Ndiaye's Journey Proves Grassroots Football Still Works

Six years ago, Iliman Ndiaye risked missing the last train back to Sheffield after a loan spell in the seventh tier of English football. Now, Manchester City have agreed to pay Everton up to £65m for him. In just six years, Ndiaye has gone from the Northern Premier Division to the Etihad. Ask anyone running a Sunday league side whether that sounds possible and most would laugh; but grassroots football is seriously important, even for the Premier League.

The numbers around the move will get picked apart — whether £65m is value for a player whose underlying output is, by his own admission, still developing. That's a fair conversation, but not the most interesting. The interesting conversation is how a teenager playing Sunday league football for Boreham Wood, invited to Sheffield United on the strength of a one-week trial, ends up playing in one of the best squads on the planet.

Ndiaye’s route to the top was far from direct. Two trial games got him signed, then it was another 18 months before he played for Sheffield United at all — a loan to Hyde United filled the gap, six senior appearances in a division most fans couldn't name. That's the unglamorous middle section of a footballer's career that rarely gets told, and it's also the part that matters most. It's where their game is actually built.

Because none of what follows — the Championship goals, the Everton move, the record sale — happens without a functioning pathway underneath it. Somebody ran that Sunday league. Somebody coached Boreham Wood's youth sides. Somebody kept Hyde United's first team going in a division that exists almost entirely on volunteer hours and minimal gate receipts. Strip any one of those out and there's no trial, no loan, no debut, no £65m fee.

It's easy to watch deadline day unfold and focus only on the transfer fees. Harder, but more worthwhile, to trace the fee back to its source: a grassroots and non-league structure that took a raw 19-year-old and gave him somewhere to be seen, then somewhere to develop.

Everton have roughly quadrupled what they paid Marseille for him two years ago. City are betting his numbers grow further in a stronger side. And both clubs’ ambitions were built on a grassroots foundation — a pathway that still, against the odds, works when it's given the chance.