Cher Ndour’s growth this year is astonishing

He remembers when we used to play. | Getty Images

A truism: at a club having an abject season like Fiorentina’s, the players all look terrible. There’s the Goalkeeper Corollary (the man with the gloves impresses through sheer volume) and the occasional At Least He’s Trying midfielder (e.g. Valon Behrami circa 2011) but this fact I hold to be self-evident. Established star Moise Kean’s been largely injured and underperforming his xG at a historic level. David de Gea and Dodô started badly but righted themselves. Even the putative player of the season, Nicolò Fagioli, sits at the top of the heap by default more than through his own excellence.

There’s one exception. One player who has improved as the season’s gone on. One man who’s made himself indispensable. I’m talking, of course, about Cher Ndour. The brawny boy from Brescia came into the season as a cypher, a mystery box whose attributes and ideal final form were uncertain; we all agreed that he had the potential to be very good but nobody was sure how exactly he would be good. In reviewing his debut season for the club last June, I wrote:

He’s a blank slate who could become any number of archetypes—box-to-box all-rounder, deep-lying destroyer, box-crashing attacker—so whoever’s coaching this side next year will probably enjoy working with him quite a bit, although he could well end up out on loan too.

He’s answered that pretty definitively, I think. Despite the raft of midfielders brought in over the past couple of windows—Simon Sohm, Hans Nicolussi Caviglia, Jacopo Fazzini, Marco Brescianini, Giovanni Fabbian—Ndour’s made himself Paolo Vanoli’s indispensable man in the middle. He’s gotten so good so quickly that I was astonished how bad he looked at Lecce on Monday. In just 6 months, he’s gone from mystery box to pillar of the team.

It was around November that I started really focusing on him. It wasn’t just that he’d leapfrogged all those other midfielders. It was the extraordinarily difficult job Stefano Pioli gave him: screen the defense but also make runs over the top down the left. Asking a 21-year-old in his first full season at senior level to do a job that’s not just physically taxing but also requires tremendous tactical awareness is usually a disaster, and you know what? It was. But so was everything under Pioli. Ndour’s off-ball work, though, impressed me to no end. He was still clunky on the ball but I could see the outline.

Pioli, of course, got sacked. Vanoli started out doing pretty much the same stuff and that meant Ndour kept running like a maniac. The move to a 4-3-3 saved Fiorentina’s season but one of the side effects was that it unlocked Ndour too. No longer instructed to do the running for 2 or 3 different players, he was finally allowed to do his just job instead of someone else’s as well. It felt quite telling that he scored against Udinese in that first 4-3-3 game.

And he just kept going. It’s easy to note the 4 goals but his impact goes well beyond goals. He provides a presence in the middle that’s been lacking since at least last year, a muscularity married to intelligence that we last saw in Edoardo Bove. He’s often everywhere but the scoresheet. It was the games against Crystal Palace that hammered home his importance: the other midfielders accepting getting bulldozed as if they too believed the hype about the Premier League owning a monopoly on athleticism, while Ndour went toe to toe with his more ballyhooed opponents. He crunched into tackles. He went up for headers. He made insane recovery runs.

One more illustrative anecdote, this one from the Lazio game. Around the 40th minute, Fabbian got bumped off the ball outside the Lazio box but Michael Fabbri declined to blow the whistle. As the visitors broke the other way, Ndour came steaming back and leveled Toma Bašić. To me, it looked like a textbook yellow but Fabbri inexplicably ignored it and waved play on. I loved it. It wasn’t just a superb covering tackle (or tactical foul, if we’re being honest). The way Ndour went into it felt very intentional, as if he was telling the Aquile, “You can’t push my guys around because I will exact revenge if you do.”

That’s a level of maturity you don’t often get from a 21-year-old in their first senior campaign. Combine that with the extraordinary reading of the game Ndour’s exhibited in his dual role and you’ve got an interesting young piece. Add in his physical gifts and you’ve got a guy to build around. Toss Ndour’s burgeoning technical ability—compare where he is now to where he was at the start of the year, when it was an even chance that his first touch would get stuck under his feet—and there might be a star in there.

This isn’t just me wishcasting, either. Ndour’s broken one of Fiorentina’s most notable curses: he’s having a good season while wearing 27, the most accursed squad number in Viola history: Samuele di Carmine, Haris Severović, Rafał Wolski, Marko Bakić, Cristian Tello, Gilberto, Fabio Maistro, Andrés Schetino, Simone Lo Faso, Martin Graiciar, Szymon Żurkowski, Nicky Beloko, Antonio Barreca, Abdelhamid Sabiri, and Leonardo Baroncelli have sported 27 over the past two decades. That list wavers between youngsters who haven’t made the jump, colossal disappointments, and the bang average winger that is Tello. I wrote Ndour off as soon as he picked it, same as I have with everyone else who’s picked it, and it didn’t matter. He’s too powerful for numerological hexes.

So thank you, Cher Ndour. It’s been very difficult to find anything positive about this piss-poor Fiorentina season but you’ve done it. Next year should be a lot more fun.