After dazzling in debut RSL season, N'Koudou firing Damac once more | OneFootball

The pressures of playing at the top level can be tough to manage for even the very best players. But for some, as tense as the environment is, football is still ultimately a game to enjoy.

Damac’s Georges-Kevin N’Koudou fits into that category. For the 29-year-old, football is fun, and it has certainly seemed to be that way since he arrived in Saudi Arabia.

The French-born Cameroon international had previously played at the upper echelons of the game. He plied his trade in his native France for Ligue 1 clubs Nantes, Monaco and Marseille, while he also represented Tottenham Hotspur and Burnley in the English Premier League.

And, for the four years before landing in Khamis Mushait, N’Koudou experienced the pressure-cooker environment of Turkish football with one of Istanbul’s biggest clubs, Besiktas.

“It is the pleasure of playing before anything else, the same way I played with my friends as a kid or as people play at the weekend with their mates. This is why I smile too,” he said in a recent interview with Arab News.

N’Koudou has good reason to smile, too, given the form he has displayed for Damac.

Joining right on the eve of the 2023-24 Roshn Saudi League season, the winger proved an instant hit and, by the midway point in his debut campaign, he had scored 13 goals, making it by far his most prolific time of his career.

N’Koudou did find the going tougher in the second half of the season, something he attributes to the extra workload of contesting the African Cup of Nations during the break, but anyone who thought he had lost his touch was sorely mistaken.

Having conceded to feeling tired towards the end of the campaign, N’Koudou used that summer as an opportunity to refresh and recharge the batteries ahead of the new season.

Whatever he did, it worked; after failing to score in his final 12 appearances of 2023-24, it took N’Koudou only three games into 2024-25 to get on the scoresheet, courtesy of a brace against Al Okhdood in September.

Clearly, those goals sparked something inside him. Since then, the goals have been flowing, with N’Koudou registering six in his last eight RSL outings before the break.

It once again places him as the league’s top scorer outside its leading marksman from the perceived bigger teams: Al Hilal’s Aleksandar Mitrovic, Al Nassr’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Al Ittihad’s Karim Benzema.

As a wideman, or sometimes deployed as a No.10, compared to an out-and-out striker, it speaks to N’Koudou’s talent.

For a player that had never notched double figures in a season before he made the move at Damac, one 15-goal campaign was impressive. But to back it up would be doubly so.

However, for as good as N’Koudou’s form has been again this season, the same can’t be said of the team, with Damac sitting 10th following a run of two wins from their past seven.

That prompted the club last week to part ways with manager Cosmin Contra after almost two years at the helm, the man N’Koudou credits for his success at Damac.

“I feel free and can enjoy my game,” he said. “The coach helped me a lot and that’s why I think everything happened for me. I scored 15 goals last season and hope I can do the same this season too.”

Contra has been replaced by Portuguese manager Nuno Almeida, a previous assistant coach at Sporting CP, Zamalek and Al Sadd. While a new manager will always bring new ideas and a fresh perspective, in N’Koudou, he’ll find a player already at the top of his game.

What's more, one with a steely focus for more goals, but one always with a smile on his face.