Frenkie de Jong interview
Barcelona can breathe easy now that Frenkie de Jong’s arriving in July. The starlet talks to FFT about following Ajax legends to the Camp Nou – and humiliating Real Madrid...
The latest in a long line of Ajax starlets to join Barça
Apprentice doesn’t always follow master – just ask Alex Ferguson about David Moyes – but having the backing of the man you’re about to replace can sometimes be a good thing. “I like Frenkie de Jong a lot – he’d be a very good signing for Barcelona,” admitted no better a judge than Xavi, who bagged enough trophies during his 17 years in the Blaugrana line-up to fill even the most sizeable mantelpiece. “He doesn’t lose the ball and he already has Barcelona DNA, coming from Ajax, which has always been a good school for us.” The four-time Champions League winner was speaking back in December last year, having been asked what he thought of the Ajax youngster. De Jong had long been linked with a move to Catalonia, despite being just 21 years of age and, at the time, having played fewer than 40 matches in the Eredivisie. Some very reliable judges – including Henk ten Cate, the former Barcelona assistant manager and Ajax coach – had even touted him as Xavi’s heir.
“Yes, I read about that,” De Jong tells Fourfourtwo, having been reminded of the kind words spoken by the 2010 World Cup winner. “Obviously it’s great to hear someone like him praise you. There were many midfielders I watched as a kid and really looked up to, and he was definitely one of them.”
It’s unlikely that this glowing testimony from the veteran midfield metronome was what convinced Barcelona to make their move, but it certainly won’t have done any harm. A month later, they signed and sealed a deal for the Dutch dynamo, who will join up with his new team-mates over the summer.
Another couple of months down the line, De Jong made about as big a statement as any prospective Barça icon could possibly make. The youngster assisted in knocking their arch rivals, Real Madrid, out of the Champions League. In their own back yard. In historic fashion.
Can this Ajax star help to put Barcelona back at the very pinnacle of the world game? History suggests he can.
When Frenkie de Jong is officially unveiled as a Barcelona player this summer, he may take a moment to reflect on some of the happier moments from his childhood. In his youth, De Jong’s family would spend many a summer camping near L’escala, around 50 miles up the Catalan coast. Although they didn’t know it at the time, his fellow campers were witnesses to a future Barça hero getting his first taste of playing football on Spanish soil.
“Those holidays were great,” De Jong reminisces to FFT, as we settle down for a chat at Ajax’s De Toekomst training facility, a stone’s throw from the club’s Johan Cruyff Arena. “There were three football pitches on the campsite, and there were always tournaments organised for us to play in during the evenings.”
But the highlight of these summer jaunts to Spain were the visits to the Camp Nou. De Jong still has vivid recollections of those day trips. “I remember going on a stadium tour, which was really incredible,” he says, a smile breaking across his boyish face. “Being at ground level and looking up to see this huge stadium looming over you – wow!
“One summer, we even went to watch a Barça friendly. I remember Ronaldinho playing and it being incredibly exciting to actually be there watching him play live.”
De Jong pauses momentarily, before his eyes widen as he repeats the name, slightly higher-pitched and louder than before as if clearly recalling the awe that struck him that summer evening. “Ronaldinho!”
As the years rolled by and Frenkie matured into a highly-promising midfielder – first with Willem II, then with Ajax – his fondness for the Catalan giants only increased. In December 2015, a few months after he’d moved to Ajax as an 18-year-old, he returned to Barcelona with his girlfriend for a brief winter holiday. While in town, the couple took in a La Liga fixture between Barça and Real Betis, and Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez scored in a 4-0 victory for the hosts. “I’ve always had a special feeling about Barça,” admits De Jong. “I’ve always felt that ending up there one day would be the ultimate feeling.’”
De Jong’s imminent switch to the Camp Nou won’t be the first big move of his nascent career, however.
There was a time when it looked like he would snub Ajax for one of their rivals. An 18-year-old De Jong – a top prospect with Willem II – was high on Ajax’s hit list, but the Amsterdammers faced competition from PSV. One newspaper even reported that he’d agreed terms with them. Ultimately, though, he picked Amsterdam over Eindhoven. “Generally, young players come through a bit quicker at Ajax than at other clubs,” he now explains. “I knew the competition for places was going to be a bit tougher, but I was still very young and they’d shown real confidence in me.”
