Ilyes Bennane. Remember that name. Okay, there’s a good chance you’ll never hear from him again, but still, in about ten years he will be Kevin De Bruyne’s successor at Manchester City.
Bennane is African, Moroccan, and his name rhymes with banana. Before you think ‘geez, cancel that guy’, the connotation comes from this: I belong to the generation that saw Nii Lamptey get a bunch of bananas thrown at his head during his debut with Anderlecht in Ghent. Almost the entire stadium was torn apart.
When that happened to him, Lamptey was barely three years older than Bennane and had been smuggled into Belgium by Anderlecht as the son of Stephen Keshi. That was shameful (the smuggling and the bananas) and we can hope that Bennane is spared from that. We can also hope that his career goes more smoothly than Lamptey’s, which fizzled out before it even started.
Bennane is now also from Anderlecht and he was not smuggled but simply brought in from Racing Genk. Bennane is now in his fourth Belgian first division game. So you know roughly what this piece is about. With an emphasis on approx.
What you may not know: Bennane is thirteen years old. Let that sink in for a moment. Bennane is thirteen years old and already on his fourth club. He comes from Verviers, but started playing football in Eupen when he was five. At the age of seven he was recruited by Standard. That was on July 1, 2018. A year later he was in Genk. At an age when most children still occasionally have trouble wiping their poop clean, Bennane was already on his third football club and a household name on the Belgian part of the football planet.
In March 2024 it was announced that after four seasons in Genk, Bennane’s entourage thought it was time to look for other places. They received day and night shelter in Brussels, more specifically in Neerpede.
Football has many more ugly faces than beautiful ones, but the trade in children playing football is the ugliest face of that sport. As far as we know, there are only two major sports that children and their entire families trade in: baseball and football.
In baseball this happens on the Caribbean islands, where, under the guise of training, entire tins of hitters and pitchers are trained, shipped to the mainland if they are good enough and thrown away again if they are not satisfactory. The largest ‘projects’ in the farming teams are tempted through their parents, with money, jobs and all kinds of goodies.
Football is no better. If you are on the road in the afternoon, keep an eye out for the vans of the clubs that pick up football players all over the country to kick a ball for an hour or two, sometimes eighty kilometers from home. On the way back you see the most diligent among them sitting by a reading light, trying to get some homework done. Most of them play FIFA.
The very best talents, or what passes for them, are asked through their parents to live close to the clubs. Clubs, in the plural for clarity, because a little guy that hits two balls well at the devils or the preminimums immediately appears on the radar of youth agents everywhere.
It is not entirely clear how exactly things turned out for Ilyes Bennane. There is much evidence that the family placed high demands on Genk, both sporting and extra-sporting. And so the entire Bennane family moves for the second time in five years: from Liège to Genk and now to Brussels.
The Pro League is a bit shocked by the reaction to this horse trading with an exceptionally gifted child who, in addition to being a target for the Belgian top clubs, has now also appeared on the radar of European clubs and is being courted by both Morocco and Belgium. That’s a bit much for a thirteen-year-old, first of all because there is a greater chance that in a few years he will be playing football somewhere relatively anonymous or will have become a new Kevin De Bruyne.
How the Pro League wants to counter the horse-trading and trapping between the clubs is a mystery to anyone who is familiar with the regulations. Up to the age of fifteen, every footballer (up to sixteen for other athletes) is free to change clubs. The only option is a gentleman’s agreement among the clubs, where they promise not to approach each other’s talents. Greedy parents and money-hungry youth brokers still escape. Moreover, our first division classes are not populated by gentlemen.
