Completed at age 16: The Beginning of the Urinary Tract
“When I first met him he was 16 and he was such a complete player.”
Jocelyn Gurvenek was the Lille manager who gave Yoro his professional debut in the 2021/22 season.
Lille have a long history of producing outstanding youth talents: Eden Hazard, Benjamin Pavard, Lucas Digne and Franck Ribery are just a few of them. mastiff Academy structure – but none of the players were as young as Yoro.
Lille's situation was relatively dire. The then Ligue 1 champions had just 18 players to compete in the league and Champions League, so Yoro was quickly brought into first-team training.
“For the first three or four months we used players older than Leny, but then the chairman told us to look for a younger player, someone as young as 16,” Gourvennec said. Sky Sports.
“We just took him to training and it was amazing. He was so neat and calm.”
The midfielder has impressed not only the Lille coaching staff but also his new first-team teammates. Gourvennec asked Jose Fonte, Renato Sanches and Burak Yilmaz for their thoughts on the new academy product.
“It's important to ask experienced players what they think. They were all definitely convinced by him,” Gourvennec added.
“They said, 'He's only 16, he can't play every game right now, but in a year or two he'll be an important player.'”
Yoro had to wait for his chance, as experienced managers like Fonte, Sven Botman and Thiago Djalo were ahead of him in the defensive pecking order.
However, when he made his professional debut in a 3-1 win over Nice in May 2022, he became Lille's second-youngest player and their youngest debutant since Hazard.
His promising career began.
