The Little Prince
Dismissed as too small and too quiet, six years ago N’Golo Kante was in the ninth tier in France and going to training on a kid’s scooter — so how did Chelsea’s ‘perfect midfielder’ make it to the brink of successive Premier League titles with different c
AT Suresnes football club in the Parisian suburbs, just across the River Seine from Bois de Boulogne, they still remember N’Golo Kante arriving as a nine-year-old. Jeunesse Sportive de Suresnes is only an amateur club. Indeed Pierre Ville, club secretary and coach, and Francois Missana, a first-team coach, have to spend some time counting through the different leagues above them before eventually deciding that they now play in the ninth tier of French football.
And yet remarkably this is the club at which the man now touted as the best player in the Premier League played until just six years ago.
Soon votes will be cast for Football Writers’ and PFA Player of the Year awards. Kante will feature highly in each. By the time those awards are handed out, it is likely he will have won successive Premier League titles at two clubs, the first man to do so since Eric Cantona in 1993.
And yet his beginnings were even more unassuming than most. ‘When he first came to us, he was half the size of the others, he was really small,’ says Ville. ‘He was small but when he started to play, he outclassed them all. He played in teams alongside players who were older than him. He was half the size, he was half the weight, but he played in all these different-aged teams.’
At the club they have a picture of a young team celebrating raucously with a trophy. The youths are energetic teenagers on the cusp of manhood. Next to them stands a little boy, looking on. It is Kante and the trophy is his. He has just won it for being player of the tournament. In the excitement of the moment, his team-mates seems to have forgotten it was his.
The photo fits the player perfectly. Cantona was the man who once dismissed team-mate Didier Deschamps as a ‘water carrier’. And Kante is a water carrier par excellence, a vital cog in any team. His manner may be selfless but he is proving invaluable. Ville says: ‘I would say to N’Golo: “Imagine you have a chemical solution that’s just inert. You add something into it, and it changes colour and transforms. It’s the same with your work. You put yourself into the group and those around you, they check themselves, because there are certainly some egos out there among them”.
‘He is so extraordinary, he has a very balancing effect. He doesn’t speak out, he’s polite but the dressing room gathers around him. He isn’t timid, he just doesn’t speak much. He is very discreet.
‘There is a correlation between his playing style and his innate intelligence. He sees things quickly. It is necessary to be very smart, very focused: to be able to analyse a situation and find space. He takes possession back and 99 times out of 100 he makes the right choice; a great pass and very quickly.’
For Kante, it wasn’t just his diminutive stature which initially concerned his coaches. There was also his quiet, unassuming personality. Even now he is hugely reluctant to do interviews; but then it was hard to get any words from him. ‘We never knew whether he was listening or whether he even understood us, because he said nothing,’ says Ville. ‘We spoke with him: the trainer or fitness coach would say something to him, give him some advice and he would look at us and we never knew if he had even listened, if hehad understood. However, over the course of the following weeks, we could see that he had taken on board all the advice.’
His youth team coach Piotr Wojtyna remembers a remark he made at the end of one season before the summer holidays. ‘I said, “you have two months free, N’Golo, and you should try to do 50 keepie-ups on the left foot, 50 on the right and 50 on your head”. And two months later, he could do it.’
But they would soon find that the excitement at JS Suresnes over their protege wasn’t shared by the outside world. At Paris Saint-Germain, they weren’t impressed by the player now among the world’s best.
‘But it’s not just Paris Saint-German,’ says Ville. ‘He was assessed several times up to the age of 14 or 15. I took him there and other people took him to other clubs. There was Lorient, Rennes, clubs in the first division, Sochaux and others. And they said: “Well, we have others as good as him, too.” ‘The scouts hadn’t been able to see his true qualities, as he wasn’t a stand-out player, he just went about his usual play.
He didn’t shine.’
If it bothered him, he didn’t let it show. But Georges Tournay, who was his manager at Boulogne, thinks it helped to make him the player he is. ‘He was rejected several times,’ Tournay told France Football. ‘And I think that he forged an iron will because he kept hanging on in.’
The move to Boulogne at the age of 19 only really came about because JS Suresnes club president Jean Pierre Perrinel had a son who had played there and arranged trials. He was taken on as an amateur. It was hardly the big time. He was a young squad player in the reserves of a second division club who were on their way to the third division. And it was only in the third division that he finally gained a first-team place.
Perhaps it is his mode of transport which best mirrors the lack of ego he shows on the pitch. At Boulogne, he used to go to training on an adult version of a child’s scooter. ‘When I saw him coming on the scooter to training I could see he was a bit embarrassed but he never said anything,’ said Tournay. ‘When his team-mates saw that he came on foot or by scooter, they said: “N’Golo, we can take you. Where do you live?” Then they organised a rota and would pick him up.’
His effectiveness at Boulogne in the third division got him a move to Caen in the French second division. Caen won promotion to Ligue 1 and Kante was beginning to attract attention. Not that he got carried away. ‘He doesn’t get it,’ said Ville.
‘When the press came to Caen and the TV media crews made their first interviews with him, he said: “Why?
What’s this for?”. He refused, saying, “I haven’t done anything yet. Why don’t they come back in six months when I have done something?”’
Now he is on the cusp of a second consecutive title and might be judged the best player in the Premier League, he would now surely accept that he has ‘done something’?
Football doesn’t usually do reluctant heroes. It tends to cast its leading characters in much broader, brasher strokes than Kante.
Yet if he does end up player of the year, few would demur.