Many teams want Ayyoub Bouaddi - but Arsenal & Chelsea may be the best landing spots for himplaceholder image
Many teams want Ayyoub Bouaddi - but Arsenal & Chelsea may be the best landing spots for him | AFP via Getty Images
Ayyoub Bouaddi is one of the world’s most sought after talents - but why would Arsenal or Chelsea be the perfect place for him to go once he leaves Lille?
It probably won’t be all that long before Ayyoub Bouaddi’s name is inescapable – and if you spend much time scanning the gossip columns for the latest transfer news, it already is. Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea are all supposed to be interested in him, after all, and many scouts see him as one of the brightest prospects in the global game.
Still just 18 years old, Bouaddi has already broken two records (he is both the youngest player ever to appear for Lille and in a European game), established himself as a regular starter in Ligue 1, and been made one of the best wonderkids in the world in the latest edition of Football Manager. He’s reportedly valued at a minimum of €50m (£43.7m). But will he prove to be worth that much to a Premier League team – and where would be fit in the best?
Just how good is Lille’s Ayyoub Bouaddi?
Anyone who goes straight from hearing stories about Bouaddi’s excellence to looking up his stats might be somewhat disappointed – for all that he has developed a towering reputation among judges of footballing potential, he is neither a destructive force in the final third nor a player who makes tackles or completes passes in remarkable volume.
When most teams search for a new defensive midfielder, they would look at the number of turnovers and recoveries he forced, or his passing accuracy. Bouaddi’s numbers in these areas are perfectly healthy, especially for a teenager, but they don’t stand out. Watching him, however, makes it rather easier to see what the raw data can’t demonstrate.
Bouaddi combines physicality and technical elegance in a way few players can. He’s strong, has a good burst of pace and a gossamer first touch, and uses that to good effect on and off the ball, not just winning the ball in deeper areas and protecting the defence but bringing the ball downfield quickly at his feet to spark counter-attacks. He’s an absolute natural in a midfield double pivot.
It's not just his strength and evident class with the ball that stand out, however, but also his judgement in the tackle and his positional intelligence. Bouaddi lets little slip past him and frequently times sliding tackles that other players wouldn’t even dream of making.
It’s that well-rounded skillset that is attracting teams to the 18-year-old, but there are areas in which he can develop – especially in his final ball, which is imprecise and means that while he gets attacks going by getting the ball out from the back, he seldom finishes them off himself.
The good news is that there is clear evidence of improvement and rapid development in many areas. Take his success rate in challenging opposing ball-carriers, which has jumped from 59% to 69% since last season – or his percentage of successful take-ons, up from a modest 48% to a quite superb 70% off the back of one summer break. Bouaddi doesn’t look like an early developer who stalls out as he reverts to the mean in senior football, but a major talent who is improving himself at speed.
All of which explains why Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and many of the usual big European teams are being linked with him. But if he does come to the Premier League, where should he go?
Why Arsenal and Chelsea make the most sense as a landing spot for Bouaddi
Teams like Manchester United may well be interested in Bouaddi – such sides are linked with just about every exciting young talent that emerges in Europe these days – but the French Under-21 international may not be the most natural fit for Ruben Amorim’s methods.
Bouaddi isn’t the kind of N’Golo Kanté-esque midfielder who can and will cover enormous amounts of ground, something demanded by Amorim’s system at Old Trafford, and is perhaps at his best when the pitch is compact and the gap between players (opponents and team-mates alike) is narrowed. The same is true of Kobbie Mainoo, and working under Amorim hasn’t panned out well for him so far.
United seem keen to develop a younger team, especially in midfield, with priority targets including Adam Wharton, Elliot Anderson and Carlos Baleba, but all three of those players appear to be better suited to covering the vast spaces required by Amorim’s midfield pair.
At a team like Arsenal or Chelsea, where a double pivot is in use, Bouaddi would appear to be a more natural fit. That’s the kind of role he already plays at Lille, suits his defensive abilities and his ball-carrying skills, but doesn’t emphasise his relative weaknesses like his passing or demand that he cover excessive amounts of ground.
They are also, frankly, teams with a better recent track record of developing young talent and teams at which there would be less instant pressure to deliver results. Right now, if Manchester United were to spend more than £40m on a midfielder, it would be to step straight into the first team. At Arsenal or Chelsea, there are more senior players to take the majority of the strain and to learn from.
Perhaps Bouaddi would be able to cover all of that ground if United signed him – we haven’t seen every string he may to his bow just yet. Perhaps he would relish the pressure of immediate expectation and deliver on it. It’s not as though he hasn’t adapted quickly to first-team football, and he has already passed 75 senior appearances. But the path to greatness would surely be smoother in London right now.
It’s not clear when Bouaddi may be prepared to leave Lille and forge his own path. It won’t be in January, as much as the gossip columnists are keen to suggest, in their usual frantic excitement, that bids are imminent. For starters, the midfielder has just signed a new contract which ties him to Lille until 2029, not that anyone at Lille will expect him to see it through. It could be next summer that he leaves, or he could choose to stay at Lille for a while longer where first-team football is more or less assured.
Perhaps, when he moves, the landscape looks a little different, but if he is eyeing a change of scenery in 2026, Arsenal and Chelsea not only look like better candidates but perhaps more likely ones, too, with more stories and more reliable sources attesting their interest of late, with Fabrice Hawkins recently attesting to Arsenal’s interest not long after stories suggesting Chelsea were at the front of the queue became common currency.
That doesn’t prove anything at this stage. Bouaddi’s future is unwritten, and the only thing that seems certain is that it will be rather bright. He could well be among the very best in his position in a few years’ time – all he has to do is choose the right team to join when the time comes.
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