Christopher Nkunku will be greeted by some familiar faces following his long-awaited arrival in England.
He will be reunited at Chelsea with Thiago Silva who was there at the very start of Nkunku’s ‘adventure’ as a professional at Paris Saint-Germain, a journey that has now brought him to Chelsea.
Around the London club there might still be reminders of the trophy-winning exploits of Thomas Tuchel, one of the first senior team managers to put faith in a rookie Nkunku as he rolled off the PSG production line.
Later on in the season the 25 year-old should bump into another manager who did similar in Unai Emery, now at Aston Villa.
But an additional figure well-known in English football that Nkunku does not appear to have an obvious link to is Chris Waddle.
Christopher Nkunku will be greeted by some familiar faces following his arrival in England
He will be reunited at Chelsea with Thiago Silva (pictured left) who was there at the very start of Nkunku’s ‘adventure’ as a professional at Paris Saint-Germain
Laurent Bonadei, Nkunku’s old PSG youth coach, compared him to Chris Waddle (above)
Yet it is the former winger that springs to the mind of one of Nkunku’s mentors when he thinks about Chelsea’s new signing and last season’s Bundesliga golden boot winner.
‘Now I can watch Christopher and he is at the same level as he played when he was in the under 17s, under-19s,’ Laurent Bonadei, Nkunku’s old PSG youth coach, said.
‘I remember one player when I was young, this famous player who played in Olympique Marseille, Chris Waddle.
‘He was a player making many movements around the ball with his legs and one journalist at that time asked him “but how is it possible to do it? How do you do it?” and Waddle said “I play as I did when I was 10 years old. That’s it.”
‘When you’re young you play football as a game, a fun game. Now Christopher is in the environment at a professional level with media, fans, pressure and he still players like when he was young. For me that’s perfect.’
The list of qualities that Bonadei saw in a young Nkunku and still does to this day is considerable.
‘The speed, the technique, the intelligence,’ he began. ‘A good ability to take in information around him, the reading of the game, very good on free-kicks, he can shoot very well with the right foot and give a good cross.
‘He also developed, because he was very small, a good ability to avoid the duels. He is interesting in small spaces, to finish actions with assists and goals.’
What he needed to add back then was physicality.
‘For Christopher, the only question was in the body,’ Bonadei said of the versatile forward who was passed over by Lens, Le Havre and Monaco after trials due to his size.
When he joined PSG as a teenager, Nkunku was just over five foot and eight stone in weight. ‘He was really skinny,’ Bonadei said.
Bonadei says Nkunku has the ‘speed, the technique and the intelligence’ to thrive in England
Bonadei said the only concern for Nkunku during his youth days was his physicality
Nkunku’s slight frame left Bonadei and his fellow coaches having to plan his progress carefully, adapting positions he played, game time given and the structure of training sessions to prevent his physical disadvantage being a handicap and him being overpowered while ‘putting him in the best condition to continue the development.’
‘What we were focused on was to preserve the integrity of the physical body of Christopher. That’s why we decided to go step-by-step with him,’ Bonadei said.
‘It was to wait for him to grow up, be more strong. He had to work at the gym to develop muscles. Also the speed and the power.
‘He didn’t never give up. Each session he wanted to win the game and each shot on target he wanted to score. A guy with a real fighting spirit even though he was not at the same level physically.’
PSG’s plan for ambitious Nkunku, though, meant Bonadei had to play the bad guy at times and leave him playing games for the lower under-17 age group even though he trained up with the under-19s.
‘He was a little bit upset with me,’ Bonadei recalled. ‘But I think we did a really good job for him to develop his skill to stay in a safe environment in terms of the physical aggressivity of the opponent.
‘We didn’t want to be in an emergency with him and put him faster in the team and higher than the level that he was supposed to play but only for one thing – not technical or tactical reasons, only for the reason of his maturity and his body being strong enough to play.’
Nkunku did play for Bonadei’s under-19s during the latter’s final season at PSG setting up 19 goals on his way to put himself top of the list of youngsters best-placed for a promotion.
‘When Laurent Blanc and [his assistant] Jean-Louis Gasset ask me for one player to put in the professional team I said ‘you can take Christopher’. He played with Thiago Silva and the same level as players like Marco Verratti. It was the beginning of the adventure for Christopher.’
Emery and Tuchel helped it continue after following Blanc in at PSG.
Bonadei said: ‘They did a good job also because they accepted Christopher was not the strongest player physically but they gave time slowly to him and Christopher was really patient to accept the situation, he played more and more and more games.’
But not enough to stop him joining PSG’s impressive list of ones that got away.
Along with Nkunku the likes of Kingsley Coman, Mike Maignan, Adrian Rabiot (above) and Moussa Diaby all came through the PSG ranks but established themselves elsewhere
Along with Nkunku the likes of Kingsley Coman, Mike Maignan, Adrian Rabiot and Moussa Diaby all came through the PSG ranks but established themselves elsewhere.
‘These type of players want to go to the first team as fast as possible,’ Bonadei explained. ‘They have the mentality of a warrior. They want to go, play, enjoy to win.’
RB Leipzig was instead the club where Nkunku put himself on the map, joining the Germans in 2019 for around £15m and developing into a player Chelsea were prepared to pay more for than £50m for after scoring 70 times in 172 games and setting up 56 more goals in four years.
Bonadei added: ‘Now you can watch a complete player with good skills, good mentality, very strong physically and efficient so I’m really, really happy for him to be at this level.’
