"The CAN is ten times more emotional than the Champions League. It's incomparable!" These words are from Édouard Mendy, speaking to RFI, just seconds after winning the Africa Cup of Nations with Senegal on February 6. Emotions multiplied tenfold, for a goalkeeper who knows how to rise to every occasion: Champions League, CAN, Club World Cup. The goalkeeper has won everything. Is this finally recognition?

FIFA Best Goalkeeper of the Year

"He is simply the world's best goalkeeper," says Yoro Mangara, a Senegalese journalist. "What more can he do? It's not normal that a goalkeeper who wins everything is not ranked in the Ballon d'Or," he adds. Indeed, the 2021 ranking of the most prestigious individual award had caused talk: Édouard Mendy was not even among the 30 nominees, despite his Champions League success. He had also seen Gianluigi Donnarumma beat him to the Yashin Award, a kind of Ballon d'Or for goalkeepers.

While the Senegalese goalkeeper ultimately won the title of FIFA Best Goalkeeper of the Yearin January, he above all won his country's first continental crown, becoming the tenth player in history to achieve the double of Champions League and CAN. Enough to make him enter the African pantheon.

"We've had very good goalkeepers in Africa," recalls Yoro Mangara. "Thomas N'Kono, Joseph-Antoine Bell, or Cheikh Seck. But for me, Édouard Mendy is the greatest of all time."

"What he is achieving is phenomenal"

Édouard Mendy is an "African domination," but also a "global" one, according to Tony Sylva, the Senegalese national team's goalkeeper coach since 2015. The former Lille goalkeeper (2004-2008) will have mixed feelings tonight for this match between his former club and that of his protégé, whom he has been coaching since 2018 with Senegal: "He has accomplished what many African goalkeepers wanted to do. What he is achieving is phenomenal," Tony Sylva also says.

What is the secret to Mendy's success? "He is a hard worker, an enormous worker. There is only work that pays, look: in less than two years, he is on top of the world," says Tony Sylva. After conquering the world at the Club World Cup and Africa at the CAN, the tireless and insatiable Édouard Mendy puts on his gloves again to conquer Europe once more.