Boasting pace, power and presence at a height of about 6ft 3in, online footage of Chermiti playing academy football at Sporting depicts a man among boys.<\/p>\n
“I remember he scored a beautiful goal against Benfica, a bicycle kick,” recalls Coelho, who coached the Rangers striker at under-15s and under-19s.<\/p>\n
“It was the first time I’d seen Youssef. Against Benfica, all goals are special, but a bicycle kick from a 14-year-old boy isn’t normal.”<\/p>\n
What is normal is his character. Coelho says Chermiti, who has played and scored for Portugal at almost every youth level, is “a normal boy with great talent”.<\/p>\n
“He really made a name for himself in the Sporting academy with the under-15s,” the 36-year-old adds. <\/p>\n
“We won the national championship and he was one of the best players in the league. He scored 12 goals in the last 10 games.<\/p>\n
“He’s very tall but so strong when he’s running into space. When he has space behind defenders, he’s very good.<\/p>\n
“In the box, he has good mobility, but his best behaviour is attacking the back post – he’s so, so good at that.”<\/p>\n
Chermiti’s reputation only strengthened as he progressed through the age groups and he was promised a pathway by now Manchester United boss Amorin.<\/p>\n
He was handed his first-team debut at 18 off the bench in a draw with rivals Benfica in January 2023 and scored his first goal a month later in a 1-0 win away to Rio Ave.<\/p>\n
Chermiti netted again in the following match, a defeat by Porto, with opposition head coach Sergio Conceicao hailing him as “a young player of great quality”.<\/p>\n
Among Chermiti’s 10 Sporting starts, Amorin also trusted him to lead the line in the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final away to Juventus that ended in a 1-0 defeat.<\/p>\n
In a relatively small sample size of 839 league minutes – the equivalent of about nine full 90-minute matches – Chermiti ranked high in multiple attacking metrics in his breakthrough campaign.<\/p>\n
On a per-90 basis, his expected goals, touches in the opposition box and aerial duel success placed him among the top forwards in Portugal’s top flight.<\/p>\n
When you consider he was a teenager at the time, those numbers become more impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boasting pace, power and presence at a height of about 6ft 3in, online footage of Chermiti playing academy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-139597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}