The four-time European Cup winners had left nothing to chance in their pursuit of De Jong. When the starlet arrived to meet sporting
“ONE CLUB WOULD TELL ME, ‘YOU HAVE TO COME HERE’ AND THEN ANOTHER WOULD SAY, ‘no, COME TO US!’ I FELT QUITE PRESSURED”
director Marc Overmars, the club’s hierarchy made sure he just so happened to bump into several other Ajax greats from days gone by.
“Suddenly Dennis Bergkamp walked in to say hello, then Frank de Boer and Jaap Stam both popped in to see me as well,” recalls De Jong. “They’d come to see me, a kid who’d played one match for Willem II! It felt amazing that they had made time for me. Frank de Boer even said he’d seen me play for the Netherlands Under-19 team and that he thought I was a real Ajax player.”
By that, the former Ajax manager was referring to the broad skill set De Jong had developed during his youth, first at amateur side ASV Arkel, then Willem II.
Until he had a growth spurt at the age of 16, De Jong was a particularly small child, meaning that he had to compensate in other areas. “I couldn’t get past people purely with speed or power,” he explains, “so my touch and technical ability had to be very good – otherwise, I would lose the ball. So I worked on all my technical skills first, and worked on the physical things a bit later on.”
The young Frenkie quickly developed into a player with impressive ball-carrying skills and a wide range of passing – he was already the kind of player both Ajax and Barcelona love.
When discussing the qualities that make him one of world football’s hottest properties, he is particularly modest, preferring instead to list the facets of his game that he sees as areas in need of improvement.
“There are quite a few things I want to work on,” says the Dutchman. “Defensively I have to be much more consistent. I could improve my long-distance shots, and my crosses too. I think I could also improve my decision-making in the opposition’s penalty area – providing more through-balls, for instance.
“It’s important to keep trying to improve. Otherwise, you can only go downwards in your development.”
De Jong’s career trajectory may have been upwards – and steep – but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t suffered a setback or two. Having started out at Willem II, the prodigy was snapped up by Ajax at 18 and then immediately loaned back to the fellow Eredivisie club for the 2015-16 season. However, the Tilburg side offered the young waif only minimal playing time, opting instead to field a bigger, more physical XI in their successful battle against relegation from the top flight.
After experiencing less than an hour of competitive match action over a four-month spell, he returned to Amsterdam midway through the season and spent the rest of the campaign playing for Jong Ajax in the Dutch second tier.
“It wasn’t like I was doubting my own qualities,” he reflects. “It just wasn’t meant to be at Willem II. But naturally you look at yourself and think about what you can improve.”
Even when he was promoted to Ajax’s first-team squad at the start of the 2016-17 season, Frenkie was far down the pecking order.
“I was about the ninth midfielder on the list,” he says, “so I wasn’t under the illusion that I would just go ahead of the other players and be a regular straight away. I knew it would take time.”
He was accurate in his estimation, as game time once again proved hard to come by in a season where Ajax would ultimately reach the Europa League final. Their midfield trio in that showpiece comprised captain Davy Klaassen, playmaker Hakim Ziyech and the experienced Lasse Schone, although De Jong did make a cameo from the bench, appearing for the final eight minutes as the Amsterdammers – fielding a remarkably young side, the 14 players used having an average age of just 21.7 – lost 2-0 to Manchester United in Stockholm.
He admits there was the odd moment when impatience struck: “I was realistic, but of course as a young boy you want things to go quick, quick, quick. There were times when I wanted my progress to be going faster than it was, but I’ve never been dissatisfied at Ajax.”
A big turning point came at the start of the 2017-18 season, when the club’s youth-team boss, Marcel Keizer, became the manager of the first team. It didn’t take very long for De Jong to cement a regular starting spot, and from there he hasn’t looked back. His vision and dribbling skills earned him rave reviews, both domestically and abroad. This was a player who looked capable of pulling strings at the highest level – something that became even more apparent when Keizer moved his young maestro into a deeper midfield role. De Jong maintained all the creative traits that had helped him to impress as a No.10, but now he was showcasing them in defensive midfield and sometimes even in the sweeper role. From there, he aimed to overcome the first line of pressing and then imbalance the opposition’s formation, connecting his own defence and midfield in the process.
“I’D HAVE no QUALMS ABOUT AJAX KNOCKING OUT BARCELONA LIKE WE DID REAL MADRID”
But then came another significant setback, just as the midfielder was really starting to make a name for himself. In February 2018, De Jong sustained a serious ankle injury during an Ajax training session. Even more cruelly, the session was being watched by Netherlands manager Ronald Koeman, who was about to give the midfielder his first senior call-up.
