AFCON 2019 Bronze medal winner with Super Eagles of Nigeria, Moses Simon, reached a new milestone in his career after he was voted into the Nantes Team of the Decade in a poll conducted by the club’s fans.
The 24-year-old Nigeria international joined the Canaries on loan from Levante ahead of the 2019-20 season and made an immediate impact, having a hand in 17 goals (nine goals, eight assists) in 30 competitive outings.
Ten of these goal involvements came in Ligue 1 where he scored five goals and provided another five assists as Nantes finished in 13th place, 14 points clear of the relegation zone with the season cancelled after 28 matchdays because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Simon scored goals in wins against Amiens and Nice and a 3-3 draw at Dijon, while all his assists earned Nantes maximum points against Montpellier, Toulouse, Dijon, Nimes and Saint-Etienne.
All of these were good enough for manager Christian Gourcuff to deem it fit to sign Simon on a permanent basis, which was announced last week.
It caps off a fantastic moment for the former Gent player who was earlier voted as the Nantes Player of the Season by the club’s fans as well.
Simon was flanked in a four-man midfield by Vincent Bessat, who made 140 appearances between 2011 and 2015, Valentin Rongier, who started out with Nantes in 2014 before joining last year, and Jordan Veretout, who began his career with the Canaries and featured 143 times from 2011 to 2015.
In the two-man attack was Filip Djordjevic and Emiliano Sala. The former spent six years at the Stade de la Beaujoire, scoring 67 goals and providing 18 assists in 193 competitive games before moving to Lazio, while the latter netted 48 times before he died in a plane crash when travelling to Wales to complete a move to Cardiff City on January 2019.
The defence is made up of Lima at left-back, Diego Carlos and Nicolas Pallois at centre-back, with Leo Dubois at right-back while Remy Riou was the goalkeeper.
An astonishing feat for Simon in this selection is that he is the only player to have played just a season for the French club with the others spending up to four years there.
The Africa Cup of Nations bronze medallist is also the player with the least outings (30) while most of the others appeared more than 100 times.
