David and Go(a)liath
Jonathan David’s quest to become one of the world’s great strikers — a lofty target for a 20-year-old Canadian soccer player — comes with risk but potentially great rewards: ‘I think I can go to the very top’
With blazing speed and impressive skill, Alphonso Davies has emerged as the 19-year-old face of Canadian soccer. And fair enough. The Edmonton-raised Davies, who’s been turning heads at fullback for Bayern Munich since Germany’s Bundesliga resumed action earlier this month, is a certifiable phenom with track-star explosiveness. Teammate Thomas Mueller has nicknamed him the “Road Runner.” Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku has called him a “cheat code.” So it’s easy to forget that Davies, while he’s Canada’s player of the moment, is not Canada’s reigning male player of the year.
That’s an honour held by Jonathan David, the 20-yearold Ottawa-reared finisher who’s currently a member of KAA Gent of Belgium’s top league. While Davies is back playing, David is not. Belgium cancelled its season this month, long after David was named the top Canadian of 2019 thanks to a calendar year that saw him score a stunning 28 goals for club and country, the most by a Canadian pro since 1999.
Considering David had achieved that feat in just his second year as a pro — he coled the Belgian league in scoring during the 2019-20 campaign — this summer was expected to be an eventful one. Given Belgium’s status as a stepping-stone league that’s apt to sell its best young talent to richer clubs in places like England and Germany and Spain, it seemed all but certain that David would be a highly coveted commodity on the transfer market, with potential suitors from various corners of Europe. And it’s highly possible he still will be.
But no one can say for sure at the moment because the coronavirus has largely shuttered the soccer business, like many businesses. David, who’s been training in Belgium, has signalled he’d be most interested in making a jump to the Bundesliga. But with the market-setting likes of the English Premier League still dark — and the still-unknown economic fallout of the pandemic adding layers of murkiness to the situation — exactly where and when he’ll be on the move, and for how much, is anyone’s guess. Gent, which will have a big say in the matter, has said it would like to keep him for another year.
For all the here-and-now uncertainty, in a recent phone interview David spoke with an infectious enthusiasm about his future. He may not know the time and location of his next game, but he seems firmly fixated on his big-picture destination.
“I think I can go to the very top,” David said. “For me, the top is obviously to be known as one of the best strikers in the world, playing for a top-10 club in the world, playing in the Champions League final, winning Champions Leagues. Stuff like that.”
The stuff of soccer’s one-percenters isn’t often the publicly stated goal of Canadians. But David credits his longtime youth coach, Ottawa’s Hanny El-Magraby, with instilling the notion that success on the global stage has always been within his reach, so long as he puts in the work. When David and his agent, Montreal’s Nick Mavromaras, first met about four years ago, Mavromaras recalls David immediately standing out from most of his peers among Canada’s elite teenagers by announcing his aspiration to one day be considered among the world’s top goal scorers.
“Usually you get a reserved answer: ‘I want to become a pro, play first team,’ ” Mavromaras said. “It’s quite shocking to hear that from a Canadian kid at such a young age. In some ways he’s very timid and humble, but with a crazy amount of confidence.”
Rising a level, whenever it happens, will come with challenges. As the league gets better, so too do the teammates, which could mean the vast playing time he’s carved out in Belgium might become scarcer. ElMagraby, who’s still coaching youth soccer in Ottawa but remains in regular contact with David, said it’s important for David to avoid becoming an expensive acquisition buried on the bench, an occupational hazard on some of soccer’s richest rosters.
“You see it every transfer window — a player gets signed to a team and the season starts and he doesn’t play much. And we’re not talking about small players,” El-Magraby said.
David, for his part, has never seemed afraid of taking a risk. A few years back, El-Magraby remembers David turning down contract offers from the academies of Canada’s Major League Soccer clubs in favour of pursuing European options. And even after tryouts with clubs in Salzberg and Stuttgart ended without offers, David was disappointed but undeterred.
“I still wanted to keep pushing and try to find something in Europe,” he said.
Eventually he did, and he prospered. And now, as he gazes into a future that’s as bright as it is difficult to predict, he said he’s willing to prove himself at the next level.
“I don’t expect anything to be given to me,” he said. “I expect to work hard for what I get. I want to make sure the (next) club knows I’m here to play and I can help the team right now, and that I’m ready for that.”
John Herdman, coach of Canada’s national men’s team, acknowledged the risk of what he called the glass-half-empty view: the fear that David, moving to a superior club, could be relegated to lesser role. That, in turn, could lead to a hit to David’s confidence and a slip in his play that could have a negative effect on his international form.
“But the glass half full for me is, he’s ready to be tested,” Herdman said. “The best players in the world are playing in the top leagues from the ages of 18 to 22. That is now the next step for Jonathan. He’s got to take that risk and challenge himself.”
In other words, the potential risks ought to be outweighed by the potential rewards if David does what he’s unfailingly done to date: rise to the occasion.
“Every time he’s come into an environment, he’s become the biggest name,” Herdman said. “I just feel that if he’s given that next-level opportunity, his mindset and then his skill set are aligned to give him a chance to go as high as the ceiling that’s offered.”
If David has a strength — beyond a rare ability to put a ball in a net that El-Magraby insists cannot be developed, only cultivated — those who know him best say it might be his ability to remain unfazed, no matter the situation. An extreme example came last December, when he spent time in Ottawa grieving the death of his mother Rose.
“She was everything,” David said. “Obviously it’s difficult, but I know she would want me to keep doing my best, to keep moving on, keep moving forward.”
Honouring his mother’s wishes, he returned to work heavyhearted but newly possessed.
“(At his mother’s funeral) he told me he’s got that extra motivation now,” Herdman said. “He’s got something he wants to achieve for his mom and the people who have helped him get to where he’s got to.”
El-Magraby, who’s on that list, said David possesses a “calmness in front of goal” that’s as rare as his scoring touch. Herdman said at the highest level it’s often “the mental component” that’s the difference maker between players who fail and succeed.
“We’ve seen guys with similar speed, similar strength, similar finishing ability. But (David) is, every camp, laser focused. He doesn’t say too much. He just gets it done,” Herdman said. “Similar to Alphonso, you provide him with a higher ceiling and he can grow to reach that.”
David and Davies, as two immense talents on a national team that aspires to land Canada’s first World Cup berth since 1986, are destined to be linked for years to come. David, an avid soccer viewer when he’s not playing, said he’s spent plenty of hours watching the Bundesliga since its return. And he said he’s looking forward to reconvening with the national team whenever the journey to that elusive World Cup resumes. If Canada has long been considered an inconsequential minnow on the global scene, David said he’s ready to challenge that status quo.
“Why not?” is David’s rhetorical question. At a moment when the future is hard to see, it’s difficult, too, for Canadian soccer fans not to be enlivened by the tantalizing possibility lying somewhere down the road.
“I think (David and Davies) are always going to be linked going forward because Canada’s been looking for players like them for a long time,” El-Magraby said. “Finally we’ve got players of their calibre, not just having athletic ability, but players who also have a brain for the game and talent to go with it. It’s the full package. They provide Canadians who love the sport the belief that they’re the future of Canadian soccer.”
“I don’t expect anything to be given to me.”
JONATHAN DAVID