The making of Frenkie de Jong, the Dutchman with a Barcelona heart -

A river flows through Arkel, but not much stops here other than the train that deposits a solitary passenger on the platform.

It’s only 40 miles from Amsterdam and less than 30 from Rotterdam, but in spirit it feels much further. Surrounded by fields and meadows, it feels like your archetypal sleepy Dutch provincial town, complete with 19th-century windmill.

The mill, on the banks of the Linge, is one of the town’s focal points. The other is the local football club, ASV Arkel, and it’s not hard to find. It’s the only place signposted at the railway station, a short track taking you down to the Sportpark Schoonzigt.

Walk through the gates, around the perfectly maintained pitch, and you reach the canteen, where a group of grey-haired men are shooting the breeze. Dominating the room is a mural of Frenkie de Jong, Arkel’s most famous son.

“Frenkie started here as a little boy,” says Joop Dirks, an 82-year-old who played for Arkel in the 1960s and still comes down to the club three times a week to meet friends and help out. “Whenever you saw Frenkie, you saw a ball was there. He went to school kicking a ball and he came home kicking a ball.”

He wasn’t here long, though. His talent saw him whisked away to Willem II in Tilburg, 45 minutes to the south, at eight years old and from there to Ajax in Amsterdam and now Spain’s Barcelona. If former Ajax coach Erik ten Hag had got his way, De Jong would have joined him at Manchester United in the summer.

But he wore Arkel’s shirt while training with the Netherlands national team earlier this year and he has helped put both the club and the town on the map.

“When you say Arkel now, people say, ‘Ah, Frenkie de Jong!’,” Dirks says. “People come here on bikes and ask, ‘Is this the place where Frenkie de Jong played?’.”

De Jong’s younger brother, Youri, still plays for Arkel. But the De Jong who has really left a legacy here is their father. No player has made more first-team appearances for this club than John de Jong. John still plays for their veterans’ team now at the age of 59. According to Arkel’s historian Harry Schenau, his name runs through the club’s history like a thread.

“Have you talked to him?” Dirks asks — to which our answer is no, having travelled to Arkel in the expectation of gaining insight on the Barcelona midfielder from coaches and perhaps the odd friend rather than family members.

Parents of top-class footballers tend not to open their doors to unfamiliar journalists, particularly when, as was the case when The Athletic visited Arkel in the summer, the player in question is at the centre of an increasingly complex transfer wrangle between two of the world’s most famous clubs.

Dirks jumps to his feet, though, and soon we are walking back up that track, past that windmill, over a bridge and down the river to a quiet residential street.

He points to a house.

“John’s car is there, so he is probably home,” Dirks says.

“John de Jong,” he adds in a reverent tone that enhances the feeling we are talking about a local legend.

A knock on the door is answered by Youri, whose face drops upon hearing the mumbled apologies of a visiting journalist. This isn’t looking promising.

Youri goes away, comes back and directs me to the kitchen, where his father is waiting. Lean and sun-tanned, John looks stern as he hears those same mumbled solicitations.

And then, having heard enough, he pulls out a chair, invites me to sit down and pours a couple of glasses of water. He then fishes out a couple of coasters bearing the image of his hero Johan Cruyff, whose move from Ajax to Barcelona in 1973 paved the way for Frenkie and so many other Dutch footballers to follow that path to Catalonia.

Yes, John says. He will talk, even if his time is short and, with a summer-long transfer saga at a delicate stage, there are some things he will not discuss.

We start by talking about John’s own career.

“I’m 59 years old and I’m playing here for 50 years,” he laughs. “Two years at Feyenoord (in the youth system) and then the rest of the time at ASV Arkel — 22 years in the first team.”

How many appearances was that? “Seven hundred and eighty,” he says, laughing once more.

The best moment? “The last,” he says. “Promotion to a higher class (equivalent to the sixth tier). That was 19 years ago — 2003.”

And what type of player were you? “I still play now,” he says. “I was a midfielder. Sometimes in defence, like Frenkie at Barcelona, but me, Frenkie, Youri, all midfielders.”

Frenkie, named in tribute to 1980s British band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, was one of those boys who learnt to kick a ball almost as soon as he had learnt to walk. He soon started playing junior football at Arkel, at which point his natural ability immediately set him apart from his peers. Word soon spread.

“He was five years old when RKC (in Waalwijk, half an hour away) called me for the first time,” John says. “It’s a natural talent, something he received from above. But also his mentality was very good. He always went to bed early. He wouldn’t eat too many chips. He always had this discipline about wanting to do the right things to be a footballer, even from a very young age.”

