked everyone by choosing to miss out on half the season, locking himself down during the pandemic after collapsing in training and becoming paranoid that what happened to his brother could happen to him as well… but ironically, just as everyone thought that he was losing it, it was precisely then and there that Kanté played maybe the greatest season of his career… When Lampard got the sack midway through the year, it was almost unanimously accepted by the fans that the season was over… after all they had been playing like a mid table team and the only thing they had left were the cup competitions… but well… then Kanté decided they were gonna win the Champions League… he didn’t just take the man of the match against Atlético, once Real Madrid came in between them and the final, he took the award again… both home and away… already at that point, it could be argued it was one of the greatest midfielder performances of all time… just looking at his heat map was… a scary sight… but then the final came and as the Guardian put it: “this final will be remembered as the day Man City flooded the pitch with midfielders while Chelsea hit back in a more targeted fashion… Enter, N’Golo Kanté, the one-man midfield overload”. .
. again, it has been widely discussed how it was even possible that Tuchel managed to get that team to take Europe’s greatest trophy in a season everyone was already hoping to forget and the answer is, as he put himself: “I’ve wanted Kanté at every club I’ve ever been at… here. .
. I finally had him”. .
. Suddenly, they were asking captain Azpilicueta if he was the best in the world and his answer was: “yes, it’s straightforward… he does… everything”. .
. even newspapers like Marca were claiming that “he deserved the Ballon D’Or”. .
.
