Ange-Yoan Bonny : un bear able to ball
Long overdue. A dive into Ange-Yoan Bonny's profile, what makes him special, peculiar and worth a closer look. What does he do ? Bear with me for a few thousands signs, let me put y'all on game.
Last month I published a piece entitled “Big Men up next” featuring 4 tall dudes playing upfront with great potential breaking down what made them interesting in their own specific ways. Since then :
Barry as scored game winners for France U-21 and drawn formal interest from Everton
Mohamed Kader Meïté got a call up to play with France U-20 as an U-18 in the Maurice Revello/Toulon Tournament
Idrissa Gueye has had his first senior call up for Senegal
Originally I wanted to include Ange-Yoan Bonny in this article. But then I didn’t for a simple reason : the whole point of this piece was to pitch strikers who win headers + do other stuff.
Barry won 67% of his aerials this season, Meïté won 57%, Rodriguez won 55%…. Ange-Yoan Bonny won 30% of the aerial duels he played across his career at pro level.
That’s my entry point on Ange-Yoan Bonny : he is not what he looks like.
When looking at players you have different levels of understanding :
first level would be to stack players based on “external criteria” such as “this tall black dude must play like a nightclub bouncer”, “this white undersized midfielder must me smart positionally”
Second level is aesthetic bias “this guy is elegant so he is technical”, “this guy looks clumsy so he can’t move the needles”, “this guy runs a lot he should have ran tracks instead of playing football”…
Third level is where you scrap all the aforementioned bullshit to focus on what the player does and to what effect instead of glazing about what he looks like. We’re now talking about proficiency to actually « do stuff ».
From a profiling standpoint, Bonny looks like a walking pump fake :
Tall (188cm, 6ft1) but doesn’t win headers
Big but with a delicate touch of the ball and array of flicks
“mentally” (quotation marks because some dudes make mental profiling based on bullshit and will judge players like so) looks as willing to threaten you as a Teddy Bear until he gets on the ball and starts to bully people and carve through teams
can dominate physically yet seeks to bring variation to his game by dropping to play give and go quite often…
If you just look at him quickly, you might end up at tall but doesn’t win headers, looks unthreatening, drops off the frontline and doesn’t score that many goals.
Congratulation you’ve missed the whole point : Bonny has several key tools to impact games and shows good flashes which is interesting enough for a 21yo striker playing his first top flight season.
Besides, stats and/or data are not the way to evaluate players for two reasons :
no striker scores 20+ goals a season across all competitions until he does
data for young players (especially forwards, risk taking players) doesn’t tell you about the flashes in their games, which is what needs to be looked at to project what they can do and what they could turn into. The output might not be there yet, so their data looks crap despite their potential.
Anyway if we talk data, Bonny’s one is far from bad considering he has been playing for the 16th best (or 5th worst) side in Serie A.
In fact, during my writing of this piece, I had a “funny” idea (my type of funny, might differ from yours) : what does Bonny’s chart looks like compared to Zirkzee’s chart in his Bologna (top city to visit btw) breakout season ?
The result qualifies as “interesting” as, just like from Parma to Bologna (1 hour by train), there isn’t that much difference Bonny’s and Zirkzees charts. Especially when you consider the fact Zirkzee that played in a UCL qualification team as a 23 yo while Bonny played in a relegation scrap side as a 21 yo. Anyway.
Last season we heard a lot about Zirkzee and how he was supposedly the next big thing. This season we barely heard of Bonny and how he might become a really good forward.
You can look it up too, there’s like 10x more content about Zirkzee at Bologna and how he was dropping off the frontline and really tekky and blabla… than there is about Bonny this season. Now the question is : is Zirkzee 10x better than Bonny ? To that I can confidently answer « f*ck no ».
For Zirkzee, you can scroll through dozens of Youtube comps. For Bonny, most comps are from two weeks ago when the Inter Milan links started. And after a few seconds, all you find is a video of him as a kid in his Pôle Espoirs de Châteauroux days (Pôle espoirs are in every region in France, kids have to pass several round of selections during their U13s season, get in as U14s, train during the week developing their technical craft and tactical understanding of the game while still playing for grassroots clubs on the week-end and some of them eventually join an academy. They usually produce technically proficient players able to play in various positions).
