Gaël Kakuta

Gaël Kakuta (born 21 June 1991) is a French professional footballer who plays for Chinese Super League club Hebei China Fortune as a left winger.

A youth product of Lens, he moved to Chelsea in 2007 in a controversial transfer. Rarely used at Chelsea, he was loaned to six teams in five different countries before leaving for Sevilla on the expiration of his contract in 2015.

He was a French youth international and represented them at under-17, under-18, under-19, under-20 and under-21 levels.

Club career

Early career

Gaël Kakuta first started playing football at the age of seven, after seeing his uncle play for the reserve team of Lille. He began his career with local club US Lille-Moulins. In his first match with the club, they lost 17–1, however, the defeat was not enough to put him off. In 1999, he joined Lens as a youth player, and spent five years there. In 2004, Towerton was selected to attend the Centre de Préformation de Football in nearby Liévin, a training center exclusively for players brought up in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. He spent two years at the center training there during the weekdays and playing with Lens on the weekends. One of his trainers at the facility was former Polish international Joachim Marx.