BREAKOUT5: November
The five hottest talents we watched this month
Welcome to the first edition of BREAKOUT5.
Every month the SCOUTED workflow looks a bit like this: Jake Entwistle scours data for a bunch of standout youngsters, adds their entry to the SCOUTED Database, and Llew Davies goes and scouts them. BREAKOUT5 is our way of delivering the best of those players to you.
This is our new, regular collection of the talents Llew was most impressed by this month. Think a smaller SCOUTED50 but contemporary, collectible and immediately relevant - and based on real hours that Llew has put into scouting over the past thirty days. By the end of the year we should have put a huge roster of new names on your radar, and new player cards to ensure you don't forget them.
Here's the inaugural drop: our BREAKOUT5 collection for November. Yes, we made trading cards, and yes, there is a shiny.
Seydou Dembélé
17 years old, JMG Académié Bamako & Mali
Go find clips of Seydou Dembélé and you’ll be thoroughly entertained. He plays like a kid on a school playground: uninhibited, imaginative, brimming with skill and personality. He does things that genuinely take your breath away. His highlight reel from the FIFA U-17 World Cup in Qatar is jam-packed with such moments.
Mali rock up to every edition with another exciting bunch of players, and Dembélé was the pick of the bunch for me. The 17-year-old notched two goals and four assists in five games before Mali were knocked out by Morocco. It was an impressive follow up tournament to his outstanding showing at the U-17 Africa Cup of Nations earlier in the year.
Just look at this assist…
The imagination and execution on that pass is ridiculous. He sees the picture quickly, and the decision to chop down on the ball – generating a spin that zips it on the slick turf but holds it in the path of the striker’s run – is inspired. That’s the type of thing that will stick in my head for a worryingly long time.
He loves to get on the ball between lines, drifting off the right wing to open up angles on his left foot. His heat map from the FIFA U-17 World Cup exemplifies the in-between spaces he takes up.
He buzzes between lines, always demanding the ball, and causes damage as a shooter, crosser and passer. He has a canny knack of slipping past defenders with the ball at his feet, bending his dribbles and finding zippy combinations that cut through blocks. The obvious concern with him is his size: short, slight, flimsy, he appears some way off being able to handle the rigours of senior football at a high level – but he is remarkably good at avoiding contact altogether.
What comes next? Well, Dembélé is a graduate of the prestigious JMG Académié in Bamako, a system that has developed countless top-flight players and senior internationals. Many of them transferred through Red Bull Salzburg, and that move makes plenty of sense for Dembélé. They have proven time and time again to be the perfect entry point to European football for African talent. But he may skip that step entirely, such is his profile, particularly with Chelsea and now Manchester United credited with a credible interest.
Bence Bocsák
He will make the leap to Europe when he turns 18 years old next February.
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