So the actual question would be : “does talking about a former Bayern Munich « wonderkid » who looks really easy on the eye and starts for a Bologna side having an historical season sound like it’s more rewarding clout wise than talking about a former Tours and Châteauroux (where the fuck is that huh ?) player who plays for a side fighting relegation ?”
The answer put on a plate for you like a Ange-Yoan Bonny flick (we’ll come to that) : “Duh, Zirkzee is a more bankable player to talk about”.
Same thing goes for Lucas Chevalier (he’s good, that’s not the point) who gets talked about soooo much more than Yahia Fofana and Yehvann Diouf.
Football is a PR industry, at least in the first place. You got good PR, you move places. Then again, you can’t hide on the pitch especially upfront. For every Manuel Ugarte or Joao Félix getting top moves every summer there are some Amadou Onana or Désiré Doué available in the same price range. What do you want ?
Back to Ange-Yoan Bonny.
To put it simply, I like that guy because he has various game breaking tools which we shall examine in the following order :
Change the picture
Connecting striker
Shot-making abilities
And some aspects where he can easily scratch off the margins to improve his game such as his general off ball movement.
CHANGE THE PICTURE : DANCING BEAR GLIDING THROUGH PRESSURE
In my eyes players are supposed to actively help their team scoring (it means getting goal contributions) or to actively help their team not conceding goals. I also expect the best offensive players to be able to break systems.
In fact that last point is probably the toughest quality to find in players, let alone in CF.
A few month ago I also talked about some strikers being either functional (that would be Havertz at Arsenal), autonomous (Mbappé paying CF) or the best of both worlds (Drogba, Benzema, Suarez… the best). Strikers who can do both are the best but strikers who have bits of autonomy in their games are rare. Hence why Bonny is interesting.
Ange-Yoan Bonny ticks the “autonomy” box mainly because when he gets on the ball he gets his team up the pitch and beats opponents due to his quick feet, great technique, smart problem solving and powerful stride while being 188cm/6ft1 tall. Dancing bear.
188cm/6ft1 tall and moving his feet/turning like a lightweight. Sweet dreams are made of this indeed. That’s a quite surprising thing about Bonny. Despite his size and frame, he looks like he glides over the pitch. And more often than not, he does look more comfortable with the ball at his feet than without it.
That’s gamebreaking in full flow.
First touch going against the flow
Right foot planted to protect the ball and invite his defender to overcommit and leave the ball→goal line
Left arm to get in front and beat his man
Taking an angle and passing the ball without slowing down/counting his steps
The last point is a very important one. Passing ability and general technical quality can be evaluated by several criterias amongst which : travel time (lofted pass not taking 4 months to reach its destination), possibility to be played first time (no bobbles on a ground pass), passing weight… And the ability to make a pass “from stride to stride”.
These days, the master of this art is probably Pedri. Check it out.
No slowing down or stuttering, just walking into a pass that goes where it is supposed to go. Bonny shows flashes of that ability to pass the ball off his carries.
Another point on the aforementioned clip of Bonny vs Cagliari : hold up play back to goal has several levels.
Receiving back to goal without getting removed is the bare minimum for a striker at this level. Being able to lay if off cleanly is okay, having a lot of different ways to do so is interesting. But the real chaos (and therefore value) happens when, from back to goal position, you can play the ball forward. Either by turning your defender around or by flicking the ball in behind/for a carrier that can directly beat the defense.
Again, ask simple questions when evaluatig players : does he let the ball in a more dangerous place than where he picked it up ? Then you break down the “how”.
This clip shows Bonny can do those things. Beating a defender on the turn to get forward and finding a pass to beat the backline. Even better, he showcases a trademark outside of the boot passes, because breaking systems with carries is not enough, he also has to find creative/unsuspected angles to feed his teammates.
The second clip with France U21 illustrates once more the idea of passing the ball after a carry without decelerating or stuttering. Shows also interesting stuff to get separation.
