Аюуб Буадди: Хөлбөмбөгийн ертөнцийн шинэ од

There is precocious, and then there is Ayyoub Bouaddi.

By the age of three, his parents had started taking him to gymnastics classes. He quickly showed an aptitude for the discipline and was soon excelling at cycling, handball, tennis and badminton, too.

He joined his local football club, AFC Creil, at five. Regularly moved up a year above his true age group, he was appointed captain of Creil’s under-12s when he was 10 years old. Three years later, he signed for Lille.

In October 2023, aged 16 years and three days, he became the youngest player in the history of UEFA club competition when he came on as a substitute for Lille away to KI Klaksvik of the Faroe Islands in the Europa Conference League.

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His Ligue 1 debut against Brest, weeks later, made him the youngest player to have graced the French top flight since 1981. On his 17th birthday, in October 2024, the tousle-haired midfielder produced a masterful performance as Lille stunned Real Madrid 1-0 in the Champions League. The club’s ultras celebrated by serenading him with a post-match chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’.

And his talents do not stop there.

According to an article in French newspaper L’Equipe from March last year, Bouaddi averaged 18.5 out of 20 across all subjects at school, which is practically unheard of in the French education system.

When he was 15, he won an eloquence competition for young French footballers (yes, such a competition does actually exist) staged at the Elysee Palace in Paris, after delivering a speech entitled ‘Is the result more important than the method?’ in front of the nation’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron.

A dedicated and gifted student, Bouaddi obtained a scientific baccalaureat (with an impressive “Very good” mention) one year ahead of schedule in June 2024 and is currently studying towards a mathematics degree with the University of Marseille.

All while holding down a place in central midfield for a Lille side who recently secured automatic qualification for next season’s Champions League by finishing third in Ligue 1.

Having switched allegiances from France to Morocco, where his parents are from, this May, he has become only the second 18-year-old to play for the North African country at a World Cup, after his current international team-mate Bilal El Khannous.

His mature displays alongside Neil El Aynaoui in the midfield engine room have helped to propel Mohamed Ouahbi’s side to a quarter-final showdown with France — the country both of Bouaddi’s birth and of his footballing education.

Regardless of the outcome of Thursday’s game at Gillette Stadium near Boston, he is speeding towards the highest echelons of the sport at a startling pace.

Bouaddi was born into an aspirational family in Creil — a town of around 36,000 people in northern France, around an hour’s drive from Paris, and known chiefly as being where gangster and jailbreaker Redoine Faid is from.

His father is a banking executive and his mother works as an HR manager in the aeronautical industry. Both high achievers, they ensured that Bouaddi and his three sisters approached their academic studies with rigorous discipline.

“Ayyoub’s family entourage is exceptional,” Slimane Layadi, president of Bouaddi’s first club, AFC Creil, tells The Athletic.

“His parents made sure that the whole family received an exceptional education. One of his sisters has a PhD in pharmacy, for example. The family are really big on the importance of work and studying hard to succeed in life.”

After joining Creil as a five-year-old, Bouaddi was swiftly moved up an age level. Although he was born in 2007, the boy with the hairband commonly found himself in games with players born a year or two earlier.

“From a very young age, he was one of the best players in his age category,” says Layadi. “There was already a maturity to his football, his reading of the game and his communication with others on the pitch.

“What stood out was his game intelligence. His movement, his passing — everything that you need from a midfield player was there. And he was a real leader. That was already part of his game.”

Bouaddi’s maturity and leadership skills won him many admirers at the club – including among his team-mates’ mums and dads.

“The other parents told their kids, ‘Follow Ayyoub’s example’,” recalls Creil youth coordinator Sofiane Khair, who coached Bouaddi between the ages of nine and 11. “When we played in tournaments and we went away for two or three days, I’d allocate the rooms and the other kids’ parents always wanted their sons to be in the same room as him. He was already an example at that age.”

Befitting his scholarly bent, Bouaddi shunned a lot of the distractions that attracted the attention of his contemporaries. Showing little interest in social media, he long forewent an Instagram account and did not get around to setting up a profile on the platform until May this year. (He’s posted nine times and already has 1.8 million followers.)

At Creil, his coaches were amazed by his off-pitch discipline. While still to reach his teens, and long before the spotlight of the professional game had started to swing towards him, he was already going out of his way to eat a healthy diet and get plenty of sleep.

“He was passionate about performance,” says Layadi. “For him, it was all about being a real athlete. His individual work, his background work, his approach at home in terms of food and sleep — he worked on everything.”

There again, Bouaddi’s approach set him apart from his peers.

“He didn’t eat burgers, pizza and things like that,” says Khair. “When we went to tournaments, if things had gone well, we’d go and eat at a fast-food place after. But he didn’t eat that. He only ate healthy stuff. He didn’t play video games either. He never had a PlayStation or a Nintendo DS. He was never on social media or on his phone. He would read lots of books, though.”

