N’Golo Kante deserves the Golden Ball

The best player at the 2018 World Cup has not scored a goal. He does not have an assist. He’s made no saves, had no moments that made SportsCenter’s top 10. He’s picked up one yellow card, but other than that, you won’t find him on the score sheet.

His name is N’Golo Kante, he plays for France, and he deserves the Golden Ball.

Kante will never win it, unfortunately, unless there’s some wild groundswell in the next half week. Defensive-oriented players don’t really win the Golden Ball, unless it’s Italy in ‘06 and we give it to Fabio Cannavaro because we didn’t know what else to do with that tournament.

It will most likely go to Luka Modric, another wonderful player who has been the engine for Croatia en route to a surprise World Cup final appearance. If anyone aside from Kante is going to win it, I’m glad it’s Modric, one of the world’s more under-appreciated and brilliant players over the last decade or so, and playing his best soccer at age 33.

But still, in my heart, this award belongs to Kante.

Kante seems out of place, doesn’t he, in this France side? There’s the attacking brilliance and youthful flair of Kylian Mbappé, just 19 and ready to take over the world. There’s Paul Pogba, playing next to Kante, he of the perfect hair and long strides and gorgeous passes that only he could make.

And then there’s Kante. He stands 5’6. He weighs maybe 150 pounds. If you aren’t looking for him, you might not notice him, and will just hear his name called every once in a while as he intercepts a ball and then passes it along to a teammate.

Kante is the type of player one needs time to appreciate. This was true of him professionally — it took time for scouts and the world’s top clubs to realize just what a special player he was. A few years ago, Kante was playing in the French second division for Caen. He got spotted by Leicester City, they plugged him into the midfield, and then they went and pulled off modern soccer’s greatest miracle by winning the Premier League.

Chelsea bought Kante, and then he went and became arguably their most important player. At every level he’s only seemed to improve. His vision, his understanding of the game, keeps getting better. He was always brilliant (one of my few prophetic moments in this dumb sport is when I said Kante could play for any team in the world when he was at Leicester, and I got laughed at), but he’s become even more so. And now he’s doing it at the World Cup.

His position doesn’t help him get attention. It’s a thankless job, defensive midfielder, and one that fans need to watch for a long time to understand just how much one contributes to a team. It’s a common trope among club team fanbases that, at the end of a long season, they won’t vote the 20-goal scorer as their Fan Player of the Season ... but rather give the honor to the defensive center midfielder, tried and true, never doing too much but bailing out their team time and time again.

For most soccer players, the defensive center midfielder is usually their favorite teammate, because he allows everyone else to do what they want to do. He’s the garbage man, dealing with the other team’s best player, making the simple passes, letting you go and do all the fun stuff.

But Kante goes beyond the standard defensive center midfielder role. He isn’t just tidy with the ball, isn’t just a decent tackler. Well, he is those things, but it takes watching him closely to understand just how much he influences a game.

For one, he covers so much ground that other players are given the freedom to do basically whatever they want. One of the favorite games for people who watch Kante play a lot, especially in his time with Leicester City and Chelsea in the Premier League, is to just keep a half-eye on him when watching the action, then crack yourself up when he shows up in the play, completely unexpectedly, often like 70 yards away from where you last saw him.

A typical thing you might see: Watching the ball, watching the ball ... Oh look, Kante just showed up on the right edge of the opponent’s box, to collect a rebound and make a smart pass off a cleared corner kick ... Watching the ball, watching the ball ... Ha! Ha! Hah! WAIT, KANTE IS NOW 85 YARDS AWAY AND JUST SNUFFED OUT A COUNTER ATTACK FOR THE OPPONENT. THAT WAS LIKE SIX SECONDS. HOW DID ... IS HE NIGHTCRAWLER? WHAT THE HELL? AHAHA!

But what separates Kante isn’t just his ability to run, though God can he run, but rather his seemingly preternatural understanding of where a soccer ball is going to go. If you watch him play, you can see him reading passes two or three ahead of time, and adjusting his positioning to deal with it.

You can see this in the stats. Here, from earlier in the tournament, on teams that had allowed attackers to bypass defenders. Look at France:

Nine. NINE. That’s Kante. Well, it’s Didier Deschamps’ organization, sure, but it’s also Kante. Teams don’t bypass him because they don’t even dare at this point. He closes everything out. Passing angles disappear. They don’t even think of dribbling at him because that never ends well.

The best thing about Kante isn’t what he makes happen, though, but rather what he doesn’t allow to happen. Yes, he can seemingly see passes before they come and can intercept them. But he also possesses the ability to see entire attacks taking form before they begin, and then snuff them out.

There was one moment in the first half of the semifinal between France and Belgium where I caught myself watching Kante. The ball was with Belgium’s defender Jan Vertonghen on the left side of the field, and Belgium were on a mini break. Vertonghen saw a pass ahead to his center midfielder, Mousa Dembélé. Kante, realizing his responsibility wasn’t Dembélé, started shifting to the opposite side of the field, and he did so before Vertonghen even made the pass. Why? He understood not only that Vertonghen was going to make that pass, but that Dembele would receive the ball, turn, then pass it out to the other side to the waiting Nacer Chadli, who was on the entire other side of the field, with space and time.

It happened exactly as Kante saw it. Kante was already on his way to Chadli when the pass came in. Blaise Matuidi, France’s left wing, who moments earlier was a bit stranded, could now step hard on Chadli, because Kante, understanding the way the game is played, had come over to support him. Chadli was put under pressure by Matuidi, saw Kante coming with the double team, so he was forced to turn backwards and cycle the ball back to the defense. The threat was over.

It was a nothing moment, one that will never be on a highlight tape. Kante didn’t score a goal. He didn’t even make a tackle. But Kante’s ability to understand what was happening that second early, and to cover that 8-10 yards of space before he needed to, meant that he was there to provide support to his teammate when Chadli received the ball. An imbalanced situation for Belgium suddenly became them passing it backwards, and France was able to get organized defensively.

That’s what Kante does, over and over again, throughout the course of a match. He reads and senses. He makes the right decisions over and over again. He allows the other France players to take chances, and make deep runs, and fly into attack when they see fit, because he is soccer’s greatest security blanket.

He’s tidy with the ball, sure. He’s underrated going forward, too. But that’s not what separates him from the rest of the World Cup. His greatness makes France great. He’s the most important player on the World Cup’s best team. For that, he deserves the Golden Ball.