• Traore is a physical marvel of a footballer; built like a middleweight boxer (although incredibly he says he doesn’t lift weights) yet with the lightning speed of an Olympic sprinter.
• Traore regularly played above his age level and skipped three groups altogether in 2013 when fast-tracked into the club’s B team, which competed in Spain’s second tier.
Image: / REUTERS
Micah Richards laughs and shakes his head as he recalls the only time he challenged Adama Traore to a foot race. “What was I thinking? he exclaims.
It was 2015 and the pair were team-mates at Aston Villa. Both signed that summer, Richards the experienced and internationally-capped team captain, Traore a largely unknown 19-year-old rookie from Barcelona.
Richards knew his teenage opponent was fast. He’d seen as much already. But he was no slouch himself, having built a career on the back of his pace and power. And besides, how badly could it go?
“Honestly, he beat me by about 20 yards,” he explains with another shake of the head. “We were warming up before training and I was really warm so I thought ‘yeah, I’m gonna see how quick this guy really is’. I always fancied myself to be fast. No-one I had faced had really out-paced me. The only people I had struggled with on a totally different level were Theo Walcott, Gabby Agbonlahor and Aaron Lennon.
“But Adama was way quicker than even them in their prime. I was just like ‘wow’. My confidence was shot after that. I never wanted to race him again.”
Richards needn’t be too self-critical, though. He is not alone.
Traore is a physical marvel of a footballer; built like a middleweight boxer (although incredibly he says he doesn’t lift weights) yet with the lightning speed of an Olympic sprinter. He’d look just at home weaving effortlessly through NFL defences as well as terrorising Premier League ones, which he has done throughout 2019-20 - his statement season in English football for Wolves.
Unplayable at times, he has scored five goals, assisted 10 more and played a vital role in numerous others by drawing fearful defenders into his orbit.
He has destroyed reigning champions Manchester City twice and is one of the few individuals this season to have given Jurgen Klopp’s runaway champions-elect Liverpool an almighty scare. City boss Pep Guardiola has likened him to a motorcycle such is the difficulty opponents have in stopping him and, following Liverpool’s 2-1 win at Molineux in January, Klopp simply described him as “unplayable”.
High praise indeed, but it wasn’t always the case. There was a time when Traore was likened to a motor vehicle in much more disparaging terms.
It might sound incredible considering his current hulk-like physique, but the young Traore was extremely skinny, and while the pace and dribbling skills were in place from a young age, they would more often than not lead him down blind alleys.
Born in L’Hospitalet, a suburb of Barcelona in the shadows of the Nou Camp, to Malian parents who moved to Spain in the 1980s, Traore joined Barca’s La Masia academy aged eight and rose rapidly through their ranks.
He regularly played above his age level and skipped three groups altogether in 2013 when fast-tracked into the club’s B team, which competed in Spain’s second tier.
He also gained international recognition with the Spain Under-16 team, and there was no surprise when he started to attract interest from elsewhere — Andre-Villas Boas, then in charge of Spurs, was among the crowd as Traore appeared in a B team match against Deportivo La Coruna in October 2013.
Stepping up to the first team was only a matter of time. He became Barca’s ninth-youngest player when he came off the bench as a substitute for Neymar in a home victory over Granada on 23 November 2013 and netted his first goal the following season - a solo effort in a Copa del Rey rout of Huesca. Marca described it as “the kind that Messi scores”.
Then his lightning-fast progression hit a brick wall. Newly appointed first-team manager Luis Enrique declined to call him up more regularly, and the frustrating inconsistency of his end product started to draw criticism.
Barca’s B team manager at the time was Jordi Vinyals, who later described the youthful Traore’s struggles to effectively express his talent by telling El Mundo he was ‘like a Formula 1 car driven by a child. The machine dominated him.’
