EDOUARD MENDY
A Champions League-winning and trailblazing goalkeeper
The list of African goalkeepers to play in the Premier League is a short one. Between them, Bruce Grobbelaar (Zimbabwe), Richard Kingson (Ghana) and Carl Ikeme (Nigeria) made 92 appearances in the competition. Of that trio, only the former can claim to have had a major impact on English football, accounting for two thirds of those appearances – although his peak came in the 1980s before the Premier League was formed. Kingson was a back-up at Birmingham City, Blackpool and Wigan Athletic, while Ikeme was Wolverhampton Wanderers’ long-serving understudy, playing only one top-flight game.
It is fair to say, then, that Senegal’s Edouard Mendy can already claim to be the finest African goalkeeper that the Premier League has ever seen.
And that has huge significance. As Rory Smith wrote in the New York
Times last year: “Black goalkeepers are chronically underrepresented in European soccer. African ones are even more uncommon.” Mendy is bucking the trend, and becoming a trailblazer for other black and African goalkeepers.
When Chelsea recruited him at the start of the 2020-21 season, they insisted he was brought in to provide competition for then-record signing Kepa Arrizabalaga. In reality, he quickly became the undisputed first choice. After making his debut at the end of September, he kept six consecutive clean sheets in all competitions. By the end of 2020, he had only conceded ten goals in 18 games for his new club.
That form continued into 2021. Mendy ended the season with 16 Premier League clean sheets, second only to Ederson of Manchester City. In the Champions League, not only did he keep more clean sheets than any other goalkeeper, he also matched the competition’s all-time record, with nine.
That tally, of course, included the final itself. In Porto, Chelsea’s well-organised defensive shape, the midfield screen provided by man of the match N’Golo Kante, and Manchester City’s toothlessness meant the Senegalese keeper had relatively little to do, only making one save on the night. Yet just as he had done all season, he brought a calmness and assuredness that had been sorely lacking under his predecessor.
He also made history, becoming the first African goalkeeper to start a European Cup final since Grobbelaar in 1985, and only the third in history to be on the winning side, following the Zimbabwean (1984) and Benfica’s Mozambique-born shot-stopper, Costa Pereira (1961 and 1962).
This season has continued in much the same way as the last one. Thomas Tuchel has built one of the tightest defences in European football, with Mendy an integral part of it. By the start of December, Chelsea had only conceded six goals – the fewest in the Premier League – with Mendy jointtop of the clean sheets chart with Ederson and Alisson.
Incidentally, the Brazilian pair have done plenty to banish misconceptions about their country’s ability to produce world-class goalkeepers. Mendy, it seems, is well on the way to doing the same for African keepers.