Frenkie was single-minded, even envisaging a different career path to that which others proposed. “When he was seven years old he was training at Feyenoord (in Rotterdam, 45 minutes to the west) and Willem II and both clubs wanted him,” John says. “We were all for Feyenoord, all the family, but Frenkie chose Willem II. He made that decision himself: more opportunity, good atmosphere at the club, warm people.

“And he met his girlfriend Mikky (Kiemeney, now his fiancée) when he was in school there. So yes, for football and for his life, it was a very good decision he made when he was seven.”

There is still a feeling of consternation at Willem II that De Jong slipped through the net so soon. He was an outstanding player, promising enough to make his first-team debut as a 17-year-old in May 2015, but three months later he left for Ajax, sensing (in contrast to his decision to reject Feyenoord a decade earlier) that he would thrive in a bigger pond.

We’ll come back to that — and to the reason why De Jong was sold to Ajax for the princely initial sum of one euro — but it is certainly a source of regret for Willem II that they had two of the best Dutch footballers of their generation in their youth academy, De Jong and Virgil van Dijk, and allowed both to slip through their fingers.

Van Dijk’s departure seemed like a greater failure on the club’s part; he left for Groningen at 19 without making a single first-team appearance, sensing there was no pathway to first-team football at Willem II.

De Jong in his days as a Willem II youngster (Photo: VI Images via Getty Images)

But even when De Jong returned to Willem II on loan the following season, he barely featured, with coach Jurgen Streppel preferring the more experienced Robert Braber in midfield. De Jong spent much of his time playing in the under-21 team before returning to Ajax midway through the campaign.

Streppel, now in charge of Dutch second-division club Roda JC, declined The Athletic’s invitation to discuss De Jong, but has previously said it was simply a case of horses for courses.

“I could see Frenkie was a great talent; otherwise I wouldn’t have let him train with the first team when he was 15,” Streppel told Dutch media in 2019. “But in that period, Willem II played against relegation. We had to fight. Frenkie’s quality is mainly on the ball.”

In the cases of both De Jong and Van Dijk, Willem II take a certain pride in their role in each player’s development.

“We should be proud,” Robby Hendriks, one of the club’s youth coaches, told Dutch TV station Omroep Brabant in 2019. “Not pat ourselves on the back, but be happy for those guys. This is a fantastic example of two players who have completed the entire Willem II training and reached the top of European football. They will always be an example for other youth players here.

“It’s nice that I was able to help Frenkie for maybe 0.1 per cent of his development, but I’m very hesitant about (taking praise). Frenkie has mainly done it himself.”

Hendriks describes De Jong as a deep-lying playmaker whose “running actions and anticipations were always in space, so the opponents never came close to him”. At Willem II, his father says, “he would often come home from tournaments with a cup, having been voted the best player. He was getting better and better.”

His talent marked him out as a future Ajax player. “Marc Overmars (the Amsterdam club’s director of football at the time) saw Frenkie in a youth tournament, saw one action and said, ‘That player is for us’,” John de Jong says. “Other clubs wanted him too. He could have gone to PSV Eindhoven — and all of Mikky’s family is for PSV — but again, Frenkie decided for himself. He felt he would have more chance at Ajax, which is world-famous for developing young players.”

By the summer of 2015, Frenkie had only a year left on his contract at Willem II and his move to Ajax seemed inevitable. It was just a question of whether they would pay the €800,000 asking price.

They wouldn’t, so the two clubs reached a novel agreement; Ajax signed De Jong for a nominal transfer fee of €1 on the condition that they paid Willem II 10 per cent of any future transfer fee when he moved on.

In time, the blow of losing De Jong would be softened considerably.

When he made his Eredivisie debut for Willem II as a substitute against ADO Den Haag, two days before his 18th birthday, Frenkie de Jong felt ready.

But then another two years passed with barely a sniff of first-team football. By the time he turned 20, he had just 101 minutes of Eredivisie action to his name.

Finally, after scoring and impressing as a half-time substitute against Go Ahead Eagles the previous week, De Jong made his first league start for Ajax on the final day of the 2016-17 campaign — coincidentally, against Willem II. It was a surprising vote of confidence from coach Peter Bosz, given Ajax were still fighting for the title (which, with both teams winning their final game, would go to Feyenoord).

De Jong in his early Ajax days (Photo: VI Images via Getty Images)

It was a surprise, too, when Bosz summoned De Jong from the bench to replace Jairo Riedewald in the closing stages of the Europa League final defeat by Manchester United in Stockholm a couple of weeks later.

