Yankuba Minteh’s Brighton potential is huge: pace and determination key, says Gambian boss Johnathan McKinstry | Football news

Yankuba Minteh was one of the stars of the early part of the Premier League season before injury derailed his progress. But there are signs that Brighton’s summer signing from Newcastle is ready to make a difference to his 2025 squad.

A positive performance from the bench in the Galebov’s draw against Aston Villa puts him firmly in Fabian Hurzeler’s mind for Saturday’s visit to Arsenal. The Gunners are in form, but any opponent will find it difficult to deal with the flying Minteh.

The winger brings something different. With a top speed of 35.38 kilometers per hour, he is the fastest player in his team, the only Brighton player in the top 50 in the Premier League this season. It is such a useful weapon, the basis for his creativity.

Johnathan McKinstry is Minteh’s head coach internationally with The Gambia. This ability to run away from people is special. “Essentially, he has the most important attribute for an offensive player in football, which is speed,” McKinstry says. Sky Sports.

“If you talk to any defender, regardless of level, what they hate to play against is real pace. You don’t need all the tricks in the world. If you can push the ball into space and have that acceleration to get past someone, it causes a lot of problems for opponents.”

Minteh is fourth in number of attempted dribbles in the Premier League this season and 11th in successful interceptions. There were also a couple of goals, in the win over Tottenham and late on against Leicester. He has that rare talent for getting things started.

Perhaps surprisingly given the quality within Hurzeler’s squad, it is Minteh who has the most expected assists per 90 minutes of any Brighton player this season. It is the 20-year-old winger, not Kaoru Mitoma or Joao Pedro, who most often creates chances.

There are aspects of his game that he still needs to work on, that’s for sure. Sometimes it can be messy, everything happens so fast that the necessary precision, especially in the last third of the pitch where decision-making is so important, is not always visible.

It’s less of a surprise, for example, to find that he loses the ball more often than his teammates. While Minteh attempts a lot of dribbles, the percentage of them that are actually successful is among the lowest among the Premier League’s best dribblers.

But isn’t that to be expected? Minteh did not arrive from the first league academy. He only signed for Danish club OB in the summer of 2022, where he was involved sparingly before impressing at Feyenoord on loan from Newcastle last season.

Brighton were paying big money for a player whose potential Eddie Howe insisted he believed in but was forced to sell for financial reasons – but it was still potential they were buying. It is encouraging that Minteh is determined to improve.

Even before he made his debut, Hurzeler described him as a “role model” for the rest of the group because of how he accepted demands, such as counter-pressing. Minteh are now in the top 10 for possession in the final third per 90 minutes.

“Yankuba has that real determination,” McKinstry says.

“Sometimes the challenge for a coach with young players breaking into professional football is that with celebrities, finances, it’s easy to get distracted. But with young Gambian players, including Yankuba, there’s a steely determination.

“We always talk about the challenges of the academy system in Europe, where players maybe get everything that is given to them very early, when you look at a lot of young Gambian players, they were still in The Gambia until they were 17 or 18 years old.

“These players played in the domestic league, which is basically an amateur league, so they had to fight with adults. They are there at the age of 17, they are beaten around, they have to learn how to survive football in that environment.

“The nice thing is that when they come to a Premier League club, a Bundesliga club, a Serie A club, they don’t take it for granted. They’ve already experienced the hard edge of football so in this nice, great environment, they know they have to work for it.

“When our young players lose, they hate it, they absolutely hate it. There are no smiles, no laughter and no jokes if they didn’t get the result they wanted, which, again, is refreshing as a coach to have that mindset among your young players.”

And Minteh remains a young player, he will only turn 21 in July. There are only seven players younger than him who have started as many Premier League games this season, and all but two are English. The learning curve was steep. But he is learning.

“You can’t swim in that ocean of sharks that is the Premier League without being very demanding of yourself,” adds McKinstry. “He made a good start, but the most important person who needs to know that it’s just the beginning is him. And he knows that.

“He knows he’s only 20 years old and he still has a lot of work to do to continue on this path, just to be in that starting eleven. He’s already an important player but he wants to learn as much as he can from the people around him and that’s so refreshing.”

Expect Minteh to take the next step in 2025.

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