Initially, and despite being so advanced for his age as a footballer, Bouaddi was overlooked by the scouting departments of France’s leading clubs. But those who worked with him regularly knew that it could take time for this tall and stately midfielder’s gifts to become apparent.

“There were lots of players in his generation, notably from the Paris region, who stood out more than Ayyoub at nine, 10 and 11,” says Khair.

“Because Ayyoub wasn’t the kind of player who did spectacular things. He didn’t dribble or play with fantasy. You didn’t think, ‘Wow, this guy is too good!’ It was only people who really knew football who noticed him. Because he had this calmness and this ability to win the ball back. Technically, he was clean. And he had leadership. So you felt that he had talent, but you had to know a bit about football to see it.

Bouaddi and an AFC Creil team-mate during his time in their youth setup (AFC Creil)

“He went on trial at certain clubs and they didn’t follow up on it. Because in one match, you might not have singled him out. But the older he got, the more he stood out.

“I remember, we played a tournament in Nantes, and we finished as best amateur club. We played against Inter, Chelsea… all the big clubs. He destroyed everyone. At another tournament in Normandy, we beat West Ham in the quarter-finals and finished second behind Strasbourg. He was still only 10, but from that point on, people really started talking about him.”

One of the clubs alerted to Bouaddi’s talents were Lille.

“We already had lots of technical players in his generation, but he had above-average vision, he positioned himself very well on the pitch and he played with maturity,” a Lille source, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, tells The Athletic.

“He wasn’t about dribbles and stepovers, but he could pick a pass and he knew how to cover for his team-mates. He was more of a Thiago Motta than a Neymar.”

Lille had several arguments in their favour when it came to recruiting Bouaddi.

Their academy had an excellent reputation, they were renowned for giving opportunities to young players and they had just been crowned French champions, surprisingly pipping Paris Saint-Germain to glory in the 2020-21 season. The clincher, for Bouaddi’s parents, was the fact it’s only a 90-minute drive from the family home in Creil.

“We knew we had a good project at Lille,” continues the club source. “We had the infrastructure, a brilliant academy and a president (Olivier Letang) who gave young players a chance. Then there was the proximity between Creil and Lille.

“But it had been a long time since we’d seen a player like that come to Lille. Probably not since Eden Hazard.”

Bouaddi signing a preliminary agreement with Lille in 2020. He joined the club the following year (AFC Creil/Facebook)

With Bouaddi’s parents living just around the corner from Creil’s home stadium, officials at the club knew they would see him again. But they also had little doubt that they would soon be hearing and reading about him, too.

“I’m not a fortune-teller, but it was obvious that everything that is happening for him today was going to happen,” says Layadi. “He had a real talent.”

🚨 Excl: Ayyoub Bouaddi on future amid growing interest in Lille & #Morocco midfielder – “I’m really happy to know that some clubs are interested in me but for now I’m only focused on the WC and we will try to give everything to do our best” @TheAthleticFC https://t.co/4wSOvZxzaY pic.twitter.com/yVlM5kTrIJ

— David Ornstein (@David_Ornstein) June 14, 2026

Just as had happened at Creil, Bouaddi flew through the youth ranks at Lille, initially being moved up to the under-17s and then, shortly after, the under-19s.

He was still only 15 when he signed his first professional contract in August 2023. By that point, he had started training with Lille’s reserves. After hearing good things about the youngster, their head coach at the time, Paulo Fonseca, invited Bouaddi to take part in training with the senior squad – and immediately realised that he was ready for first-team football.

“On the pitch, he doesn’t look like a kid of 16 — you’d think he was over 20,” Fonseca said, shortly after handing Bouaddi that debut against Klaksvik early in the 2023-24 season.

“A few weeks ago, he was playing so well with the reserves that I decided to call him up to see how he’d get on in the (first) team. And I was incredibly surprised by his quality as a player. I tested him at Klaksvik, and I really liked what I saw. I already no longer see him as a young player but as a first-team player I trust.”

Bouaddi makes a tackle against Brest in October 2023 (Francois Lo Presti/AFP via Getty Images)

On the pitch, Bouaddi’s positional intelligence and composed decision-making showed his vastly more experienced team-mates that he was ready to play alongside them. But they were equally reassured by the ease with which he found his place in the changing room.

“The older players in the squad, guys like Benjamin Andre (Lille’s now 35-year-old captain), appreciated Ayyoub because he knew where his place was,” says a source close to the first-team squad.

“Sometimes a young player moves up to the senior squad and their head swells and they think they’ve already done it all, which the older players tend not to like. Some players move up, show that they’re willing to fight, but stay in their lane. That’s what the older players like. He was adopted by the senior squad very quickly.”