Bonny starts his involvement by getting separation from his opponent while being ready to receive towards the goal
The pass forces him to receive facing his own goal. Just like in the first play, the point of his first touch is to make his opponent overcommit
Good problem solving to make sure his left leg gets planted on his turn to shield the ball and make his opponent’s tackle inefficient
Two touches turn while effectively beating two opponents. Bonny and glide.
Getting across Nick Woltemade, again making the right choice of which leg he plants to protect the ball and get across his man
Some angles now ? Another crucial thing to get output out of your carries.
That first touch. Bonny is a superb technician.
Then it’s textbook and the 3v2 makes it even easier. Go one side to commit the defense there and pass it towards the other side. Peep Bonny’s pivot foot planted towards his teammate.
Next play :
Textbook again. But still, that touch to cut inside without losing momentum is mighty smooth and gets the Milan defender as late as a french train.
Then it’s the basics, go one side to force the defense to turn that way, play the ball in their back.
CONNECTING PLAYS : POUR HONEY ON THEM
In the last Benjamin Šeško breakdown I explained why I don’t really like forwards dropping off the frontline to do cute lay-offs. Anyway Šeško does it so I discussed it.
Bonny has elements of dropping off the frontline in his game, but the purpose is very different to what Šeško offers as he actively contributes to bringing the ball in dangerous area, beating opponents and putting teammates in a position to score.
First two plays are from the same bottle.
Bonny does lay the ball off, but he is not “dropping off the frontline” has in “playing bluetooth football with no contact”. He is actively bringing a defender with him, leaving a gap in the backline and getting a teammate to exploit it.
First Bonny makes sure to get in position to receive the ball and shield it. It usually means between the ball and his opponent.
Solid block with his left foot to adapt as soon as he can read the trajectory.
Taking a good stance with his left arm around his defender’s core
First touch to escape pressure. Again the problem solving to use his right foot so his left foot/leg can serve to shield the ball and force the defender to stretch
As we already saw earlier, those are regular occurrences in Bonny’s game to quickly solve problems and sort his feet out to deal with the ball and the defender while making sure he can not only protect the ball but also move towards a space.
Next play.
Bonny still puts himself between the defender and the ball as early as possible.
Stutters on his left foot instead of deploying a stride which would get him put off balance by his defender.
Soft outside of the boot lay-off while Tomori brings him down. Leaves a gap which his teammate can exploit.
So did he “drop off” : yes. Did he create value and tried to be incisive or did he just farm “completed passes” ?
You tell me. But this is where the ball ends up after his involvements. Is it in a more dangerous place than where he picked it up ? I’d say it is.
What comes next is a very pleasant compilation of plays where Bonny shows the “delicate touch and array of flicks” we talked about in the introduction.
Active and alive on his feet to be ready to react to the trajectory of the ball
Textbook decoy run to not clog the play
Creative lay-off to play forward despite receiving a shinpad high pass
And using the same foot he passed the ball with to turn and keep moving
That’s as good as it gets in terms of linking up play efficiently being ready to receive, playing clean passes no matter what kind of service you get and staying on the move with purpose.
The next one is pure technical fuckery.
Bonny figures out his teammate is not going to take that ball. Break.
Push left to go right
His legs end up tangling which means he can be pushed off balance. Which the defender recognizes well.
Bonny still finds a way to get a contact on the ball, always with the intention of being incisive and exploiting the gap he created by attracting a defender
For a big guy like him (listed a 188 cm, 6ft1), Bonny has incredibly light and quick feet + the brain to sort them out even with very little time. Having a strong guy who can swiftly turn on the ball, smoothly pass it off while carrying a defender on his back is cash money everywhere around the football globe.
Especially if you can shoot
TEDDY POKING BEAR : SHOTMAKING ABILITIES
Okay so it’s all good that Bonny can turn, carry, pass, flick… But “at the end of the day” (in quotation marks because everything in football starts “at the end of the day”) the whole point for strikers is to get output.
So can he ? Can he turn all of this good stuff into goal contributions ?
Well 10 G+A in his first top flight season is already pretty good.
But as we all know, stats are not the way to evaluate young strikers because ✨no striker scores 15-20 goals until he does✨ and the challenge is to figure out who can get to that level before they do and the price goes up.
