This summer, we are running a series profiling 50 exciting players under the age of 25 — who they are, how they play, and why they could be attracting interest in the coming transfer windows.
So far, we have run the rule over a striker on Manchester United’s radar, Gen-Z’s answer to Sergio Busquets and the France forward who has gone from zero to €100million in the space of a year. You can find all our profiles until now here.
Next up is a new — and exciting —Bundesliga arrival…
On Saturday, Victor Boniface made his first appearance at Bayer Leverkusen’s BayArena. After 70 minutes of a friendly against West Ham, he was substituted to thunderous applause, to the sound of his name being chanted and having already won the heart of his new city.
Pre-season or not, it was exhilarating to watch. Boniface scored with a crisp half-volley. He also won a penalty and forced an own goal. Throughout the game, he played with flamboyance, flair and craft. It was a stirring home debut and everybody in attendance left convinced that Leverkusen have spent €20m very wisely and signed a centre-forward who will make them extremely dangerous.
Victor Boniface playing for Leverkusen against West Ham last weekend (Photo: Marco Steinbrenner/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
But that is the future. And Victor Boniface’s past is an important part of his story.
A product of the Real Sapphire football academy in Lagos, Nigeria, he took his first steps in Europe at just 18, joining Norwegian side Bodo-Glimt. Quietly, the club has become a key staging post for developing talent. In recent years, Jens Petter Hauge (AC Milan), Patrick Berg (Lens), Erik Botheim (Krasnodar) and Joel Mvuka (Lorient) have all been sold for significant, seven-figure fees and, most recently, midfielder Hugo Vetlesen joined Club Bruges for nearly €8m.
On arriving in 2019, Boniface — then a Nigerian youth international — looked like he, too, would just be passing through. Within two weeks of joining Bodo-Glimt, however, he damaged his cruciate ligament in a training game. He was young, didn’t know anybody in his new country, and he was immediately faced with six months of recovery.
But he would win that battle and his comeback was quite something. Within a year, he had recovered to become a force in Norwegian football and was ready to step towards Europe’s main stage. A move to Club Bruges in Belgium was close to being agreed when, cruelly, disaster struck for the second time. In November 2021, Boniface damaged his cruciate ligament again. This time it was more serious. This time, he wouldn’t play again for over 12 months.
Before Boniface had even turned 20, he’d already suffered a career’s worth of misfortune. As he recovered from that second injury, his mother also passed away and the twin punches of professional and personal devastation left him adrift, on the verge of walking away from the game entirely and in the grip of depression.
“I lost interest in football,” he told the journalist Ojora Babatunde in April 2022. “I forgot about my diets, I began to eat everything. I started living a normal life and I just wanted to be happy. I started partying and drinking.”
Again, though, he would be back. This time, it would be to perform a footballing quantum leap. He would score a goal every two games for Bodo-Glimt in the season following his return and a move to Belgium rematerialised, to Union St Gilloise in the summer of 2022. It was the perfect stage. During the following season, he would finish as the top scorer in the Europa League alongside Marcus Rashford. His six goals in 10 games teased a prolific future but also demonstrated his range. There was a smart twist, turn and hit against SC Braga, and then, later, a deft header in the same game.
Ladies and gentlemen your UEFA Europa League topscorer 2022-2023: Victor Boniface! 💫 pic.twitter.com/mh6PoDJZty
— Royale Union Saint-Gilloise (@UnionStGilloise) June 1, 2023
Against Union Berlin in the freezing snow, he pirouetted 30 yards from goal before rattling a deflected shot into the top corner. In the second half that night, against one of the meanest defences in Germany, he raced away from defenders to finish a one-on-one stylishly and with impudent ease.
The best was to come. In the quarter-final, USG were drawn against Leverkusen and — coincidentally — it would be at the BayArena, in the first leg, that Boniface produced his inarguable moment of class. Receiving the ball on the edge of the box, he teased Edmond Tapsoba one-on-one before shaping a side-foot nonchalantly into the far corner. It was too difficult a chance to be made to look that easy and Tapsoba is too good a defender to be left so helpless.
But it was a moment which described Boniface’s talent so well. The screenshot below shows him as he receives the ball, with the Leverkusen defence and Taspoba (circled) in a relatively good position.
Midfielder Florian Wirtz (No 27) would also track back to help, but instead of looking for the developing overlap on his left, Boniface engaged Tapsoba, rocked him back on his heels, then guided his shot across goal and into the far corner. It was breathtakingly good. As the next screenshot shows, it was also so well disguised and so quickly released that Tapsoba, despite being 6ft 4in (193cm) and having the reach to block most angles, wasn’t able to react at all until it was much too late.
