It’s been a breathless start to the game. After conceding inside the first two minutes, France Under-21s lead 2-1 against an England side who have just hit the post.
Enzo Millot, the France captain, picks up possession midway inside his own half and sweeps a lofted pass out to the right.
Only Rayan Cherki knows why he chose to do what he did next.
Putting one foot behind the other, Cherki controls the ball on the inside of his right boot, keeping it up in the air with a first touch that feels beautifully unnecessary. He takes a second touch with his left before casually volleying a pass to a team-mate with his right. He’s ball-juggling seconds after England came within inches of equalising.
💎 @rayan_cherki 💎 pic.twitter.com/SQMr9sHhIG
— Equipe de France ⭐⭐ (@equipedefrance) March 22, 2025
As the crowd gasps and applauds — the soundtrack to so many of Cherki’s actions in Lorient three weeks ago — Gerald Baticle, the under-21s coach, stands on the touchline, directly behind the Lyon playmaker, stroking his chin. A penny for his thoughts.
There are 17 minutes on the clock and Cherki already has two assists to his name, the first a lovely first-time pass that cut England’s defence wide open and the second a perfectly flighted 50-yard through ball from inside his own half. He also produced a brilliant backheel, in the centre of the pitch, to launch another France attack.
A few minutes later, Elliot Anderson makes the fatal mistake of trying to get tight to Cherki up against the touchline. Cherki shifts the ball adroitly from one foot to the other — La Croqueta to the kids; prime Andres Iniesta to the rest of us — and glides around the Nottingham Forest midfielder. Next comes a rabona, nonchalantly flicked around the corner, to release the Monaco winger Maghnes Akliouche. Again, unnecessary. Again, beautiful.
Cherki is in exhibition mode, working his way through his repertoire, making fools out of some of the best young footballers in England, and entertaining the France fans who rise to clap him as he jogs over to take a corner. Both of his assists were with his left foot, but he takes the corner with his right. He’s not showing off. He’s just being Cherki.
“Wherever I go, I want to enjoy myself and entertain people because when you see what happens pretty much everywhere in matches, there’s not much entertainment on TV,” he told L’Equipe in November. “I want people to enjoy themselves when they’re watching TV. And I hope to do so for the whole of my career.”
(Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images)
Cherki’s capacity to enthral is nothing new. Precociously talented, some would say gifted — “God has given him incredible qualities,” Fabio Grosso, his former Lyon manager said after a 3-3 draw with Lorient two years ago — Cherki has been a social media sensation since he was a kid.
Born in France to parents with Algerian and Italian roots, he can do magical things with a football — and with both feet. Aged 16, he scored twice and assisted twice during a 4-3 win in the Coup de France that featured a mesmerising piece of skill that left Charles Traore, the disoriented and unfortunate Nantes full-back, face down on the turf.
“Ooh la la!” said the TV commentator. “CHERKI SHOW!” screamed the headline in L’Equipe the next day. “Don’t talk to him too much about his age, eh,” tweeted Kylian Mbappe, drawing on his own experiences as a teenage prodigy (Cherki was nine months younger when he broke through).
A boy in a man’s world, Cherki was forced to grow up fast to a backdrop of expectation and hype. Questions about his attitude and whether he worked hard enough without the ball followed. People wanted much more than the jaw-dropping flicks and tricks that filled TikTok and Instagram showreels.
This season, at the grand old age of 21, Cherki has come up with the answers. Reintroduced to the Lyon team in September after a turbulent summer when he was targeted by Fulham and Crystal Palace, among others, and came close to leaving his boyhood club, Cherki is playing the best football of his career. He has registered nine goals and 18 assists in all competitions for Lyon and, statistically, is the most creative player in Europe’s top five leagues this season.
Even allowing for the fact Cherki takes set pieces (with, naturally, both feet), his attacking numbers are impressive and underline the huge contribution he has made to a Lyon team that face Manchester United in the Europa League quarter-finals. It is a tie that feels like the perfect opportunity for Cherki, who has little more than a year remaining on his contract at Lyon, to bring some entertainment to our television screens and advertise his services at the same time.
Roger Martinez has been working as a youth coach at Saint-Priest since 1962. So many young footballers have passed through the club during that time — some top players, too. But this was different.
“I thought to myself, ‘Who is this kid? This isn’t possible’. Because he was juggling with both feet and the ball didn’t hit the ground,” Martinez recalls to The Athletic.
That kid was a six-year-old Rayan Cherki and he wasn’t even taking part in training. “He was messing around with a ball at the side of the pitch,” Martinez adds.
It would be easy for Martinez to take some credit for Cherki’s early development. Instead, he makes his role as Cherki’s coach sound almost redundant.
“You gave him the ball and he knew how to do everything,” Martinez says. “I didn’t teach him anything. He already went past players so easily. I’d just say to him, ‘OK, once you’ve dribbled past someone, make sure you offload the ball’. You see all the goals and assists he produces these days. For me, he’s a phenomenon.”
(Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images)
A year later, Cherki signed for Lyon, where the academy staff knew they had a rare talent on their hands. “Technically, he was an extraordinary player,” says Jean Francois Vulliez, who spent 12 years at Lyon’s academy, finishing up as the director.
“Everyone knew who he was because he had a way of touching the ball and a way of playing that set him apart as a player. He has a deep love of football. He loves the relationship with the ball and he loves one-v-ones. His thing was getting the ball and thinking, ‘How can I get past my opponent? How can I get past two opponents, how I can get past three opponents, how can I score a goal?’.”
Word soon got around and, inevitably, there was interest from other top European clubs. As an academy player, Cherki briefly trained with Chelsea and travelled with them to play in a youth tournament in Belgium. When the story got out that Cherki had been spotted in a Chelsea kit, Lyon were furious and threatened to report the Premier League club to FIFA.
Lyon were determined to not just keep Cherki but to fast-track him to the first team. An early developer — picture the kid at school who never had to worry about carrying ID — Cherki had the physicality as well as the ability to play several years above his age.
(Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images)
In an away match for Lyon’s under-18s in 2019, against a Parisian team called Bretigny, Cherki played up to the crowd by going through his array of tricks, including producing a rainbow flick that was caught on camera. He was 15 years old at the time and oozed confidence.
“I remember a conversation we had when he’d first joined up with the pros but was still playing for the reserves,” Vulliez recalls. “I said to him, ‘What are your objectives?’. He said, ‘I want to win the Champions League, the World Cup and the Ballon d’Or’. And I said, ‘OK, but how are you going to do it?’.”
Expectations grew around Cherki inside and outside the club. Adidas signed him up at a young age and Lyon knew they had to be proactive, too. “President (Jean-Michel) Aulas got in touch with his family and his agent very quickly to get him protected by a contract,” Vulliez adds. “There were other European clubs that wanted to recruit him.”
Cherki wasn’t just technically outstanding; he was different — different because nobody could work out whether he was left- or right-footed. There are videos on social media of him shooting flawlessly in training with both feet — inside, outside, instep, half-volley, volley — it makes no difference. The execution is perfect.
“I met Zinedine Zidane once and he told me that he’d had to work on his (weaker) foot in training,” Vulliez says. “I don’t think Rayan ever did. It’s just always been natural for him.”
Gael Clichy tells a story about a training session before a France Under-21 game during Thierry Henry’s time in charge. France were rehearsing their set pieces and Cherki was about to take an out-swinging corner with his right foot.
“Thierry said, ‘We want a left-footed guy’,” Clichy recalls. “So I’m looking around like, ‘Who’s gonna take it?’. And Cherki goes around the corner flag and changes his position. I knew that he could use both feet, but I was like, ‘No way, that’s gonna be a poor corner’. And he just goes with the easiest movement and he whips it with his left, a header on the near post and a goal.”
Clichy smiles. “I think there’s a bit of DNA and it’s a gift that you receive.”
Toulouse, March 2024.
Lyon are losing 2-1. Their manager, Pierre Sage, knows that he needs to make an attacking change. Cherki is on the bench for the seventh league match in succession. He has endured a difficult season, much like Lyon, who were in relegation trouble at one stage and are already on their third manager of the campaign.
Sage wonders what sort of reaction he will get from Cherki if he turns to him. He suspects the 20-year-old is annoyed at being left out. “I looked at him and I asked him, ‘Are you angry? Are you nervous?’. Not nervous when you can’t do anything — nervous to fight. He looked at me with the eyes of the tiger. I thought, ‘Maybe he’ll be good today’.”
Cherki was better than good. “He was crazy,” Sage adds. “It was ‘the Cherki game’. We won 3-2.”
Cherki scored the equaliser and set up the winner. It was his first and only goal in Ligue 1 last season.
🦁 L’égalisation de @rayan_cherki face à Toulouse pour son premier but de la saison en @Ligue1UberEats ! 🔥🔴🔵#TFCOL pic.twitter.com/2WA4R5I6lk
— Olympique Lyonnais (@OL) March 18, 2024
A few days later, Cherki received a late call-up to the France Under-21 squad after initially being left out. “He has woken up,” Thierry Henry, the coach, said in a press conference. “That’s good. Not seeing his name on the list should have annoyed him. He needs to show consistency because there is a huge difference between sometimes showing character and showing character all the time.
“I’m not talking about his quality because I have never seen a player in history who dribbles as quickly as him, with both feet. But he made a thunderous debut, very young, and to not be starting matches today, that means what it means.”
(Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images)
Cherki has had to deal with his share of criticism over time. Grosso, the former Lyon coach, talked last season about the need for Cherki to improve his “mental and athletic qualities”, and there have always been questions about the defensive side of his game, not to mention the need for more goals.