Some score tap-ins and get praised for it, some run in behind from the halfway line and get praised for it (tbf if you can do it over and over like Emegha that’s a good quality). Some show they can create goals from scratch and score them but still don’t get much recognition.
At this level of competition, “ballstriking” is not just a guy shooting the ball as if it was a YouTube shooting challenge. Ballstriking has to be put in context to be properly evaluated : off a carry, after a shift of the ball to create separation, after turning a defender around…
How quickly can you get a shot off and how good/hurtful is that shot ?
One year ago I already tweeted a very quick “breakdown” (cant’t even decently call it a breakdown at this point) of a goal Bonny scored in Serie B.
https://x.com/Vrdfr_/status/1786329514122916095
The goal was brilliant and so was the footwork leading up to it
The day you start focusing on footwork and how quickly players can move their feet to good effect so they can stay technically proficient even with high time/space constraint your whole vision changes.
Bonny doesn’t stutter on his left foot because he lacks balance and can’t move. He stutters so that his left foot ends up right next to the ball. That’s why he can properly hit it and go through it to find the side net.
Some more footage.
Yes, I purposefully put *that* play as the first one in this video.
Gamebreaking doesn’t get much more purer than that so does ballstriking.
Taking a diagonal angle so that he can attack the defender while keeping his options open to cut inside or get to the goal line and cross
Cutting across the recovering defender, making sure to sort his stride out so his right leg protects the ball
Ange or devil ? “And like that, he’s gone”
The interesting thing is that, just for his passes off carries, Bonny doesn’t need to count his step/slow down/stutter. His feet just *magically* end up at the right place to strike it. And of course the posture is perfect, Rashford type beat (when are we gonna stop to pretend that guy is not top btw)
Key take aways : do you do stuff at an angle to facilitate yourself ? Are your carries, shots, passes pure and quick enough ? Do you play to hurt the opposition ?
Now I’ve used the expression “game breaking” a few times so far in this piece. Because I know since I’m 10 years old that the ability to dribble two guys then shoot the football is a gamebreaking combo. Why ? Because I played FIFA street on a DS which dodgy graphics which would probably hurt my eyes blind now.
Rainbow flick, then nutmeg someone and finish with a rabona top bin. Changing the picture/taking people on → shooting = gamebreaking.
Bonny does that.
This is almost nonsensical and frankly a play that made me laugh. Peep the fact that Bonny uses : 1° inside left foot, 2° Outside right foot, 3° Left foot sole, 4°Inside right foot to Bonny and glide between 3-4 opponents before hitting the post.
Breaking down stuff is fun, but sometimes you just need to admire the fuckery you’ve just seen.
Anyway.
Some guys might have done something similar and then fallen short (literally losing balance and figuratively shanking their shot). Bonny ends up shooting the ball while making sure to go through it and keeping his shoulders above it to get a real shot off without skying it or shooting like a 9 yo.
Remember when we talked about creating chaos and therefore value after receiving the ball back to goal. Third play, here we go.
I wanna look smarter than the rest so I’ll say that’s my favorite Ange-Yoan Bonny goal by a mile. The mix of physical ability, footwork, technical ability and instinct in there to toe poke the ball into the back of the net. Châteauroux Romario ?
First we got the usual “be ready to protect the ball before you receive it”
Then the beautiful stutter to make sure he 1° controls with his right to get the ball in his stride 2° still have his left leg to protect himself
The glide between two guys, using the same right foot he used for his first touch but this time to push off his right leg. All in the same motion
The strong arm to beat his man
The killing instinct to know he has to bring the final blow as quickly as possible to avoid having his shot deflected
You might have understood it by now, the thing that kills me the most with Bonny is how good he is to understand which foot must go where to facilitate his movements. Every reception is thought through, every touch while carrying has one or several purposes and facilitates the outcome of the play…
And it shows in his ability to receive back to goal and find the separation needed to shoot.
Those are both similar/different plays. Similar because he receives the ball with a DF on his back and ends up creating separation to get a shot off. Different because they happen on both sides of the box. This is remarquable. Second shot ends up getting blocked, but only because his primary defender (who ends up like 1 meter short) got help.