The road to recovery proved much longer than he’d hoped – De Jong would be sidelined for the remainder of that season – and it was a period of great frustration and anxiety for him.
“There were definitely moments when I worried that this injury may stay with me,” he admits to FFT, “or that maybe I’d need surgery which would cause me to lose some agility and movement.
“Football is the thing I love doing the most, so that period was tough – the toughest in my career so far.”
Despite missing the final few months of the 2017-18 campaign, De Jong was still a man in demand among Europe’s biggest clubs last summer. Some even made firm offers for his services, and Tottenham Hotspur’s sales pitch tempted the Dutch midfielder.
“I considered their offer long and hard,” he reveals. “I see Tottenham as a very stable club, and they are only getting better. They give young players a chance and I see Mauricio Pochettino as a manager who really improves young players. I like the kind of football they are playing. I think it would have suited my game.”
Though the idea of moving to north London certainly appealled to De Jong, he opted to stay in Amsterdam, principally as he felt it was still too early for that first big transfer abroad.
“The moment wasn’t right,” he insists. “I still wasn’t finished at Ajax, as I hadn’t yet played a full season in my own position. I was also injured in that period, so I was thinking, ‘Not yet’. I felt I should stay for another year at Ajax, or perhaps even longer.”
De Jong was back fit and firing by the beginning of 2018-19’s pre-season, much to his own relief, and he soon picked up where he had left off last term.
The high points came thick and fast during the early months of the campaign: not only was there a Dutch international debut in September, but he also helped Ajax into the Champions League knockout stages – their first appearance there since 2006.
The more De Jong impressed on the pitch, the more the buzz around him increased. By now, his name was a regular fixture in the gossip columns, which didn’t go unnoticed by the man himself.
“I first noticed people were suddenly talking about me when I became a regular last season,” recalls the midfielder. “I think the international media started to speak about it a bit more after I made my Netherlands debut against Peru, and even more after we won 2-0 at home to France. It just got crazier the more I played in the Champions League with Ajax. There had been a few rumours before then, but after those matches it all got very intense.”
It wasn’t long before other European heavyweights were fluttering their eyelashes at De Jong, who started to wonder if this was the moment to take the plunge and make his move.
“It got to the point where there was just so much interest,” he says, “and after hearing the amounts that clubs were prepared to pay Ajax, I was thinking, ‘They are so serious about me – I have to take the chance.’
“One club would come and say to me, ‘You have to come here’ – and then another would say, ‘No, come to us!’ Of course that was a great position to be in, but I felt quite pressured, with so many people calling to explain how great their club is.”
Eventually, De Jong identified Manchester City, Paris Saint-germain and Barcelona as the most suitable destinations. He managed to find time to meet with representatives of those teams, all of whom also visited him in Amsterdam.
“I’m a bit of a worrier,” he reveals, “and I was probably overthinking the possible outcomes, because there were a few good options. I was anxious to make the right decision for my career, and I was imagining what it would be like to move to a club and then wish I had gone to one of the others. There were definitely whole days where I’d just be sat there thinking, ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’”
Eventually, Frenkie took a back seat and let his agent worry about any potential transfer. For months that seemed certain to involve Barcelona – until early December, when news emerged suggesting PSG had stolen a march and sealed a deal for the Dutchman. When a delegation from the Ligue 1 powerhouse was seen in Amsterdam, people put two and two together. Even De Jong’s girlfriend thought a move to Paris was in the offing.
“One morning, a story broke which claimed I was moving to PSG for €75 million,” explains De Jong. “I woke up a little later that morning as we were training in the afternoon. My girlfriend had already gone out. When she came home, she said, ‘I was in the car and heard on the radio that you’ve signed for Paris Saint-germain – is that true?’”
For a second, even the man himself thought he might have missed something. “I knew deep down it wasn’t true,” he says. “However, there was still a small part of me thinking that maybe the two clubs had done a deal. There was so much being said, even I got confused!
“Paris was a really good option,” he continues. “I’d have had a fairly good chance to play from the start there. They’re one of the best teams in the world with players like Neymar and Kylian Mbappe – and a really good manager in Thomas Tuchel. Paris is not too far from Holland, either.”
Slightly further afield – though not quite as far as Catalonia – was Manchester, where Pep Guardiola is also said to be a big De Jong fan.
