Илиман Ндиае: Долоо хоногийн 100 фунтийн цалингаас 65 сая фунтийн үнэлгээ хүртэл

Watching from the home dugout at Hyde United, six divisions below the Premier League, it didn’t take long for David McGurk to realise the young Iliman Ndiaye had magic in his feet.

“It’s the only time in management I’ve been able to stand on the touchline and just enjoy watching football,” says McGurk. “I can only really compare it to how it must feel for someone who has worked with Lionel Messi. Just give him the ball. That was our message: just give Iliman the ball and let him go wherever he wants.”

The scene was Ewen Fields in Greater Manchester, just six miles east of the stadium where Ndiaye made his debut for Manchester City at the weekend.

“We got him for £100 a week plus expenses,” says McGurk, explaining how a future £65million ($87.8m) footballer spent time in the seventh-tier Northern Premier League. “We had one of the lowest playing budgets in the league – around £2,200 a week for a 16-man squad – so we were always looking to see who was available in the loan market. But we got Iliman almost by accident.”

Ndiaye, then 19, was in the under-21s at Sheffield United, a top-division club at the time, when McGurk went to watch him in a game at Barnsley, midway through the 2019-20 season.

“He showed that stepover, his ability to go past a player, but he didn’t really do anything too productive,” says McGurk. “Then my assistant, John McCombe, went to watch him again and came back with the message: ‘In and around the box, this lad’s another level.’”

That still leaves one obvious question: how did a part-time club arrange a deal with a Premier League outfit?

“They (Sheffield United) basically told us they didn’t want him to drop down to our level,“ says McGurk. ”It wasn’t until transfer deadline day in January (2020), when Iliman had run out of options, that we got him over the line. I’m surprised nobody else took the bait. But it worked out perfectly for us and he joined on loan for the rest of the season.”

Born in Rouen, northern France, Ndiaye has said he knew only one word of English – ‘rainbow’ – when he moved to London as a boy with his father, Mouhamadou, a dancer and talented amateur footballer.

Ndiaye, one of nine siblings, had unsuccessful trials at academy level for Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Southampton and Reading, and told Everton’s website last year that his father was repeatedly told he was too small to make it as a footballer. As a teenager, he went into the youth set-up at Boreham Wood, a non-League club just north of London, and that was how he came to Sheffield United’s attention.

Photographs from the time show the future Senegal international in Hyde’s red tracksuit top. He wore the No 10 shirt — players still wear No 1 to No 11 at this level — and made an immediate impact.

“From the first training session, everyone could see he was special,” says McGurk, who managed Hyde until 2021. “We used to do a warm-up exercise where each group of four or five lads had to keep the ball up, not letting it touch the ground, from one end of the pitch to the halfway line.

“Within five seconds, Iliman had the ball on his head, balancing it like a dolphin, and ran at full pace the whole way.

“Everyone was falling apart laughing, making dolphin noises. So we had to bring in some rules. ‘This time,’ the lads were told, ‘everyone has to touch the ball at least once.’ Everyone had a touch and when it got to Iliman, he did exactly the same again, ball balanced on his head, before jogging back to start again.”

The new kid on the block wasn’t finished there, either. “He was a freak of nature, the way he could manipulate his body and manipulate the ball,” says Liam Tongue, one of his former Hyde team-mates.

“Nine times out of 10 at our level, when someone goes round the goalkeeper they will either tap it into the net or leather it in as hard as possible. Iliman went round the goalkeeper in our first training match, but then he faked a shot, then faked another shot, and then another one.

“I was trying to get back as the nearest defender and it was probably the only time, physically, I’d been sat down in training. The goalkeeper was rolling around on the floor. I was rolling around on the floor. At some point, I was expecting Iliman to put us out of our misery and stick the ball in the back of the net. But it felt like we were there for five minutes. He was just tormenting us before scooping the ball into the net.”

Visitors to Ewen Fields these days will find it decorated in red, matching the colours that Hyde have worn, for the most part, since the club’s formation 107 years ago. Ndiaye, however, arrived in this part of Greater Manchester in a different era.

“The stadium was painted blue at the time because Manchester City had taken it over for their reserves,” explains McGurk, whose own playing career included spells at Darlington, York City and Harrogate Town. “They even had ‘Etihad’ (City’s sponsors) painted on the roof. The entire ground was in City’s identity while Iliman was there.”

Ndiaye’s debut came against Grantham Town in front of 351 people. Hyde won 3-0 — and you can probably guess who won the man-of-the-match award.

“They (Grantham) had a left-back called Joe Skarz, a seasoned professional who was coming towards the end of his career,” recalls McGurk. “Joe came over at the end of the game and asked: ‘Who the hell is that player?’.

“Joe was actually working with the younger age groups at Sheffield United. But he didn’t know Iliman.

“‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go back and make sure they know we’ve got a hell of a player on our hands.’

“We didn’t know how good he (Ndiaye) was until that game. After that, we knew no one in our league was going to get near him. Technically, he was on another level, going past players like they weren’t even there. And physically, though he looked quite slight, he was a really strong boy. Even the bigger defenders couldn’t knock him off the ball.

“We were going into games with so much confidence because we were thinking, ‘We’ve got Iliman in the team.’”

Ndiaye made nine appearances for Hyde before the Covid-19 outbreak led to the season being abandoned, with the Tigers in 10th position.

“At our level, it’s a lot more physical,” says Tongue, who now plays for Stalybridge Celtic and works during the week as a teacher. “People could see how gifted he was with the ball, and resolved that the only way to stop him was by kicking him as hard as possible. He would have two or three people around him. But he just took it in his stride. He never shied away from wanting the ball, even when he’d been kicked or put into the advertising boards.”

Hyde won six of Ndiaye’s nine matches and the only criticism was that the teenager needed to develop a killer instinct in front of goal.

“We lost 2-1 at Morpeth,” recalls McGurk. “Iliman had two one-on-ones, but he lacked the ruthlessness to go with his ability to beat defenders.

“I remember my exact words in the dressing room. ‘You’re going to have some career,’ I told him. ‘But there’s another level to your game if you can develop that ruthlessness’.”

Ndiaye’s potential began to flower fully when he moved back to Sheffield United, then managed by Paul Heckingbottom, becoming a regular scorer before moving to Marseille and then onto Everton for £15million (then €17.7m, $19m) in 2024.

Iliman Ndiaye in July 2023, shortly before he left Sheffield United to spend a season at Marseille (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

But this isn’t just a story about a kid with natural talent. Attitude-wise, the reports from his former coaches and team-mates are excellent, too.

“The best thing about him was how humble he was, how polite he was, and the way he conducted himself,” says Tongue. “He didn’t come into the dressing room thinking: ‘I’m way above this level.’”

McGurk, now a director at the Tactx coaching and tactical analysis platform, remembers Ndiaye being “the first at every training session … and many times when we literally had to drag him off the training pitch.

“We’d say to him: ‘Iliman, your train’s going in 20 minutes, if you want to get home you need to get off.’ The floodlights would go off at a certain time and he’d still be out there, the last man on the pitch, in the dark.”

Hyde used to train at 7pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the loan agreement was that Ndiaye didn’t have to attend every session because he was being coached in Sheffield during the day. Yet he was there, at 6pm, every time, catching the train from Sheffield because he didn’t drive.

“It can be hit-and-miss sometimes when a young player (from a professional club) drops down to that level,” says McGurk, describing Ndiaye as the most talented player he has ever worked with. “But Iliman fitted in straight away. You could put him in a five-a-side league with 60-year-old men and he’d fit in. Because he loves the game and he just wants to play football.”