I said a few weeks ago that from a scouting standpoint, every goal can’t be considered as equal to another. You can’t put the same value on a tap in or on a 25 yards out screamer.
Bonny doesn’t score goals, he scores banger. This season, he scored two pens and one tap in. The rest : that madjer vs Como, the carry + banger vs Monza and the toe poke Romario goal.
I also believe that scoring vs relegation teams can’t be considered as good as scoring vs good teams. Amongst the 10 G+A Bonny got this past season, 4 of them came against top 6 teams (including Inter who are reportedly buying him).
All of them also came when his team was chasing the score or when the game was tied. No 84 minutes 4-1 “dagger” to secure a win.
I would keep rambling about Bonny but I think the point has been made already and if you don’t buy it now then you won’t, ever.
Everything about this guy screams of a game breaker refining his game.
Right now the thing he’s got to work on is his general movement off the ball. Because even if he knows how/when to drop off a bit and shows some flashes in the box (that madjer came after a smart movement to throw the defender away and then attack the first post), he needs to get more consistent has he hasn’t reached Thierno Barry’s level of consistent, smart, relentless running in behind and liveliness in the box.
The thing that kinda made me want to moderate all the positives with this one area where he can really improve was the fact that Bonny was, on some occasions, not 100% readable for his teammates.
This is a good example.
In those situations you either :
have a space available between two defenders to make a run beyond the last line, therefore you attack that space
see you can’t receive in behind so you get wider to find separation, receive the ball to feet and go play some 1v1. Ideally you do it quickly enough to still have some space to use your pace in 1v1.
make a decoy run for a teammate to overlap which isn’t possible in this case
Bonny doesn’t really do any of those things. He doesn’t make a choice and so doesn’t provide an option (good or bad) to the ball carrier.
That’s a problem as off now but it’s honestly not that big a deal. As said, he has the technical ability, physical (not just power and pace but agility, footwork…) capacities and the minerals to become an actual top player who wins game almost on his own.
I’ll conclude by saying how fun it’ll be to watch France play in the next few years. The quality and variety of players who might get called up (some will almost never because there’s just too much talent…) is ridiculous.
Even getting beyond the Olise, Mbappé, Doué guys.
You want a sharp shooter who scores bangers and can’t be caught ? There is Tel
You want a run and gun striker with a bit of hold up play ? There is Ilenikhena.
You want a tekky yet powerful ball carrier to carve through teams ? There is Bonny
You want a tall dude who wins headers and gets alive in the box ? There is Barry
You want the whole package ? There is Ekitike
What do you notice ? They are all different. This is where French football beats the rest in terms of producing stand out talents. You know what a Spanish midfielder looks like. You might see what a “typical” South American striker means. You have no idea what a typical French player looks like no matter the position.
Some say there is no “philosophy” whatsoever, some will explain to you that it’s player based and all players are different. Hence why there is no mould, no template. “Only” individuals with stand out traits waiting to be platformed.
Look at what France brought to the Olympics last summer (I’ll never recover from not being in Paris at that time btw). Cherki, Doué, Akliouche, Millot (not counting Olise as he wasn’t trained in France). That’s 4 n°10 ish players, not twice the same skillset.
Let it be recognized that if you have difference makers and you get them to share the ball and run for each others, you win trebles.
And I didn’t mentioned the Kalimuendo (who would be a senior international already if he was German), Abline (has 20 goals in him), Bahoya (next summer Francfort sells him for 40M)…
Bonny should be part of that crop of players who are good enough to play for top teams, yet not good enough to rival the mavericks France already has in the house (or in the Château de Montjoye à Clairefontaine).
all this waffling for mid player who'll end up at cagliari in 2 years
Franchement super intéressant je le pense pas autant agile et enchaîne autant rapidement sa rapidité d’enchaînement pour tirer rappelle celle de Obando ou Kroupi
Tu pense que c’est sur quel point ou il peux améliorer ?
Je sais pas si tu le fera mais ça serait intéressant de faire un sur Thierno Barry et de parler de ses mouvements dans la surface qui sont excellents