N’golo Kante – France
First, the numbers. In the past three seasons, N’Golo Kante has played 129 club matches for Chelsea and Leicester City, scoring four goals and providing seven assists.
In roughly the same time frame, he has played 29 matches for France, with a goal and an assist. So he’s not a goal-scorer or goal provider.
He has got a total of 21 yellow cards in that same period, and not a single sending-off – so he’s not really a defender either, with those last-ditch tackles, taking one for the team.
At 168 cm – shorter than Xherdan Shaqiri – you could miss him on the pitch amid the muscled-up giants of the modern game.
And yet, in those three seasons, Kante has seen his market valuation go from 9 million Euros, when Leicester signed him from French club Caen, to 36 million Euros, when they sold him to Chelsea, to the 100 million Euros Chelsea are now reportedly demanding of any club that wishes to sign him now.
In those three seasons, Kante has won the Premier League title twice – with different clubs – and been voted player of the year by his Premier League peers and by the English football writers’ association, each a difficult constituency to please.
Yesterday, Kante was the wall that stood between Belgium’s star-studded attack and the French goal.
So, for those who’ve come in late, who is N’Golo Kante and why is he important to club and country?
The second part first. Kante’s role, in one line, is to stop the opposition’s attacks before they become dangerous, anywhere on the pitch, and to then start his own team’s movement forward before the opposition has time to organise itself.
It sounds simple and complex at the same time – how could one man do both jobs, and all over the pitch?
And that’s the key to Kante: His ability to be wherever the danger is – or, actually, a second before the danger arises. That explains those facts above: He is not interested in scoring goals; he is not necessarily the player who will pass to the scorer either. His job is to anticipate, intercept and pass. As France’s coach Didier Deschamps said on Monday: “He is an essential part of our plan. You don’t want to just steal the ball from your opponents. Kante uses the ball; he has a lot of trajectories for his passing.”
Deschamps would have an affinity with Kante; he was dismissed as the water carrier in his playing days by Eric Cantona – his sole role being to pass the ball to his team-mates. Kante is the water-collector and carrier. The ultimate firefighter.
So how does his play help his team? Basically, by enabling swift counterattacks.
Leicester City’s game plan was built around the speed of their striker Jamie Vardy, who would run at opposing defences in a quick counter; the key was to get the ball to him as fast as possible once his team had the ball. France use a similar style with the tear away Kylian Mbappe.
Chelsea has Eden Hazard. They all need someone who can turn a threatening move against their team into a threatening move by their team in the shortest possible time, before the opposition can recoup.
That’s what Kante does.
He is an unlikely star on YouTube, with clips focusing on his reading of the game and his ability to cover distance at speed. One short clip – 20-odd seconds – features a sequence where he gives away the ball, then wins it back three times in succession each time a team-mate gives it away.
The most common description of Kante is that he’s everywhere at one time. It’s what Steve Walsh, the Leicester scout who spotted him while he was playing in France, says about him.
“When I first saw him [playing for French club Caen] I thought ‘is there two of him?” When Leicester improbably won the Premier League title in 2016, the joke was that they won it with three players in midfield – Danny Drinkwater in the middle and Kante on either side of him.
Those jokes – born out of sheer incredulity – followed him to Chelsea. His club team-mate Hazard, Belgium’s captain and creative force whom Kante will have to stop tomorrow, said: “Sometimes, when I’m on the pitch, I think I see him twice. One on the left, one on the right. I think we play with twins.”
Marcel Desailly, a former France captain, tweeted this probably unoriginal joke when Kante was helping Chelsea to the league title in 2017: “71% of the earth is covered by water. The rest is covered by N’Golo Kante.”
That same season, Thierry Henry – who is now on the Belgium coaching staff – wrote of his visit to a Chelsea training session: “I went over to him and stood in front of him. And I poked him in the chest. I had to, just to check if he was real!”
And yet all of this might not have happened. Kante’s football career began late – so late that, at 21, when his current peers were making their first millions, winning their first championship medals, making their first headlines, Kante were still studying for a diploma in vocational accounting.
The problem was his size; no academy in France signed him because of his height.
Perhaps it was understandable; there is a picture of Kante, pre-teen, with his local club team-mates after winning a trophy. There is only a couple of years’ age difference but he is about half the height of the others, a baby among boys.
Kante is also notoriously reserved. Those who’ve spent long spells of time with him – whether team-mates who drove him to training or a flat mate back in France – remember him saying absolutely nothing.
But occasionally he would break into that innocent, gap-toothed smile. He hasn’t given too many interviews but one journalist who has interviewed him, Jonathan Northcroft of the Sunday Times, writes of “the genuineness of the look in his eyes”.
In a game that has at one level become increasingly complex, with multiple systems and formations, Kante keeps things simple.
Where the game celebrates its goal scorers, dribblers and creative geniuses, Kante minds the baseline. He never did become the accountant but out on the field, Kante is the one who will ensure his team remains on the credit side.
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