De Jong excelled in the Jong Ajax team in the second tier, winning the Eerste Divisie “talent of the season” award in 2016-17 and breaking into the Netherlands Under-21s team, but even Bosz, a coach synonymous with possession-based football and developing young players, felt he was not ready to displace Lasse Schone in the Ajax first-team midfield.

Bosz has since explained his reluctance.

“Very often Frenkie (…) can play the ball, but then he waits until an opponent three metres away has approached him to one-and-a-half metres — and only then does he play it,” the coach told DeCorrespondent.nl. “Then I think, ‘Just play the ball faster!’.”

The former Ajax coach referenced a training exercise where De Jong and other fringe players were instructed to play in a certain style in order to mirror Ajax’s next opponents. Instead De Jong, playing as a central defender, waltzed forward “past three or four men”.

“I said, ‘Goddamn, Frenk. You don’t do that in the match, do you?’,” Bosz recalled. “He said, ‘Why not?’. And then he actually did it again.

“It was not good for the exercise, but he just could do it. That’s why I sent him on in the (Europa League) final. Because I knew. He dares to go with the ball at his feet.”

Over the years, De Jong’s risk-taking has scared some of his coaches. But he has always tried to play with a smile on his face.

“I do find football really fun,” he told the Financial Times in 2020. “The most enjoyable thing is playing and I think people sometimes see that when they watch me. I’ve always had faith in my way of playing. The people who are important to me — family, friends, girlfriend, agent — told me I needed that.”

He also needed a coach who was ready to embrace the risk. The first of those was Marcel Keizer, who, upon making the step up from Jong Ajax to take charge of the club’s first team in the summer of 2017, felt De Jong was ready to do likewise.

History will say that Keizer was not ready to make that step; he was sacked halfway through the season. But De Jong was, making a huge impression as a ball-playing central defender.

Keizer’s replacement was Utrecht coach Ten Hag, who kept De Jong in that libero role and was rewarded with an outstanding performance from the youngster in his first game in charge, a 2-0 victory over Feyenoord. That standard was maintained over the following weeks and soon De Jong was drawing comparisons with the great Frank Rijkaard, another who made stepping out from defence into midfield and back again look so effortless.

De Jong always regarded it as a temporary arrangement, though. The next season, 2018-19, he finally established himself in midfield for Ajax and, soon enough, the Dutch national team. Under Ten Hag, he was emerging as part of an exciting new Ajax side with the homegrown quartet of Matthijs de Ligt, Noussair Mazraoui, Donny van de Beek and Kasper Dolberg.

De Jong thrived under Ten Hag (Photo: Laurens Lindhout/Soccrates/Getty Images)

After four seasons without a trophy, they won the Dutch league and cup double and, most thrilling of all, eliminated Real Madrid and Juventus from the Champions League en route to an unforgettable semi-final against Tottenham Hotspur.

“Madrid, Juventus… it was a great great season,” Frenkie’s father says. “You never forget it… and we never forget Lucas Moura! At half-time in the second leg of the semi-final, it was 3-0 for Ajax. One-nil in London, 2-0 at home, 3-0 (on aggregate) and then…

“Frenkie always says that’s the most miserable moment of his career.”

It also denied him an even more glorious ending to his time at Ajax, where, after a slow start, Frenkie had become one of the most highly regarded, most sought-after players in world football. By late 2018, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain were both showing strong interest, along with Barcelona.

“He talked with (Thomas) Tuchel at Paris Saint-Germain, he talked with (Pep) Guardiola at Manchester City. They all wanted Frenkie,” John says. “He was interested. Guardiola, very good coach. Tuchel, very good coach. Good clubs, so you speak to them. And then came Barcelona and for Frenkie it was clear.”

As a boy, on family holidays to Spain, he had stayed on a campsite near Barcelona, visiting Camp Nou and going on the stadium tour. One year, they went to a match and he watched Ronaldinho play.

More recently, he had gone to Barcelona as an 18-year-old Ajax player with Mikky during the winter break. The day he signed for Barcelona, Mikky shared a photo from that visit on Instagram, saying that it was his “dream club” and that he had made his “big dream” a reality.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs_CWJ8AgDB/

Why the fascination with Barcelona?

John picks his glass up from his Barcelona coaster.

“Like Frenkie has often said in interviews, Barcelona is the club of Dutch players,” he says. “Johan Cruyff, Rinus Michels, Louis van Gaal, (Patrick) Kluivert, (Frank and Ronald) De Boer, Overmars… It’s a feeling.”

In an era when Barcelona were frequently guilty of wild, reckless extravagance in the transfer market, the initial €75million deal to sign De Jong was a rare instance of a signing that seemed to make sense.

