Forget Nico O’Reilly, Eli Junior Kroupi should win Young Player of the Year | OneFootball

Manchester City’s Nico O’Reilly is the favourite to win the Young Player of the Year award but there is a more deserving candidate.

On the list of highest-scoring teenagers in Europe’s top five leagues this season, Lamine Yamal is at the top. Number two on that list is Eli Junior Kroupi.

Now if you were to compare the volume of noise around one player compared to the other, it would be like comparing the size of a football to the sun.

While Yamal is being spoken of as the second coming of Lionel Messi, Kroupi’s debut Premier League season has gone under many’s radar.

Kroupi was signed by Bournemouth last January but only moved to the seaside club in the summer after finishing his season with FC Lorient. With the French club, he scored 28 goals in 64 games including 30 in 22 games as Lorient won Ligue 2. All of this at the age of 18, no wonder then that confirmation of Bournemouth’s signing came with a quote from technical director Simon Francis saying “very excited to sign somebody with such potential.”

But even Francis and the staff at the Cherries may have been surprised by just how quickly that potential has come to fruition.

Kroupi’s introduction to the Premier League was a slow one. His debut lasted a minute, his second game just three, but a goal in a 10-minute cameo against Leeds earned him a starting spot. He repaid Andoni Iraola’s decision with a brace.

The 19-year-old has scored 12 goals this season which while only good enough for eighth in the top scorers of the Premier League, in terms of minutes-per-goal, only Erling Haaland and William Osula are higher.

What makes Kroupi a player who looks like he is on his way up the footballing ladder is that he is an incredible finisher mixed with an excellent ability to know where to be. No one in the top 10 Premier League goalscorers this season is outperforming their xG more than his 3.52. He is also not just a one-trick pony and has scored goals ranging from tap-ins with an xG of 0.76, headers from a corner at 0.84 and free kicks with an xG of 0.02.

Hardly a surprise then that his potential and performances were noted by Thierry Henry.

“I’m not surprised,” Henry said on Sky Sports.

“I thought of taking him when he was only 16 with the U21s. That didn’t go down too well at the time because he hadn’t played with the U17s, the U18s, the U19s.

“But when you see someone who has that raw talent and desire, age doesn’t matter.

“He has been proving that he’s a great goalscorer, very Jermain Defoe-like when he’s in the box. He can play on the right, on the left. He has an eye for a goal and he has a good future.”

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Henry was right to bring up Kroupi’s ability to play across the front line. Andoni Iraola initially played him as the leading number nine when Evanilson was unavailable but has since moved him into the number 10 spot, a position that seems to better suit him and his preference to play off a central striker.

In his last six matches in that role, he has scored four goals and was the width of a crossbar away from doing so against Fulham at the weekend.

As for what comes next, Kroupi need only look at the example of Antoine Semenyo as proof that he is in an ideal position to further his development and incoming Marco Rose has a history of working with youngsters.

Max Dowman and Ryo Ngumoha are the Premier League’s two most talked-about teenagers and while they are a few years younger than Kroupi, the Bournemouth forward deserves to be spoken of in the same breath when it comes to what he could achieve in his career.

Bournemouth will be confident of keeping him in the summer but another season of improvement and the top clubs will surely come calling.