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Antoine Semenyo’s rise is a reminder the big clubs’ scouting systems are not infallible, that not all players will flower at the same time. Fulham, Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Millwall, Reading and Tottenham rejected the schoolboy Semenyo. At 15, he took a year’s absence from the game.
A decade on, a circuitous route to the top alights at Manchester City, who beat a queue of big hitters to his signature. Bournemouth’s ability to find talent the elite passed over continues to prove profitable. Pep Guardiola’s squad has another player who pairs physical power with a high skill level. It also adds a long-throw specialist to the armoury; City are towards the bottom of the metrics in that voguish category.
Semenyo’s initial £62.5m fee fits City’s practice, after the mixed results of lavishing £100m on Jack Grealish, of preferring to buy players at about that price point. A contract extension signed in the summer to stay at Bournemouth locked in the fee, and he follows Dean Huijsen, who headed to Real Madrid last summer, in leaving the Vitality Stadium for a pre-agreed valuation. Though Liverpool and Manchester United had interest in the summer, neither made the decisive move when the player’s desire for a January move was clear. The prospect of the Ghana international and Jérémy Doku’s rolling thunder either side of Erling Haaland is daunting.
While Bournemouth’s owner, the American billionaire Bill Foley, has ambitions to take his club into Europe on an annual basis, a delicate balance with profitability and sustainability regulations must be struck. Last April it was revealed Foley’s £71.4m shareholder loan write-off after his December 2022 takeover, as recorded in the club’s 2022-23 accounts, prevented the club being in breach over a three-season PSR cycle. Their wages-to-revenue ratio in 2023-24 was about 71%. Until plans for a new stadium to add 20,000 to the Vitality’s 11,300 capacity come to fruition, the club is likely to remain a shop window rather than a final destination for talent. There remains confidence in the scouting system that finds players in the lower divisions; Semenyo, Alex Scott, Marcus Tavernier and James Hill were scouted from the Championship and below.
Andoni Iraola had been explicit in his reluctance to lose a player who trails only Haaland, Igor Thiago and Bruno Fernandes for goal involvements this season. “If he can play years for us, it’s much better,” Iraola said after Semenyo scored the back-heeled consolation in a 4-1 defeat at Brentford. “If it cannot be years, it can be months.” The sales of Huijsen, Illia Zabarnyi, Milos Kerkez and Dango Ouattara have proved, once Bournemouth’s early-season form subsided, damaging to Foley’s blue-sky ambitions. Semenyo will be especially difficult to replace.
The player whose youthful rejections came as a chubby central midfielder has become a most modern winger, his career revived by David Hockaday, the former Leeds and Forest Green manager. “It was like an itch that I couldn’t forget,” said Hockaday of the flashes of talent Semenyo showed during a trial at Bisham Abbey, signing up the Londoner for a BTec in sports science at South Gloucestershire and Stroud College and the Wiltshire Academy team. Moving away from his London roots, Semenyo was put up in accommodation in Swindon, to eventually join Bristol City, with links to the college, and initially sent on loan to Bath City.
From there, the callow teenager who played his first senior games in the National League South began an upward curve that was by no means plain sailing. “He didn’t have the pedigree, he hadn’t really come through an academy, everybody at the club had to put a lot of effort in” said Lee Johnson, the manager who gave Semenyo his chance at Bristol City, of a player who arrived “a couple of stone overweight”. Changes to lifestyle and diet eventually won him a place in Johnson’s team, and after five years at Ashton Gate in which his reputation grew as one of the Football League’s most extravagant talents, he joined Bournemouth in January 2023. Bristol City will receive about £10.5m of Semenyo’s fee, a 20% sell-on clause more than doubling the initial £10m fee first received.
It still took time for the Semenyo that Manchester City are signing – capable of playing off either flank, and leading the press, his physique now full of muscle – to reveal himself. There were flashes under Gary O’Neil’s management but it was only when Iraola’s team hit the heights of their 11-game unbeaten run last season that Semenyo was truly found at the fulcrum. This season, he kicked on, beginning with two goals on opening night at Anfield, and a player-of-the-month award for October. Semenyo might have become a suitable replacement for Mohamed Salah at Liverpool. In joining Doku, Rayan Cherki and Rayan Aït-Nouri, the cast list of enigmatic talents asked to surrender to the Guardiola doctrines grows longer, though working under Iraola should be suitable preparation.
Having turned 26 this month, Semenyo is at the stage of a footballing life where potential hits its peak, even for late developers. Bournemouth will sorely miss the latest player they have polished up for the elite.
