Geovany Quenda is going places. Fast. ‘I see similarities with Lamine Yamal’

Training was already starting when Geovany Quenda turned up.

He was new to the neighbourhood — new to the country, in fact — and he wanted to play some football. He approached the coaches and asked if he could join in.

In normal circumstances, they would have let him. SF Damaiense, based in the Lisbon suburb of Amadora, is a community club. Turning away bright-eyed local kids is not really the done thing. On this occasion, though, there was a small issue. Quenda, who had just turned nine, didn’t have any kit.

“He was wearing jeans and trainers — social clothes,” recalls Edmundo Silva, Damaiense’s president. “He clearly had the football bug and was desperate to play, but the coaches said no.”

Quenda, disappointed, might just have walked home. Instead, he hung around. He found a spare ball and started kicking it around by himself. He surely knew what he was doing, just as you surely know where this is going.

“The coaches saw his touch, his relationship with the ball,” says Silva. “It wasn’t typical for a kid of that age. They decided to make an exception and let him train. They were curious to see more. And he was astonishing.”

Curiosity and astonishment: these have been recurring themes in Quenda’s journey to this point. It is not a long story — he is only 17, barely halfway through his breakout season at Sporting CP — but it has moved quickly, hurtling along with the same momentum that defines Quenda’s wing play.

Chelsea may have won the race to sign him for £40million ($51.8m) — he will move to Stamford Bridge in 2026 — but excitement about his potential goes beyond club affiliations. In Portugal, there is a growing conviction that Quenda will be a genuine global star, not to mention a fixture of the national team for years to come.

“A good news story for Portuguese football,” Portugal coach Roberto Martinez called him in November. Bernardo Silva, one of the stalwarts of Martinez’s side, was even more effusive: “He might steal my place. It’s impressive how good he is at that age.”

Edmundo Silva recognises that sentiment. “He had so much quality in his left foot, even back then,” he says. “After three or four training sessions, we all agreed that the boy was special.”

Age, as they say, is just a number. And denim is a just a material.

Quenda was born in Guinea-Bissau, west Africa. He moved to Lisbon in 2016, joining his father, who had relocated there for work a couple of years prior.

One of his early mentors in Portugal was Basaula Lemba, a former international footballer for Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). Lemba had spent much of his club career in Portugal and was working as youth coordinator at Damaiense when Quenda arrived.

“He had never played organised football, but he was playing passes with both feet, making it look easy,” Lemba told Portuguese website ZeroZero in 2023. “He was the guy starting every attack. He had extraordinary potential.”

Off the field, Quenda was not the most ebullient. “He was still getting settled into a new life, finding new friends,” explains Silva, the Damaiense president. “He was observant, not a big talker, but very calm and respectful. And he quickly demonstrated that he was a very attentive, smart kid.”

Quenda as a child with former Sporting CP player Yannick Djalo (Photo courtesy of Geovany Quenda)

Quenda’s talent was so obvious that Silva knew it would be tough to hang onto him for long. He told the youth coaches to hold off on using the youngster in tournaments so scouts from bigger clubs wouldn’t catch sight of him before he was fully registered at Damaiense.

It was a smart plan. It didn’t work.

“The coaches couldn’t resist playing him,” says Silva. “They took him to a competition in another neighbourhood. After five minutes of the first match, I was getting calls from the two big Lisbon clubs asking me where we had unearthed this diamond.”

Silva resisted. “We didn’t want to give him up immediately,” he says. “Geovany was still adapting to a new environment, establishing friendships. Damaiense is a small club, but it has a strong social role in our community. We succeeded in keeping him for a year. It was a fight at times, but it was important for him to be happy.”

His next destination was Benfica. He entered their academy in 2017, impressing his new coaches with his dribbling ability and maturity. “He wasn’t scared and he didn’t feel pressure,” David Sousa, who managed him at under-11 level, told Portuguese newspaper Record. “That helped him a lot. He would make difficult things look easy.”

After two seasons at Benfica, there was a rift. Quenda and his family expected an offer of a place in the club’s on-site boarding house. When it did not materialise, he left, joining rivals Sporting.

Tiago Teixeira arrived at Sporting in summer 2022. He became assistant coach of the under-23 side, later taking up the same role with the senior team. He remembers the buzz about Quenda. “Everyone was talking about Geovany,” Teixeira tells The Athletic.

A year later, Teixeira got a closer look at what the fuss was about. Quenda was only 16 when he moved up to under-23 level, but you would never have known it. “He had a fantastic season for us,” says Teixeira. “He found it easy to adapt.”

Teixeira’s impressions are recent enough that he quickly abandons the past tense. The player Quenda was in 2023 and 2024 is the player he is today, give or take a little refinement.

“He is a very, very good dribbler,” Teixeira says. “He’s impressive physically and can beat his man on the outside or on the inside.”

Case in point: his goal for Portugal Under-17s against Morocco in September 2023, a ludicrous solo effort that left a trail of dazed defenders scratching their heads and wondering what the hell had just happened.

