Minteh magic in 2025? Brighton winger's massive potential

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

A positive performance off the bench in the Seagulls’ come-from-behind draw at Aston Villa puts him firmly in Fabian Hurzeler’s thoughts for the visit of Arsenal on Saturday. The Gunners are in form but any opponent will struggle to deal with a flying Minteh.

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

Johnathan McKinstry is Minteh’s head coach at international level with The Gambia. This ability to run away from people is special. In essence, he has got the most important trait for an attacking player in football and that is speed,” McKinstry tells Sky Sports.

“If you talk to any defenders, no matter the level, what they hate playing 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 go past somebody, it causes a lot of problems for opponents.”

Minteh ranks fourth for attempted dribbles in the Premier League this season and 11th for successful crosses. There have been a couple of goals too, in the win over Tottenham and late on at Leicester. He has that rare talent for making things happen.

Perhaps surprisingly given the quality within Hurzeler’s squad, it is Minteh who has the highest 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 creates chances most frequently.

There are aspects of his game that he must still work on, that is clear. It can be untidy at times, everything happening so quickly that the precision required, particularly in the final third of the pitch where decision making is so important, is not always evident.

It is less surprising, for example, to discover that he loses the ball more frequently than his team-mates too. While Minteh attempts many dribbles, the percentage of them that are actually successful is among the lowest of the Premier League’s top dribblers.

But then, is this not to be expected? Minteh has not arrived from a Premier League academy. He only signed for Danish club OB in the summer of 2022, involved sparingly there before impressing at Feyenoord on loan from Newcastle last season.

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

Even before making his debut, Hurzeler described him as a “role model” to others in the group because of how he had embraced the demands, such as counter-pressing. Minteh now ranks in the top 10 for possessions won in the final third per 90 minutes.

“Yankuba has that real determination,” says McKinstry.

Sometimes, the challenge for a coach with young players who break into professional football is that with the celebrity, the finances, it is easy to become distracted. But with the young players from The Gambia, Yankuba included, there is a steely determination.

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

“These players were playing in the domestic league, which is basically an amateur league, so they were having to fight it out with adults. They are there at 17 years of age, getting kicked around, having to learn how to survive football in that environment.

“The nice thing is that when they arrive at a Premier League club, a Bundesliga club, a Serie A club, they do not take it for granted. They have already experienced the tough edge of football so in this nice, shiny environment, they know they need to work for it.

“Our young players, when they lose, they hate it, they absolutely hate it. There are no smiles, they are not laughing and joking if they have not got the result they want, which, again, is a refreshing thing as a coach to have that mindset within your young players.”

And Minteh remains a young player, not 21 until July. There are only seven players younger than him who have started as many Premier League games this season and all but two of them are English. The learning curve has been steep. But he is learning.

“You do not swim in that ocean of sharks that the Premier League is without being highly demanding of yourself,” adds McKinstry. “He has made a good start, but the most important person who needs to know it is only a start is him. And he does know it.

“He knows that he is only 20 and there is so much more work to do to continue on this path, just to be in that starting eleven. He is an important player already but he wants to learn as much as he can from the people are around him and that is so refreshing.”

Expect Minteh to take the next step in 2025.

Watch Brighton vs Arsenal live on Saturday Night Football from 5pm on Sky Sports Premier League; kick-off 5.30pm