Bouaddi made 18 senior appearances across all competitions in that 2023-24 season. Most of them came as a substitute, although he started five times in the Conference League, where Lille reached the quarter-finals. His penchant for continental competition became even more apparent the following season, when he shone against Madrid, then the reigning European champions, on his full Champions League debut on the day he turned 17.

An injury crisis saw Bouaddi brought into central midfield alongside Andre — a player twice his age — by Bruno Genesio, who had succeeded Fonseca that summer. Despite registering only 26 minutes in the competition, he performed with the class and composure of a veteran, helping shut down a visiting midfield boasting the talents of Jude Bellingham, Aurelien Tchouameni, Federico Valverde and Eduardo Camavinga.

“That match changed everything,” Bouaddi told L’Equipe last December. “Real Madrid at home in the Champions League, on my birthday, with a victory at the end — all the elements were there for it to be magical. I was almost pinching myself to believe it. I didn’t really realise what was happening.

“(Barcelona’s Andres) Iniesta and (Luka) Modric were always my models as players, and Modric came on (as Madrid chased an equaliser)… But at the end of the match, I was so out of it that I didn’t even notice him!”

Lille players raise Bouaddi high after his remarkable performance on his 17th birthday against Real Madrid (Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images)

Bouaddi used the same interview – his first with a mainstream media outlet – to explain his passion for mathematics.

“It’s a way of taking my mind off football, of not getting bogged down and of opening myself up to something else,” he said. “I chose studying because it’s what I like to do, but everyone has their own way of clearing their head.”

Bouaddi, who is close to fellow Lille youngsters Ethan Mbappe and Matias Fernandez-Pardo, moved into his own house near the training ground earlier this year, having previously been living at the club’s academy. He — characteristically — obtained his driving licence at the earliest opportunity, shortly after turning 17.

Although his playing time dropped towards the end of 2024-25, Bouaddi featured more regularly in the most recent season, and wore the captain’s armband at times in pre-season last summer. Although he has generally been deployed as one of two central midfielders, he has also demonstrated versatility by filling in at right-back.

If there is a shortcoming in Bouaddi’s game, it is in the final third. Across 96 first-team appearances for Lille, he has never scored a goal and has contributed only four assists. Genesio, who left Lille at the end of their 2025-26 campaign, believes he can chip in with “four, five or six goals a season”.

Bouaddi is under contract until 2029, having signed a new deal in December, but there is little expectation that he will hang around at Lille’s Stade Pierre-Mauroy for much longer.

Among the clubs keeping tabs on him are Manchester City, as revealed in The Athletic’s Transfer DealSheet, although they are considering how they could proceed with a move. Options include returning the 18-year-old to Lille on loan, or integrating him into their first-team squad right away, as long as they can find a role for him, possibly at right-back.

Capped by France up to the under-21s, Bouaddi announced in May that he had chosen to represent Morocco, where both of his parents have roots.

The first photo he posted on his new Instagram account mentioned above showed him, as a child, sitting in a stadium wearing a Morocco shirt, before one of their matches during the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia.

He wrote: “Proud to be able to represent Morocco in the biggest of competitions.

“A dream come true, but above all the beginning of a new stage, with even more work, even higher standards and even more responsibilities.

“I’m conscious of what a privilege it is to wear these colours and I’ll give everything to represent my country as well as possible.

“A thought also for France. My decision in no way detracts from the pride and gratitude I feel about wearing that shirt as a youth player.

“I am, and I will always be, proud of my double culture, my background and my roots.

“It’s now up to us to write the next chapter.”

His decision was met with disappointment at the French Football Federation.

“It’s a significant loss for our federation,” technical director Hubert Fournier told The Athletic, “but it’s his choice.”

Bouaddi in action for France Under-21s in March this year (Federico Pestellini/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)

This week’s encounter between France and Morocco has brought Bouaddi’s decision back under the spotlight. But although there had been a feeling in France that he was probably not far from a first senior call-up by Deschamps, those who know him say he only ever had eyes for Morocco.

“It was a choice of the heart,” says his former Creil coach Khair. “Ayyoub didn’t make his choice because of the World Cup. He’s known in his heart for a long time that he wanted to play for Morocco. If he’d wanted to play for France, he’d still have had plenty of time.

“Of course, it’ll be a special match for him because he’s Franco-Moroccan, he has dual nationality and he was born in France. He’s always felt grateful towards France. But I don’t think he’ll feel any extra pressure. Some players might, but not him.”

Thursday’s game, with Kylian Mbappe, Ousmane Dembele and Michael Olise expected to be among the opposition, will be the biggest assignment Bouaddi has faced to date. But if his early career is anything to go by, he’ll take it in his stride.