O QUE ACABA DE FAZER QUENDA 🤯

Talento inacreditável, 16 anos 💎🦁 pic.twitter.com/OjA36ZX1zK

— Sporting CP Adeptos 🏆 (@Sporting_CPAdep) September 12, 2023

Teixeira, though, is at pains to point out that Quenda has plenty more arrows in his quiver. “He’s a very intense player, very committed,” he says. “But I think his greatest strengths are his decision-making and his ability to play the final ball. He reads the game brilliantly.”

It is telling that the players Quenda looked up to in his early teens — Franco Cervi at Benfica, Marcus Edwards at Sporting — were not hug-the-touchline wingers, but tricksy creators. Many of his assists at youth level and for Sporting’s B team came from through balls rather than crosses. He is currently playing on the left flank for Sporting, but it is not a given that he will end up there.

“He has a great capacity to learn new positions,” says Teixeira. “Sometimes with the under-23s, he was close to being a No 10. He can operate in small spaces, be that out wide or in central areas. He is very switched on defensively, so he really contributes out of possession, too. In the long term, I think he will end up playing through the middle.”

It seems fair to say that Quenda’s career would not have progressed quite this quickly were it not for Ruben Amorim. It was the latter’s willingness to promote youth players that propelled the teenager into Sporting’s first team last summer.

“We see him as a big project,” Amorim said in March 2024. “We will take it slowly and look at the big picture.”

Quenda has impressed since breaking into Sporting’s first team (Filipe Amorim/AFP via Getty Images)

Quenda quickly put paid to the careful approach. Playing slightly out of position at right wing-back, he found the net in the Portuguese Super Cup against Porto — a goal that made him Sporting’s youngest-ever scorer — and never left the side thereafter.

“He got an opportunity and didn’t give me any way to leave him out,” Amorim said after watching Quenda net his first league goal against Famalicao in October. “No reason for doubt, nothing. I think he’s going to be a great player.”

It is to Quenda’s credit that his level did not dip when Amorim departed to join Manchester United in November. He has arguably been even more effective under the new coach, Rui Borges; witness the superb assists against Vitoria Guimaraes and Porto this year.

Borges, clearly, likes Quenda a lot — and not just the cutting edge he provides. “Individual quality isn’t enough and he understands that, understands that he has to be committed,” Borges said after a recent victory. “He’s a kid who likes to learn.”

Quenda in action against Dortmund in the Champions League (Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)

His team-mates, meanwhile, increasingly look to him for inspiration. “He’s an enormous talent,” Sporting captain Morten Hjulmand told Record last week. “What stands out is the way he carries the ball. It’s hard to stop him because he changes direction at great speed. He’s really hard to mark.”

Like any 17-year-old, Quenda is not a perfect player. Amorim once expressed exasperation at his finishing, which could generously be characterised as scattershot.

“He is often more interested in setting others up than shooting himself,” says Teixeira. “I think he could also be more aggressive in one-on-one situations. He could go at his marker more, be a bit more incisive and ambitious, maybe alternate more between going left and right.”

The extra year in Lisbon should work to his advantage. He is still living at the Sporting academy, still in school. There are plans for extra English lessons to soften his landing when he moves to London in 15 months’ time. Teixeira, for one, doesn’t believe he will have any problem adapting to a new league.

Of greater concern will be the precise circumstances he encounters at his new club.

It is not just that Chelsea already have a huge cadre of wingers and creative midfielders; it is also that two more players with very similar profiles to Quenda — Kendry Paez and Willian Estevao — are also due to arrive before him. Paez and Estevao are both left-footed attackers who can play wide or centrally. Both will arrive with significant fanfare. Both are still teenagers. You could easily see Chelsea signing a couple more wonderkids before 2026, too.

Quenda will join Chelsea in 2026 (Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)

What’s the plan here? Not for Chelsea, whose modus operandi under Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly at least has the benefit of being transparent, but for Quenda? There is a lot to be said for backing yourself, but the route to regular first-team starts at Stamford Bridge does look unusually congested. There is a danger that at least one of the new guys is going to go the way of Angelo Gabriel, the much-hyped Brazilian winger who was flogged to Al-Nassr — still, somehow, at a profit — in September after precisely zero appearances in Chelsea blue.

You can understand, perhaps, why some saw Manchester United — and a reunion with the coach who first took a chance on him — as a better fit. “The Amorim factor could have been a big help,” Sousa, Quenda’s old coach at Benfica told Record. “Maybe it would have been easier for him to adapt.”

It is Quenda’s task — and Chelsea’s — to make those hypotheticals irrelevant. The talent, clearly, is there. And for all that we must exercise caution when we talk up 17-year-olds, for all that that it is our duty to highlight the possible pitfalls, to point out that players rarely follow a linear development path, there is a degree of confidence about Quenda’s ability to surf the waves.

“I see similarities with Lamine Yamal,” says Teixeira. “Both of them started playing senior football at 16, 17. Yamal is already playing for Spain but Quenda has just been called up by Portugal for the first time and I’m certain he’s going to be a regular in the national team for years to come, and a star of the Champions League.

“He will get better with age and keep growing in confidence. He has everything he needs.”

(Top photo: Carlos Rodrigues/Getty Images)