Tactics and Transfers: Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante deserves the Ballon d’Or

Thinking of anything worth writing about in regards to Chelsea during the Euros has been difficult except for one thing.

N’Golo Kante deserves to win the Ballon d’Or and you can consider this the official beginning of the campaign to make that so. Whether it be for Chelsea or France the only way to describe both his play on the field and his personage off it particularly in an age where so many would be idols prove to be false, is heroic.

He is the best midfielder in the world bar none. Not defensive. Not attacking. Not complete. He’s not a trequartista or a mezzala and he certainly isn’t a regista. There is no need to complicate his position with adjectives, verbs or modifiers. He is the best midfielder in the world and it’s as simple as that.

When they play together, all of a sudden Paul Pogba is the millennial Zinedine Zidane that everyone in the entire world is always angry at him for spending more time on his phone than being. Danny Drinkwater is Daniel Drinks-Expensive-Champagne when they’re together. When Kante is around Jorginho and Mateo Kovacic are world beaters rather than system players or lesser Luka Modric’s in the eyes of the public.

N’Golo Kante takes teams from good to great simply through his presence. Never before has a player so quietly achieved the sort of wild achievements that he has. The simple cycle from Leicester to Chelsea to the World Cup and winning them all on the bounce was of such utter magnificence that he deserved to win then. For him to win the trophy this year would only be a recognition of how many years he has been the best because he has been for at least four years.

If anything for him not to win the award it would say something about our society’s failings and the decline of our values. It would mean that an award for supposed excellence was more an award for marketing, bravado, self-promotion and dare I say it economic machinery than anything else. That a man simply because of his humble spirit and gentleman’s attitude was denied what he truly deserves in favor of more self-glamorizing and loud characters would be a shame. It would be a tragedy. It would be a crime against the nature and fabric of football itself.

If football is about heart. If it’s about tribes, home, passion, love, faith, history and sport or just one of those things than N’Golo Kante deserves the award. His title with Leicester, with Antonio Conte’s Chelsea, the World Cup in Russia, and his Champions League win this year demand that he wins the award. Of even more importance than those things decency demands it. Decency in a world that has grown ever less so.

While the world is more separated and volatile with every single passing day that one man could humbly cross so many borders, groups of men and women and cultures and do it with such class and true sporting excellence (it is supposed to be about sport is it not?) demands it. The fact that he has improved all of those lives demands it. The fact that I literally smile when N’Golo Kante smiles says something about who he is.

The world of sport is supposed to show the best of what we can be and what we can achieve. It is the most efficient microcosm for life and the pursuits within it that we have achieved as a race thus far and N’Golo Kante has mastered it. He has done it with aplomb and class and his name deserves to be carved into the history of Ballon D’Or winners because the people who come after us should know exactly what excellence is and if nothing else N’Golo Kante is excellent.