Watching it can make you dizzy.
Forge FC’s rotating up-field offence weaves in and out like a high-tech loom. So many different players get touches and return passes that it sometimes feels like there are too many men on the pitch.
As the 2-0 Forge prepare to host the winless Valour FC on Saturday afternoon (4 p.m.), they have the league assist leader in Tristan Borges (who also has a goal) and the only two CPL players with two goals so far: David Choinière and Béni Badibanga.
Not only has Badibanga connected in each of the Hammers’ two wins so far, but he also scored in the last CPL game last year, tying that brilliant extra-time 2-1 victory in the North Star Cup playoff championship with a classic attacker’s finish. Since debuting with Forge early last August, Badibanga has found his full stride and has five goals in just 14 games against CPL opposition. Three of those in the last three games.
The 28-year-old native of the Democratic Republic of Congo seems to be getting better as time moves on, which is a double-sided coin for Hamilton: he increases their chances of winning; but increases his chances of attracting an offer from, say, an MLS team.
Badibanga has multiple talents and interests, not just on the pitch. He has played for pro club teams in Belgium, the Netherlands, Morocco, and France; he’s fluent in English, a Congolese dialect, and French; he’s a fashion model who has been featured in the prestigious Paris Fashion Week showcasing the “fast clothes” of renowned design company Fashion Nova; and he pays attention to politics because his father, Samy Badibanga, is a former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the vice-president of the country’s senate last year, and recently won election to another position.
Badibanga is not content unless he has a lot of irons in the fire. He says that in Europe, people tend to concentrate on having just one high-level pursuit at a time, but he prefers far more variety. He recalls that when he was young and living in northern France, he was equally proficient at basketball as he was at soccer, but his mother “took a knife to my basketball and stabbed it into bits.” She didn’t realize his hoop skills and wanted him to focus on footy.
It was that magnetic pull of diversification that attracted him to the north shore of Lake Ontario. During last year’s Paris Fashion Week, one of Badibanga’s cousins in Montreal said he knew Forge FC assistant coach Kyt Selaidopoulos. So Badibanga watched some Forge games online, loved their offensive style and winning mentality and the crowd at Tim Hortons Field, and eventually signed here.
“My cousin knew I was attracted to North American culture just in the way I live, the way I see things,” Badibanga says. “In Europe, you do one thing and you do it 100 percent. But since I was young I have liked to do different things. Creative things.
“The way I play is the way I am. If I feel okay with what I’m doing… then I do it.”
His father was a businessman for a multinational Congolese company, negotiating contracts in the mining industry, and Badibanga and his five siblings (one of his brothers has since died) lived in London, then northern France near Lille. Then it was off to Belgium, in ‘Waterloo –“The ‘real’ one, where Napoleon was defeated.”
He was a quick study, walking at seven months, speaking before he was one, playing soccer at the age of three, and in his early years of age-class futsal and soccer, playing with a cohort that was two years older.
“Then I started getting transferred up and my father was always making sure that I didn’t go too fast,” he recalls. “Sometimes your body can do something but your brain’s not ready to do it. He wanted me to go step by step.
“When I turned pro at 18, it was a little too fast.”
When he was 15, Badibanga’s family returned to Congo, so he struck out on his own, was enrolled at boarding school, and worked his way up soccer’s chain, playing youth academy at Standard Liege, then making the first team in 2015. He was loaned to a couple of other teams and eventually played for a handful of Belgian pro clubs, a Dutch side, a first-tier Moroccan team, and then back to Belgium’s third-tier squad RAAL. But he announced he’d leave the club before the second half of the 2022-23 season and looked across the Atlantic toward Hamilton.
“You have to adjust when you change teammates, and last year I had that,” he says. “I was focusing on just understanding what and how I had to do things defensively and how I could get the ball during the game. Now, I understand it, and it’s more natural, and I can focus on how I can finish or make someone else finish.
“Now everything is fluid in the game and with teammates. I know if I move there, he will move there.”
No better example than the delicious sculpture of the winning goal of the 2-1 victory over Cavalry in the home opener. He and Tristan Borges combined on a perfect 1-2 that bordered on the psychic, with Badibanga directing the finish.
“It’s what we work on all the time in training,” he says. “And if it was Bekks (Kyle Bekker), Dave, Daniel (Parra), Ali (Hojabrpour), it would be the same.”
Badibanga will try to make it four games in a row Saturday against Valour FC, who are struggling at the moment and haven’t scored in the last 156 minutes since Jordan Swibel opened their season with an early goal against Vancouver FC. After that, they’ve given up six straight goals in losing to the two B.C. teams, who are tied with Forge with a full six points from two matches.
It’s a tough schedule start for Valour, who lost some key players, open the season with eight straight matches on the road while the new field surface is installed at Princess Auto Stadium. And, it’s public knowledge that Valour has at least listened to inquiries about purchasing the team, which can be nerve-wracking for players.
That, though, can also make a team circle its wagons and play with a certain ferocity, but Badibanga says that Forge doesn’t play to the opposition, they try to make the opposition play to them.
“Every time I step on the pitch it’s to win,” he says. ‘I don’t really care about the form of the other team. I look to see where the spaces are and how I can take advantage.”