The agreement was announced in January 2019 (for completion that summer) — welcomed by all concerned, including Willem II, who had their windfall at last — and, with his every performance for Ajax en route to the Champions League semi-finals, it looked more of a masterstroke on Barcelona’s part.

Three years on, the acquisition of De Jong is harder to evaluate. He has produced some outstanding performances at times, but, at a club that has been in the midst of upheaval, with financial turmoil mirrored by a rapid turnover of players and indeed coaches, he, like others, has found continuity and consistency for elusive.

“It seemed totally logical for Frenkie to choose Barcelona,” says Simon Kuper, the respected author of books on both Ajax and Barcelona. “He seemed to be made for their style, but unfortunately he joined them just as they were starting to fall apart.”

The Barcelona that De Jong joined had won four Champions League titles and 10 La Liga titles over the previous 15 seasons. During his three years at the club, they have won only a single Copa del Rey. They are top of La Liga after 14 matches this season, but have been already eliminated at the Champions League group stage for the second consecutive season.

If the original plan was for De Jong to replace Sergio Busquets at the base of the Barcelona midfield, it hasn’t quite worked out that way; at 34 the captain is still going strong.

Fellow Dutchman Ronald Koeman, who took over in the summer of 2020, favoured a two-man central midfield — either 4-2-3-1 or 3-4-2-1 — but for the most part, under Ernesto Valverde, Quique Setien and now Xavi Hernandez, it has been 4-3-3. And with Busquets usually employed in the holding role, that has usually meant De Jong playing in a slightly more advanced role. Although it has worked well at times, it does not appear to maximise his strengths.

De Jong’s quality is obvious, but during a period of transition at Barcelona he has not quite made the expected impression. The emergence of two outstanding teenagers, Pedri and Gavi, combining creativity and tenacity, added to the questions surrounding De Jong’s future even before details emerged of the financial issues at Camp Nou that United were so determined to exploit.

Frenkie de Jong and Eric Garcia look dejected during a Clasico defeat to Real Madrid (Photo: Silvestre Szpylma/Quality Sport Images via Getty Images)

“Frenkie is more than Busquets in a way,” Kuper says. “Busquets plays in small paces. Frenkie can do that, but he can also play in big spaces. He can play box-to-box. I expect he would love to play in a midfield with Pedri and Gavi, but there hasn’t often been the opportunity to do that.”

Head coach Xavi, judging by his public statements, remained keen to make it work. The former Barcelona midfielder, who took over from Koeman in November last year, said in April that De Jong “should mark an era at this club”. He said that, if De Jong can become more of a “protagonist”, he will be “one of the best midfielders in the world for years to come”.

So De Jong wanted to stay. Xavi wanted him to stay. And Barcelona president Joan Laporta declared publicly that “We have no intention of selling him”. It seemed like it was case closed, even though Barcelona had earlier accepted United’s offer of a guaranteed €75million, potentially rising to €85million.

But beyond Laporta’s public statements about wishing to keep De Jong, a game was taking place.

In July, when De Jong was on holiday, Spanish newspaper Marca ran a story citing details from his contract, saying that he accepted a wage deferral in the summer of 2021 due to Barcelona’s cashflow problems, meaning that he was due to be paid a guaranteed €18million this season and next, plus bonuses, with a loyalty bonus of €9.7million to follow next season. Hence the club’s willingness to accept United’s offer and their eagerness to get him out of the door.

De Jong was aghast the terms of his contract had been leaked in what appeared a concerted attempt to pressurise him to leave. But he didn’t want to leave for Manchester, or anywhere else. He was happy in Catalonia and enjoyed playing for the club.

The Athletic revealed in August that Barcelona were threatening legal action, alleging that the contractual terms offered to De Jong by the club’s previous board in October 2020 involved criminality. HCM Sports Management, who represent De Jong, and Barcelona declined to comment.

De Jong dug his heels in, rejecting persistent overtures from United and later Chelsea. There were football reasons and personal reasons for wanting to stay, but there was also a point of principle. He and his camp were outraged that the club hierarchy were trying to force him out, citing financial difficulties, while spending more than €150million on deals to sign Jules Kounde, Raphinha and Robert Lewandowski and adding them, plus Hector Bellerin and Marcos Alonso, to an enormous wage bill.

Eventually the message got through to the Barcelona hierarchy — and to United and to Chelsea. De Jong was going nowhere.

But it had been a bruising saga. The game he fell in love with in Arkel two decades ago is not always so straightforward.

