Kekuta Manneh Statistics and Irrational Excitement, In Full

It doesn’t take a deep look at the numbers or the video before Kekuta Manneh starts to look like an extremely exciting young player.

I’ve got to be honest, I’m starting to get excited about Kekuta Manneh.

This is “MLS draft” excited. I don’t think Manneh is right off to Arsenal or banging in six goals with the MLS Whitecaps next year. But what we have is a 1994-born forward/winger who has already had 900 minutes as one of the best scorers in the USL PDL and whose performances in the USSDA academy have been unquestionably first-rate. He’s the sort of player I like to see teams drafting: a younger, skilled sort who might pan out, might just be a flashy bust, but at least isn’t another scrub who already wasted his best development years in an American college and whose ceiling is “reliable”. Swing for the fence in the MLS draft, that’s what I say; you can get journeymen cheap but young stars are special.

The Whitecaps traded up to get Manneh, and Martin Rennie did a better-than-usual job of sounding genuinely excited in the team press release[1]. Manneh is Generation Adidas so won’t count against Vancouver’s salary cap and Marc Weber reports Manneh has a United States green card[2]. The trade allowed the Whitecaps to select both Manneh and Erik Hurtado out of Santa Clara, and I don’t mind saying that Manneh gets me much more interested than Hurtado.

As is tradition, let’s take a look at Manneh’s statistics in North America[3]. These statistics exclude Manneh’s season with Steve Biko FC in the Gambia, because I don’t know a good site for Gambian league statistics (you’ll be shocked to hear). The Whitecaps press release informs us he scored 17 goals in 12 matches. Is that good?

The Whitecaps press release credits Manneh with nine assists in the 2012 USL PDL season. The box scores do not give him any. I would actually be inclined to trust the Whitecaps; the Austin scorer looks stingy and if you read the match reports you can see several occasions where Manneh would have been credited with an assist just about anywhere else. However, I’m reflecting the zero assists given in the box scores in my statistics to maintain consistency. In addition, the USSDA statistics website is notoriously unreliable, and I have seen with my own eyes occasions of them crediting goals to the wrong people or making seemingly-random lineup changes. These figures will not be precisely accurate. As always, regular season statistics only.

GP Strt MIN G A PKG SD SoG SoG% S% Yl Rd G/90 SD/90 SoG/90 2010-11 Texas Rush USSDA U-16 23 21 1691 33 3 0 1.756 2011-12 Lonestar SC USSDA U-18 23 23 1930 24 7 2 1.119 2012 Austin USL PDL 13 11 911 10 0 1 34 1 0 0.988 3.359

For three straight years Manneh has moved up while maintaining first-class goal scoring rates. As a USSDA U-16, his figures were demented: 33 goals in 1,691 minutes makes an average of 1.561 goals per 80 minute match and that’s just wrong. He had a six-game streak of multiple goals from May 8 to June 11, and a 17-game goalscoring streak from October 23 to June 11. Needless to say, he was part of the USSDA U-15/16 Starting Eleven that year[4]. By comparison, Brody Huitema led the 2011/12 Whitecaps U-16s with 1.018 goals/80 minutes.

As a U-18, Manneh kept producing. He was a 1994-born player and therefore among the younger guns on his team; regardless, he led the field with 1.119 goals/90 minutes, not quite so dominant but still very good (compare Caleb Clarke of the Whitecaps with 1.238 and Yassin Essa, a ’94 like Manneh, with 1.190) and another long scoring streak (15 games from October 8 until February 11). Manneh’s shot at league honours that year was hurt by a long cold snap, with only one goal in six appearances from February 25 to April 21, as well as moving up to the Austin Aztex USL PDL team full-time. His goalscoring rates qualified Manneh to stand with the best strikers in his division.

In 911 USL PDL minutes last summer, Manneh scored ten goals. That’s 0.988 goals per 90 minutes; ahead of everybody on the 2012 Whitecaps U-23s except for Long Tan (who only played two games). Caleb Clarke managed 0.627, Ben Fisk got 0.444, even Coulton Jackson, a veteran at that level who spent the second-half of the year having pretty much everything he touched go in, was only 0.953. Manneh was 0.988, and younger than every player I just listed.

The Austin Aztex are, unusually for USL PDL teams, courteous enough to put many of their highlight videos on YouTube. My favourite Manneh moment so far is this one from a June 22 match against the Laredo Heat; the video should be at the right place but the good stuff starts at 25 seconds.

I love that. A combination of speed, agility, and a deft touch will always make me like you. If you want to see Manneh’s real 2012 highlight, here’s his May 24 game against Texas where he scored four goals. Four goals in a USL PDL match, against players five, six years older than him! Why yes, I will take that. This whole video is pretty much just “17-year-old demolishes adults in semi-professional soccer game.”

As I’ve been at pains to point out, I am not an expert on American college soccer or even this draft class. I don’t know if Manneh was the best player available; the Aztex own website calls him “the 2013 MLS SuperDraft enigma.”[5] Even if I was an expert on the NCAA, ranking Manneh next to players so much older than him is difficult. But last year Manneh was joint seventh in USL PDL scoring[6], in a competition usually dominated by the college players Manneh was up against in the draft. Deshorn Brown, the leading scorer, went sixth overall to Colorado but Brown is over three years older than Manneh and played an extra game. The most impressive scorer was Stefan Dimitrov of Brooklyn, who’s 28. You get the idea. This is a man’s league of known quality, in which Manneh was one of the élite before he could vote or drink. I can’t think of another player in the draft who can make the same boast.

No, I’m not expecting much this season. He’s a teenager. But going forward, why not?