It was as smooth a piece of play as you could ever wish to see and it elevated Boniface’s reputation even further. But it also characterised the sense of surprise in his game — of reality not matching up with expectation and his ability, in that instance, to score with little backlift and a finish which came from almost nowhere. He’s hard to defend because as well as being skilful, quick and difficult to dislodge from the ball, he’s original in the way that he solves problems and is quick in acting on those impulses.
Really, Leverkusen should have known better; they’d been aware of Boniface for a long time and had been watching him intensely for months. The club’s managing director for sport, Simon Rolfes, told The Athletic in July that the club had followed the player long before he moved to Belgium and had made the decision to pursue him properly following his performances in the Europa League group stage, prior to the 2022 World Cup.
What they would have seen was a player who can score in all manner of ways. In his single season in Belgian football, he showed he could finish with his right foot and his left, with the outside of his boot and his in-step.
He also proved that he was formidable in the air and capable of generating tremendous power, even from floated crosses. But those Leverkusen scouts would also have watched a player who was more than just his goals and who, potentially, had traits which suggested an evolution into a very unusual but very complete centre-forward.
And Boniface is unusual, even if that’s hard to quantify at the moment. The chart from smarterscout above describes a broad attacking player, capable of being extremely dynamic. It shows that Boniface habitually enjoys operating outside the penalty area, but that his contributions in those regions of the pitch — in terms of creativity and his role in the build-up — are neither overwhelming nor consistent.
That’s not an inaccurate portrait, but it’s not entirely faithful either; for now, Boniface exists beyond the data. It doesn’t describe how, occasionally, his game is decorated with exuberant and interesting moments. Nor does it take into account that having spent just a single season at Union St Gilloise, his game didn’t profit from the long-term chemistries that help incubate potential and allow it to flourish.
But that quality was there. Or the potential for it was. Leverkusen — or anyone else watching — will have seen moments last season that really showed the potential range of Boniface’s game.
The screenshot below is taken from USG’s visit to Charleroi back in January and it captures a good example. It shows Boniface dropping into a deep position to compete for the ball, then winning it, and – finally – carving a pass between three defenders and into the path of a galloping full-back. Ultimately, an excellent last-ditch tackle prevented the move from resulting in a goal, but it was a compelling demonstration of Boniface’s worth from deep and these latent playmaking abilities. Currently, his data shows that he is not a particularly progressive passer, yet this sequence shows that he can be — not that he absolutely will be, but that the capacity is there.
Another example of that potential was shown against Standard Liege in April. The next screenshot shows Boniface receiving a pass and three attending defenders — circled in red — blocking off his immediate options and all well-positioned to contain him.
At this point, there were big gaps between all three attacking players and little danger.
The obvious pass would have been to the overlapping player on the left, seen sprinting down the touchline and into a one-on-one situation with the deepest defender. Instead, Boniface takes a touch infield and holds the ball for long enough that the defenders could pincer in towards him, which allows his overlapping team-mate to go beyond the defensive line.
Then (below), having initially taken the speed out of the phase, he slides his pass through the line and takes all three opponents out of the game. It was a subtle difference, but with a devastating effect; instead of a one-on-one down the touchline, he actually created a scoring opportunity and allowed his team-mate to attack a gulf of open space.
So, Boniface is unusual, that much is certain. Because of the severity of his injuries, he has also played relatively little football. At 22, he has taken part in just over 100 senior games and is also yet to be capped at senior international level by Nigeria.
That lack of experience is especially interesting when it is considered that many of the forwards who loiter between the No 9 and No 10 categories tend to blossom over time, but goalscoring instincts develop early. Playmaking skill and consistency comes later and depends on ego, team-mates and tactical familiarity. For instance, Harry Kane’s evolution into a hybrid forward really became noticeable in his mid-twenties after Tottenham (and England) had learnt how to best use that side of his game.
But while Boniface may not necessarily be destined for that future specifically, the uncertainty about his final form is what makes him so intriguing and it is why this union with Leverkusen should be so good to watch. Xabi Alonso is building an aggressive, vertical side and Boniface will be surrounded by very talented, very creative players who can help explore his goalscoring capacity.
But he will also have at his disposal a range of dynamic attacking options that should be a muse for his more creative instincts. In a year’s time, that data profile should really have flowered quite dramatically.
The signs are already there. At the weekend, West Ham were admittedly awful. They were idle and ill-disciplined and highly vulnerable to Leverkusen’s style of play, leaving huge gaps in front of and to the side of their defence. Boniface was involved in everything the hosts did to exploit those weaknesses, though, and while the highlight of the afternoon was the volley he whistled past Lukasz Fabianski, a characteristic of his overall performance was how dangerous and at ease he looked with Florian Wirtz, Jonas Hoffman and Granit Xhaka alongside him, and how much Jeremie Frimpong and Alex Grimaldo appeared invigorated by his presence.
This is going to be worth watching. A real spectacle, perhaps. Most likely, it will make €20million look like a pittance.
(Top photos: Getty Images/Design: Rachel Orr)
