Davies steps into Champions League spotlight
Rising Canadian star lines up against free-spending PSG team he passed over
Despite playing in Ligue 1, generally regarded as Europe’s fifth-best league, Paris Saint-germain isn’t afraid to splash the cash.
In August of 2017, they shelled out US$260 million to buy Neymar from Barcelona, the most expensive transfer in history. Later that month, they made Kylian Mbappé the most valuable teenage soccer player in history — and No. 2 overall behind Neymar — after paying Monaco US$237 million.
Les Parisiens spend money faster than the U.S. Postal Service decommissions mailboxes. And just one year after securing two of the world’s most exciting players, they tried to recruit another supreme talent: Alphonso Davies.
At a point when the Vancouver Whitecaps and Bayern Munich had already agreed to terms, and Davies’ reps were about to put pen to paper on the Us$22-million transfer, PSG swooped in with a lucrative last-minute offer. The deal, relayed through then-caps assistant coach Pa-modou Kah, was more money than Bayern had offered, but was ultimately futile as Davies decided to go with the Bavarians.
When the two teams meet in Sunday’s Champions League final (Noon, DAZN), PSG fans can only imagine the talent that “could” have been on display. Davies making rampaging runs down the wing, whipping crosses to Mbappé — a player many compare him to because of their age, pace and power — or Neymar’s ball-handling brilliance springing the Canadian sensation in on goal.
Kah, who was a mentor to Davies in Vancouver, knows the young star is where he was destined to be: on the world stage, the darling of a team, a country, a continent.
“We’ve seen his development in Bayern now, and you never know what his development would have been at the other club. But there are other factors that play in,” said Kah, now head coach of Canadian Premier League side Pacific FC.
“At the end of the day, the choice was on Phonzie, and I do believe that he made the right choice . ...
He’s there with some of the best players (in the world). Nothing is going to go wrong there with his development.”
The 19-year-old’s rise has been meteoric. Davies was an unknown player from a non-soccer country who has emerged as one of the world’s best at his position, with legions of fans in dozens of countries.
Newspapers, blogs and websites are stuffed with stories of those who discovered, developed or shaped Davies, but Kah stoutly puts the praise where it belongs — on Davies himself, and his parents who helped instil that work ethic.
“Everything that he’s achieved, it’s based off of his hard work, but also the talent that he has,” he said. “You see how hard he’s worked for success, and it’s not me, or anybody else. That’s purely based on Alphonso’s qualities. That’s why he deserves to be where he is.”
Kah joined the Whitecaps as a player in 2015, and switched to a role as player-coach with the club’s USL side two years later. Six months after that, retired as a player, his 18-year career transitioned to the coaching ranks. Like everyone who has played with him, he has a story about Davies from the training pitch.
Davies talked about it in a story he wrote for the Players’ Tribune, describing how he skinned Kendall Waston — the Whitecaps’ hulking, six-foot-four centreback with a penchant for physical play — then stayed away from him for the rest of the session out of fear.
But he couldn’t escape Kah. “I kicked the (crap) outta him. That’s what I did,” Kah said, laughing.
“Every young player who came here, we always made sure that Kendall and I gave them a welcome present. And the welcome present was just to test them and see where they are, like physical and mental-wise. We’d go straight into them with a tackle or with a body shove or whatever. And once I got Phonzie, it was like ‘OK, you woke him up a little bit.’ But the next ball he got, he just twisted Kendall and you can just see people go ‘Ohhhh. Alright. This is not a normal football player.’
“That tells you also how intelligent the kid is,” he said.