After very careful consideration, there was only ever going to be one choice. Barcelona were a club that appealed to De Jong’s romantic side. Not only would he be moving to the city that gave him countless cherished childhood memories, but he would also become the latest in a distinguished line of players, led by Cruyff, to have headed to the Camp Nou after starring for Ajax.
“After I had spoken to the president and some of the other people at Barcelona, I didn’t have to think about it for long,” says De Jong. “I’d always wanted to play for Barcelona, and now they were very
serious about wanting me – and they had come with a good project. The money they were prepared to pay Ajax [€75m, rising to €86m] showed me how serious they were. I felt I had to grab the opportunity, because maybe it wouldn’t come around again.”
Moving to one of the world’s biggest and best clubs does come with its own challenges, such as proving himself good enough to start all over again.
“Of course, [the fee] doesn’t mean I’ll automatically play from the start,” he insists. “But everything about Barcelona is beautiful. My family agreed I had to go for it. I’ll do everything in my power to succeed there.’”
With Lionel Messi, Ousmane Dembele and fellow Ajax alumnus Luis Suarez set to profit from his playmaking, the chances of success look high.
Unsurprisingly, De Jong reveals that Messi has long been one of his favourite players, and he even recalls defending the Argentine maestro’s honour on the school playground.
“I remember having discussions with friends where I’d argue why he was better than all of the others,” he beams, then composes himself, remembering he’ll soon share a dressing room with the man he once hero-worshipped. “I don’t want to get too carried away with my appreciation and come across as a crazy fan,” adds De Jong, laughing. “But let’s just say I don’t think anyone is going to reach his level soon.”
Even by Messi’s standards, what De Jong & Co. did to Real Madrid in the Champions League last month was impressive. Having lost 2-1 in Amsterdam, Ajax went to the Spanish capital as massive underdogs. Only six times in the European Cup’s 64-year history had a side gone through after losing a first leg at home – and Los Blancos had just won it three years in a row. Ajax, with De Jong setting the tempo, wiped the floor with them.
“It was my first match at the Bernabeu, but there weren’t really any nerves,” says the 21-year-old. “We actually had a lot of confidence going into the game. We gained a lot of belief from the first leg, when we had played well but got a bit unlucky with a VAR decision.”
That confidence showed. With De Jong bossing the reigning Ballon d’or winner, Luka Modric, and former Southampton man Dusan Tadic having the game of his life, Ajax turned back the clock to the days of Frank Rijkaard, Edgar Davids and Patrick Kluivert – perhaps even the back-to-back-to-back European Cup-winning team of Johan Cruyff and pals. Goals from Ziyech, David Neres, Tadic and Schone sealed an earth-shattering 4-1 victory. It was Real’s biggest ever home defeat in a home European match – and the most humbling.
“During the game I didn’t really think about how big an achievement it was,” recalls the midfielder, letting out a little chuckle. “I was just concentrating on the match. But when we were leading 4-1 in injury time, I had a brief chat with Matthijs de Ligt. That was probably the moment of realisation that we were going through. He turned to me and said, ‘We’re going to do it!’ – and we both started laughing. That was a great moment.
“I definitely think the experience will help me to settle in Spanish football. It was nice that the supporters there were able to see me play in that way.”
Any Barça fans watching on will have been enthused by De Jong’s display, not to mention the result itself. Even the man at the very top was delighted – and he was keen to let his incoming starlet know exactly how pleased he was to see Madrid mauled.
“The Barcelona president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, spoke to me after the game, which was special,” reveals De Jong. “He wanted to congratulate me, and he told me that I’d had a really good game. He was very happy – almost as happy as me!”
Bartomeu might not be so happy if Ajax do the same to Barça later in the competition. Should De Jong’s current employers beat Juventus in the quarter-finals, and either Manchester City or Tottenham – his erstwhile suitors – in the semi-finals, he could possibly face his future employers in the final. Awkward? Apparently not.
“I have thought about that scenario,” says De Jong, smirking while shuffling awkwardly in his seat. “That would be special, but at the same time it doesn’t matter to me who we play. As long as I’m an Ajax player, I want Ajax to win. I’d have no qualms about trying to knock out Barcelona like we did Real Madrid.”
That may be the case, but if things do pan out that way, Frenkie shouldn’t expect his next phone call from the Barcelona president to be quite so friendly.
“I DID CONSIDER SPURS’ OFFER. THEIR KIND OF FOOTBALL WOULD HAVE SUITED MY GAME”