More pointedly, in February 2015 Vinyals publicly questioned Traore by noting: “Sometimes he tries to win the war all by himself. Little by little, he will learn when he has to make the individual plays that only he can do, and when he has to play for the team.”
That 2014-15 campaign ended badly, with Barca’s B team suffering an ignominious relegation amid suspicions that some of the team’s rising stars could have done more to prevent their fate.
By the summer of 2015, Traore had reached a crossroads. Enrique had made it clear he was not part of the first team’s immediate future, so he had to decide. Remain patient and head back to Barca’s B team, now playing in the third tier, or leave his boyhood club in search of regular first-team football elsewhere?
The decision soon came. It was time to head to England.
“I’d seen clips of him before he joined Villa,” says Richards, who was already boss Tim Sherwood’s new team captain. “The manager pulled me aside and said to me ‘look at this kid here’.
“He showed me some highlights of him playing for Barcelona’s B team and he was running past players in a way I had never seen before, ever. Tim said, ‘we’ve got a chance to get him, what do you think?’ and I was like, ‘if you can get him, do everything you can’.”
Get him they did. Villa paid a reported £7m to make him one of 12 signings that summer designed to hugely improve a side that had avoided relegation by just three points the season before. Richards and his team-mates soon discovered what everyone at Barca already knew - here was a potential world-beater undermined by notable flaws.
“He was only 19 when he joined, so of course he was raw,” continues Richards. “In training, I knew he was faster than me so I would just show him wide because the quality of his crossing wasn’t great. He wouldn’t just kick the ball straight out of play, but he didn’t have a pinpoint cross on him. But we realised that, day by day, he was getting better and better, so we couldn’t just let him go wide anymore, because he was just embarrassing everyone.”
Ultimately, Traore’s first season in England was a failure; hampered by injuries, adjusting to a new country and culture, the language barrier and a change of manager, which saw Sherwood make way for Remi Garde.
He made only 10 Premier League appearances as Villa were relegated with a measly 17 points and three wins all campaign.
He would play just 16 minutes for the club in the Championship the following season before leaving for then Premier League Middlesbrough in a swap deal for Albert Adomah. Boro’s boss Aitor Karanka knew of Traore from the Spanish youth system and felt he could harness his ability. While recognising his clear talents, the battered and bruised Villa supporters offered little protest to his departure.
“The season he was at Villa, he was actually quite good, it’s just he got an ankle injury that kept him out for a couple of months,” adds Richards. “I remember speaking to Villa fans about him who’d say they’d rather have Traore on the pitch, getting them off their seats, than watching us play in a more negative way. The Villa fans knew what they had, I just don’t think anyone thought then that he would be doing this well now.”
Things would get worse before they got better for Traore. He provided just a solitary assist in 27 games in 2016-17 as Boro were relegated at the end of a season in which Karanka lost his job. He then rarely got a look in under the Spaniard’s successor, Garry Monk, before he too was sacked, 23 games into the following Championship season.
However, Monk’s departure, and the appointment of Tony Pulis to replace him, would be the spark that ignited Traore’s career in England.
A 2017 study found Traore to be the best dribbler in Europe — but that season Middlesbrough were relegated from the Premier League
Pulis had seen Traore during the winger’s Villa days when he was manager of West Brom and identified in him the qualities around which he could build his Boro team, so long as he could be made to believe in himself.
“I knew he was really talented but until I got there and we trained I didn’t realise how good, how quick he was,” Pulis tells BBC Sport. “He had fantastic pace and balance but he was a young footballer who lacked the confidence to go out and play. I took him in my office on a regular basis and spoke to him. I have worked with players and you tell them something and they look at you with glazed eyes and you’re not getting anything back from them, but Adama always wanted to improve.
“He is a massive football supporter, wants to learn and get better and that came through straight away. Picking him every week, encouraging him every week, even when he did things that weren’t brilliant, helped him. I had trust in him and him in me. If I didn’t think he was playing with the confidence he needed, and he was playing on the opposite side of the pitch (to the dugout), I would bring him to my side and encourage him and talk to him while the game was going on.”
