● 2025/26 Premier League season — final stats. Man City finished 2nd. Source: Premier League official.
There is a phrase used constantly in football that almost never holds up to scrutiny: "he's two-footed." It gets said of decent players with a reliable left foot, or wingers who occasionally cut inside. Genuine two-footedness, where a player truly cannot be forced onto a weaker side, is vanishingly rare. Rayan Cherki might actually be one of them.
How Rare Is It?
Researchers have been arguing about how to define two-footedness for decades. A 2001 study by Carey et al. analysing the 1998 World Cup found almost zero genuinely two-footed players when defined by equal frequency of use. A later study by Bryson put the figure at 18% when defined more loosely as "equally strong with both feet." The gap between those two numbers tells you everything: most players who claim to be two-footed are just two-footed-enough.
The reality is that roughly 60% of professionals are right-footed, around 22% are left-footed, and the remainder sit somewhere in the grey area between.
Why It Matters for Attackers
Two-footedness is almost exclusively an attacking asset, and for good reason. Every defensive press has a direction: defenders funnel you onto your weaker side. Remove that option and the press breaks down entirely. For a defender, this rarely comes up. For an attacker in a tight 1v1, it is the difference between a shot and a lost ball.
The shooting angles double too. A right-footed winger on the left has to cut inside, a predictable move every defender reads. A two-footed player can shoot across goal from wide or cut in, and defenders cannot pre-commit. In tight spaces, a one-footed player buys half a second adjusting the ball to their stronger side. A two-footed player plays first time from either. At Premier League pace, that half second is everything.
Who Has It in the Premier League Right Now?
Genuinely balanced two-footedness is rare even among the elite. Opta data covering the last four Premier League seasons ranks players by the difference between their left and right-footed shot proportions. Jean-Philippe Mateta leads on 13.8%, and Anthony Elanga sits close behind with exactly five top-flight goals with each foot. Both are attackers. Of course they are.
This season, Cherki tops the entire Premier League when ranked by two-footedness across shots, crosses, passes and clearances combined. FBref — the sport's most authoritative statistical database — lists him as "Footed: Both," a classification so rare it barely appears elsewhere in their records.
Cherki's Numbers
In his final Ligue 1 season with Lyon, Cherki took 44 shots split almost evenly between feet. He passed with his left foot 56% of the time; only two players in the entire division were more balanced. He was taking corners with both feet in European competition before most teenagers had settled on a dominant side.
He scored his first senior goal for Lyon on 4 January 2020, aged 16 years and 140 days, the youngest player ever to do so for the club. Manchester City signed him in June 2025 for £31m. In 33 Premier League appearances this season — 19 starts, 1,786 minutes — he has 4 goals and 12 assists, an assists-per-90 rate of 0.60. He is 22.
Lamine Yamal is widely regarded as the best young player in the world right now. He is also still working on his right foot. Cherki already has both.
2025/26 Season at a Glance
| Metric | Value | Per 90 / Note |
|---|---|---|
| Appearances (starts) | 33 (19) | 1,786 mins |
| Goals | 4 | 0.20 per 90 |
| Assists | 12 | 0.60 per 90 |
| Goals + Assists | 16 | 0.81 per 90 |
| Shots | 54 | 13 on target (24.1%) |
| Crosses | 31 | 32% completion rate |
| Fouls committed | 17 | — |
| Goal difference on pitch | +22 | +1.13 per 90 |
Source: Premier League official. 2025/26 final figures.
What the Shot Data Actually Shows
Here is where honesty is important. Of Cherki's 54 Premier League shots this season, 36 came from his right foot and 18 from his left — a 67%/33% split. That is not 50/50. By shots alone, he is not technically equal with both feet in the Premier League this season.
But that framing misses what makes him unusual. Shots are heavily influenced by position and opportunity — a player stationed out wide will naturally take more crosses than shots with the far foot, and penalty-box moments dictate which foot gets used based on which side the ball arrives from. The more revealing numbers are in creation and ball-carrying. Cherki generated 60 chances this season with no discernible preference for which side he set up from. His dribble success rate of 48% holds because defenders cannot force him onto a weaker side in the first place.
His Ligue 1 data with Lyon told the clearest story: 44 shots split almost evenly between feet, and pass balance that put him in the top two in the division by symmetry. The Premier League shot split may reflect City's positional system more than his actual capabilities. The wider picture — crossing from both wings, creating chances without adjusting stance, carrying the ball past defenders in either direction — is what puts him in a different category to players who simply have a reliable weaker foot.
FBref — widely regarded as the most thorough statistical database in football — classifies him simply as "Footed: Both." That designation is vanishingly rare on the platform. It is not a loose description; it is the site's own shorthand for a player where the data genuinely does not separate one foot from the other across all actions tracked.
One to Watch at the World Cup
The 2026 World Cup could be the stage where the wider world properly notices Cherki. France carry the usual weight of expectation and, at 22, he is exactly the right age to step into a major tournament with something to prove. If Didier Deschamps gives him the platform, defences that have spent months preparing for Mbappé will find Cherki's two-footedness a completely different kind of problem to solve.