Anthony Elanga is Eddie Howe’s Allan Saint-Maximin 2.0 | OneFootball

The Anthony Elanga £52m plus £3m potential add-ons arrival from Forest is, for me, the final proof that Eddie Howe meant it, when he said he really didn’t want to have to let go of Allan Saint-Maximin and wouldn’t have done so in a PSR-free world.

For Newcastle that summer of 2023 was a sacrifice for United in the same way Elanga has had to make sacrifices to get to a better place in his own journey.

We could say Anthony Elanga already holds in his locker, at a younger age, the kind of end product that evaded Maxi in his prime.

But a deeper look reveals the same kind of player: One who’s real value to the team can’t be neatly quantified by final third statistics.

The Banker in the Chaos

At first glance, the Anthony Elanga ranking as the third highest Premier League player for assists last season is more than just impressive; it’s arguably the meal ticket that won him a move to Newcastle (and a second shot at Champions League football).

These are the kind of stats that get you broadcasted all over social media and generate a buzz around your name. But the foundation of Elanga’s assists column was made from set-pieces – almost half (five of eleven)of the young Swede’s assists in the 2024/25 league season came from corners and free kicks.

Elanga should be unreservedly applauded for finding this banker in his game, because it’s saved his standing in the Forest first eleven throughout his stay at the club.

When I looked at the Nottingham Forest fans‘ impressions of Anthony Elanga over the last two years, there have been doubts amongst some Forest supporters about the player in the final third, during his time at the club.

Plenty of other Forest fans though come to Elanga’s defence on this front, especially when Nottingham Forest play more on the counter, speed on the break a huge game plan involving the winger.

Summed up perfectly in mid-September 2024, an away win at Anfield, a through-ball from Elanga to play Chris Wood in on goal for the winner, massive favourites Liverpool slain on their own turf.

In short, a win against the odds where Forest were the unlikely lads, where they most prospered last season, Anthony Elanga playing a massive part in that.

That Anfield win was no different to how the talented Swede youngster earned his way into the Forest first eleven back in the autumn of 2023 after arriving from Manchester United that summer, a time when Forest were battling relegation and being offered plenty of space on the break by the opposition.

By the time Nottingham’s second season came around, opponents gave them a different challenge – less space on the break, more respect given to Forest as a unit, and an invite to come and play on the ball rather than counter-attack.

Nuno’s men weren’t losing those sorts of games but they weren’t free-scoring either.

Elanga also wasn’t looking that decisive in the final third when invited onto opponents who sat back, but this is a common theme around players who live in a different gear to the rest of their peers (let alone the rest of us watching on the sidelines).

It’s very easy to judge pacey players as “all legs no brains” when they’re not racking up the game-winning numbers at the end of their runs, but very few players (and ex-players) can honestly say they know what it’s like to have to make decisions at high speed.

And when we say high speed: We’re talking about controlling the ball at over 24 miles per hour, with an average of less than 1 second for every touch on the ball during that sprint – as Elanga demonstrated to devastating effect when he fast-forwarded to one April 1st 2025 afternoon spent tearing his old Manchester United club to shreds.

Forest were defending a Manchester United corner in their own defensive end that day but, nine seconds later, Elanga had the ball in the back of Man Utd’s net for the game’s only (and winning) goal. Probably the most impressive part of that winner was that Elanga had carried the ball all 85 metres of the way himself.

It was April Fool’s come home to roost. The butt of every joke on display was the state of Elanga’s old team Manchester United; themselves relegation candidates for the 2024-25 season while Anthony Elanga was busy leading Forest’s charge near the top of the table.

That April winner also represented Elanga firmly turning Forest fan opinion in his favour; a feat that, to Anthony’s credit, he admitted came about in spite of a rough start to last season, when he cut an April interview to the BBC just ten days after his revenge tour on former club Man Utd:

“Looking at my game and what I can try and do better because, I didn’t have one of the best starts to the season, that is why I can’t say I have done really well. I can still improve and get better, can still start the season even better, but, at the end of the day, it is not about how you start but how you finish.”

Forest themselves would, admittedly, finish last season short of their ideal expectations. But if Elanga had spent his debut season at Forest starting with a bang and fading out by New Year with a whimper, the Swede had reversed that trend just 12 months later.

In December 2024 to January 2025, Elanga went on a surreal tear of three goals and three assists in six games as Forest took up second place in the league table at that time.

Elanga followed that form through with a hat-trick of assists in one Brighton game alone, where he was given a free role and license to run the Seagulls at will this past February (Forest winning 7-0). It felt like the kid Elanga had arrived on the stage as a man; he could not only break a game’s momentum but turn that momentum on its head, if given just 50 yards (or more) of space to wreak havoc.

But Elanga could also be accused, like momentum breaking-players before him, of being a streaky player. Whether those Allan Saint-Maximin types come across as a genius or a gigantic waste of space so often boils down to perception of end product, as a Forest fans noted:

“He’s back to playing on instinct. That’s so important for players like him. The temptation for modern coaches is to over-coach a player like that into not giving away the ball, but they’re at their best when you keep the game simple and just give them license to run. We had a player like that back in the day: Franz Carr. They frustrate and excite in equal measure. They’ll make a long run where they won’t pull off anything at the end of it, then they’ll make another run where they do. He’s a very instinctive player and probably needed a long time to get used to the shape and tactics Nuno wants to play. Some people just have to build pictures in their heads to figure out what’s going on and what they should do. And you have to allow players like that the time to play instinctively because they’ll do something brilliant sometimes.”

It’s not just a return to playing on instinct for Elanga, but a return to the instinct of signing maverick players for Newcastle United that’ll get any St James’ Park crowd believing in the magic at the end of a mazy run.

A lot of money gets spent in football to end up right back where you started, and whether that’s a positive from your seat, as a fan, depends on whether or not you liked what came before.

For me, the magic of players like ASM or Elanga is the chaos and unpredictability they represent with the ball at their feet. The willingness to take a defender on the outside, near the touchline, just as many times as the will to cut inside and deliver an inswinger or take a shot on goal.

These are the kinds of players no coach can instruct their defender to plan for ahead of time, unless that plan boils down to: “Just grab two teammates and try boxing him in – and pray he doesn’t release the ball to a teammate.”

Yet we’ve established there’s a pragmatic side to Elanga’s game – one he’s found at a relatively young age unlike Newcastle mavericks before him. He’s added the set-piece quality and delivery as a feather in his cap at just 23 years of age.

If you can’t always be that guy who runs the ball quicker than anyone else on the way to changing the scoreline, find other ways to be decisive on the scoreboard all the same.

Elanga looks like he’s spent 2025 achieving exactly that which, frankly, could mean his assist rate at Newcastle ends up going in either direction.

Newcastle United under Eddie Howe arguably haven’t been as clinical at offensive set pieces as they should be as a team, which could rob Anthony Elanga of a source of headline-grabbing end product to his game early in his Newcastle career in the worst case scenario.

On the other hand, United have just hired a set-piece specialist to the coaching staff in Martin Mark from Denmark. The Scandinavian addition could be a signal of intent from Newcastle to re-shape their set-piece identity around one of the more bankable assets of Elanga’s game.

That represents a practicality and forward planning that’s hopefully becoming Newcastle’s instinctive position as a club under the long-term stewardship of Eddie Howe. One where unpredictability and thinking on your feet, to keep the opposition off their balance, are consistent features both on and off the pitch.