In 22 games under Pulis, Traore scored five goals, provided eight assists and did things few had seen before in English football, never mind the second tier.
Exhibit A: the viral clip from Pulis’ first game in charge, at home to Villa on December 30, 2017, in which Rushian Hepburn-Murphy breaks away down the right and appears uncatchable until Traore appears into shot, moving as if on fast-forward to motor past the increasingly deflated young winger and collect the ball with 10 yards to spare.
Boro would miss out on promotion, losing in the play-off semi-finals to Traore’s former club, but the winger cleaned up at the club’s end-of-season awards, winning fans’ player of the year, young player of the year and players’ player of the year.
A move back to the Premier League was inevitable. It materialised in the form of a club record £18m transfer to Wolves in August 2018.
True to form, Traore’s first season in the Premier League for his new club was something of a disappointment. Familiar inconsistencies emerged during the process of acclimatising to his new team.
Thankfully, though, Wolves’ success as a side means Traore is finally getting a sophomore top-flight campaign and, like with Pulis at Boro, he has a manager in Nuno Espirito Santo who knows how best to engage and motivate him.
They are delighted with his progress at Molineux, but also not surprised.
Speak to anyone at the club and they will wax lyrical about a humble, quiet, kind and remarkably mature 24-year-old, devoted to his family and faith, whose size belies his softly spoken manner.
They are also struck by the fact that one of the fastest men on a Premier League football pitch moves so slowly off it; always happy to talk, always eager to help and, crucially, more often than not the last one off the training ground.
One key aspect that he has honed during all those hours at training ground Compton Park is a continuation of a lesson he learned during his time at Middlesbrough — working with former British Olympic sprinter Darren Campbell to use his speed intelligently.
Campbell advised him not to run at full speed, to dial it back to 70% to give himself time to decide what to do next and greater options to choose from. It would also give his team-mates chance to catch up.
Observers at Wolves believe this approach is even more pronounced this campaign, with Traore noticeably halting in his tracks at times to assess a situation before going again, with a more effective game plan and safe in the knowledge that he probably has the beating of his marker a second time.
This season he has completed 132 dribbles, more than any other player in the Premier League. Only Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha, with 123, is even in three figures.
Matt Doherty operates down the same right wing for Wolves as Traore and admits he has modified his game so the side can better utilise his team-mates unique talent.
“Adama is a confidence player,” the Republic of Ireland international tells BBC Sport. “Maybe he just had a bit more love this year. He got a good pre-season behind him and his end product has really improved. Everybody knows the pace and power he has is unplayable, but he is a different beast now.
“I don’t keep up with him, he is so quick. Last season I was going forward a lot more but this season I have been coming more inside and linking the play with him. When I fling it out wide to him I am trying to get in the box because I know he is going to skin the full-back and get the cross in. When you have someone of that talent you just give him the ball.”
The next step for Traore is to introduce himself to the senior international stage, where he still has the option of representing Mali or Spain. A decision will likely be forced from him before this March’s international break.
Should he choose the latter it would only intensify the speculation surrounding his club future, with reports suggesting former side Barcelona and La Liga rivals Real Madrid are both keen on signing him this summer. Inevitably, he has also been linked with two of the Premier League sides he has terrorised this season - the division’s leading lights Liverpool and Manchester City.
For this season at least, Wolves’ rivals in the top flight are still faced with the same dilemma on the pitch - how do you actually stop Traore? We’ll let a man with first-hand experience of going up against him answer that one.
“I don’t think anyone can handle that raw pace,” says Richards. “You have to try to stop it at source, and stop the people playing passes into him. Or, if you are up against him, you draw a foul as soon as you possibly can because if he gets into his stride, there is no player on the planet who can match him. Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk is the best centre-half in the world at the moment and even he can’t deal with him. No-one can.”