“Grabbed my chance with both hands”: Bilal El Khannouss beats Charles De Ketelaere with minimal difference and is ‘Promise of the Year’ | The Golden Boot

El Khannouss was the absolute top favorite in the category for best young player. However, few will have taken Charles De Ketelaere into account. The Red Devil, who exchanged Club Brugge for AC Milan in the summer, took all his 354 points in the first round of voting and came so close to Genk’s teenager, who gathered 355 votes. All collected in the second round of voting.

For El Khannouss, the prize means a new award for a remarkable advance. The Brussels Moroccan played in the Racing Genk youth a few months ago, but broke through completely under Wouter Vrancken. In the meantime, the playmaker can no longer be ignored from the starting team of the leader. It even earned him a World Cup selection for Morocco. He was allowed to start in the consolation final against Croatia. Today he can no longer walk the streets in Morocco and even going to a restaurant with his friends in Brussels is no longer an option.

His guts, fabulous technique and through passes have attracted interest from the biggest clubs in the world. Manchester City and Napoli, among others, emphatically follow the technician. Genk wants to keep him for another year and a half and let him go for a Belgian transfer record. In between, they prefer to win a few prizes together.

So pressure on the shoulders, but El Khannouss seems immune to that. When he entered the Antwerp Expo hall, he shrugged his shoulders. “Am I nervous? But no, why?” It typifies the bravura of El Khannouss. Never nervous, always confident. Not afraid of the devil. Very conscious about his career too. It is not for nothing that he exchanged Anderlecht for RC Genk at the age of fifteen.

He received the prize from his mother Karima Ben Assa. “I am very proud of him,” she said. “He has shown great things.” Moroccan national coach Walid Regragui congratulated him via a video message. “Bilal, you deserve this. You started the season strong and I’m glad you were with our squad in Qatar. We all hope that you continue to develop in this way.”

El Khannouss looked emotional when he received his prize. “I didn’t know my mom would be here, so it makes it very nice again,” it sounded. “In six months time, things have gone very quickly for me. I was still playing at the Genk U18 back then. In the preparation I was allowed to train with the first team and I just did my thing. I got chances from the coach and played a World Cup. I am very proud of this. It was also very close with Charles, I saw.”

“I want to thank my family, my friends, my teammates, everyone at the club and my agents. It is also thanks to them that I am here. Will I celebrate my prize in a special way? No, that’s not in it. I’m going home soon and get some sleep. We have tomorrow off and I will probably just hang out with my friends. I’ve already had a lot of messages and it’s nice to feel that appreciation, but in the end it’s also about collective prizes,” said El Khannouss, just before he was congratulated by Golden Boot Simon Mignolet and his compatriot Tarik Tissoudali.