By far the biggest frustration for those close to Cherki, however, is the idea, or perception, that he has an attitude problem and is difficult to handle.
“For me, it’s a cliche,” says someone who has known Cherki for a long time and asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationship. “I don’t like playing the victim card. But I think Rayan has been stereotyped as a north African player from the suburbs, the kind of player who gets labelled.”
Whether that’s the case or not, one of Cherki’s former coaches at Lyon admits that he was guilty of pre-judging him. The coach had a misconception, in his words, that Cherki “causes problems”. He accepts that he got that badly wrong and paints a picture of Cherki as someone who is impossible not to like.
Vulliez, who was there for every step of Cherki’s journey through the academy, warmed to him as a person and as a player. He describes Cherki as someone who was “lively” and “enjoyed having a good laugh”.
He adds: “We never had any problems with him in terms of his behaviour, turning up late or not respecting the rules.
“The only thing was that he was a very ambitious boy, very extrovert, and he had no boundaries with regard to his team-mates and the staff. He was capable of walking into the pros’ changing room, putting himself in the middle and saying, ‘Right, I’m the boss’. He could be very pally with the staff members, so you had to establish some boundaries.”
(Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images)
That level of self-confidence feels reflective of how Cherki plays the game. Vulliez talks about Cherki having “strong football convictions” and a burning desire to succeed that was healthy but, at times, led to friction.
“Sparks might fly on the pitch, or in the changing room, because he didn’t agree with someone,” Vulliez explains. “But it was linked to his frustrations and his emotions with regard to the game. Sometimes, he was a pain on the pitch because he didn’t want to defend. But I spent 10 years with him and there was no malice to him.
“He had an ego, he wanted to win. Things kicked off a bit sometimes with his team-mates because he felt they didn’t share his vision of football. But deep down, in terms of his personal values, there were no attitude problems with him.”
“We see the player he is now,” Sage says. “I’m happy because every player is able to be at their best for three games, but Rayan is one of the best in every statistic in Europe.”
A season that got off to an inauspicious start, when Cherki was frozen out until he signed a one-year contract extension, has gone far better than anyone could have imagined. He has 27 direct goal involvements in all competitions for Lyon and 17 in his last 12 matches for club and country (France Under-21s).
The numbers jump off the page compared with previous seasons and point to his growing maturity as a footballer. Cherki’s ability was never in doubt, but it feels like his decision-making in critical moments — when to pass, when to dribble, when to shoot — has really started to click this season.
(Gaizka Iroz/AFP via Getty Images)
“That cognitive potential is exploding today in terms of his understanding of the game,” Vulliez adds. “He sees the space, he anticipates his team-mates’ movements, and when he has a good connection with his team-mates, he’s capable of playing incredible passes.”
Generally, those passes are played from central areas (as illustrated in the graphic below, which shows Cherki’s assists and the chances he has created in the Europa League this season). That goes some way to explaining why Cherki says that his favourite position is as a No 10, albeit he often ends up in that territory when playing wide and drifting inside with his sinuous runs that open up the pitch and draw opponents towards him.
An assist against PSG in a Ligue 1 game in December is a good example. Three PSG players converged on Cherki on the edge of the area and he somehow squeezed an eye-of-the-needle reverse pass into the path of Georges Mikautadze.
The PSG game is intriguing to rewatch because Cherki, despite showing some lovely touches, was withdrawn 15 minutes into the second half with his team trailing 2-1. Lyon ended up losing 3-1 and when Sage was quizzed about the substitution in his press conference afterwards, he talked about how Cherki “was beginning to make efforts only in one direction and it became dangerous for the team”.
Sage isn’t the first manager to think that way about Cherki, which maybe says as much about football today as it does about the player. Creative mavericks and individual freedom out — tactical discipline and team structure in.
That said, very few footballers in the modern game get a free pass when it comes to defending and those that do tend to post incredible numbers at the other end. Cherki’s attacking output this season falls into the very good category, but it’s not incredible, and that puts an onus on him to improve his defending — something he recognises himself.
Broader criticism that he doesn’t pull his weight for the team doesn’t sit so well with him. “I’m labelled as a guy who has no work ethic, but it’s the opposite, I’ve got a huge work ethic. When the coach speaks, I follow everything to the letter,” Cherki told L’Equipe a couple of years ago.
Cherki seems to be heavily invested rather than high-maintenance. He has his own fitness and psychological coaches, as well as a personal chef, and those who have worked with him at first-team level talk about a player who likes to receive regular feedback on his performances via video analysis and a person who benefits from a close relationship with the coach.
More than anything, Cherki comes across as someone who loves playing football and in a way that makes the modern game a lot more fun to watch.
(Additional contributors: Tom Burrows and Mark Carey)
(Top photo: Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images)