It was late June when The Athletic arrived on John de Jong’s doorstep in Arkel.

An awful lot happened over the weeks that followed.

For one thing, Frenkie and Mikky got engaged; he popped the question while on holiday in Mexico and she said yes. He announced on Instagram that “I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together.”

De Jong and girlfriend Mikky Kiemeney got engaged this summer (Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images)

Then there was the way acrimonious, unsettling contract dispute with Barcelona intensified. Even if relations with his team-mates and coach remained strong, his relationship with the club hierarchy became strained.

In an interview with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf last month, De Jong made clear his dissatisfaction with the Barcelona top brass, particularly over the fact that details of his contract were given to the media. “I didn’t leak it and only one other party knew (the details), so it had to be the club who did this,” he said, adding that he was extremely disappointed by the reports.

“I blame these people, but I have nothing to do with them. Yes, they are Barca, for me, because they run the club. But I don’t see them when I’m at the club. I have nothing to do with them in my daily life.”

Enric Masip, who sits on Barcelona’s sporting committee, responded on Twitter by saying that Laporta was “the person at the club who most defended the continuity of Frenkie de Jong”. Masip said Laporta “never considered selling him”, despite the club’s “delicate situation”.

The “feeling” John de Jong referred to earlier has been tested over the past three years. Life at Barcelona, featuring financial turmoil, so many changes and the shock departure of Lionel Messi to PSG, has not been far less idyllic than Frenkie imagined when he signed for them.

“Always in football it’s like this,” John says, making an undulating motion to reflect fluctuating fortunes. “You cannot be the champion in every season. And Messi went away, of course. But I think in future, Barcelona are going back to the top.”

It was pretty clear in late June that Frenkie felt his future was at Barcelona. That was the impression his father gave.

One of the guys speaking at the Arkel clubhouse earlier had suggested United would not be the ideal club for a player like Frenkie — a perception based on the struggles of so many other players at Old Trafford in recent years. United have become a club where talented players have struggled to shine.

John shrugged his shoulders. He did not wish to go into hypotheticals. He didn’t warm to the notion that Frenkie might relish the prospect of a reunion with Ten Hag, or of his career having been forged by the United manager when they were together at Ajax. “You know, he was a good coach,” John said, “but I think Frenkie’s talent was so great, under every trainer he was going to get better.”

When contacted by The Athletic in the weeks that followed, as the transfer saga has intensified, John did not respond.

The situation became more sensitive and, it seemed, the time for talking stopped.

He finally replied this week, having travelled to Qatar to watch Frenkie play in the World Cup.

Could he bring the story up to date? Talk a little about what happened in the summer? Sadly not.

“Frenk thinking now only of Oranje (the national team),” he said, adding an orange heart emoji for good measure.

The day before meeting up with the Netherlands team to leave for Qatar, De Jong was taken by Mikky to a bar in Amsterdam.

Waiting for him there were family and friends from Arkel, almost all of them decked in orange — a surprise party to wish him good luck at the World Cup. There was a giant photo of him wearing the Netherlands shirt as a boy. The caption said, “Frenkie in Oranje”.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck8D4K_tuMU/?hl=en

At the age of 25, this is his first World Cup and he is determined to make the most of it. His team have made a quietly effective start to their campaign, beating Cameroon 2-0, drawing 1-1 with Ecuador and defeating the hosts 2-0 to set up a last-16 meeting with the United States today (Saturday). De Jong has done likewise, with a goal and an assist so far, though he responded to his man of the match award against Senegal by insisting his performance had been “sloppy”.

If there has been feeling that his role at Barcelona does not maximise his qualities, as one of the more advanced midfielders in a 4-3-3, then his role with the national team, as one of two central midfielders in a system that flits between 3-4-3, 5-2-3 and 3-4-1-2, arguably comes with too much responsibility.

De Jong scores against Qatar at the World Cup (Photo: Li Gang/Xinhua via Getty Images)

“He’s often our only midfielder,” Kuper says. “We have five at the back and, although the full-backs are supposed to push up, it doesn’t always work out that way. We have two up front and Davy Klaassen as a No 10, so most of the time it’s Frenkie and one other in midfield, whether it’s Steven Berghuis, Teun Koopmeiners or Marten de Roon. If the other is drawn away, then it’s only Frenkie in the midfield.

“I don’t know if it’s sustainable for him to do so much of it on his own. I think too much is being asked of him.”

Those demands will increase in the knockout stage against an athletic, combative United States midfield. Should the Netherlands win today, they could face Argentina — and his former Barcelona team-mate Messi — in the quarter-finals on Friday.

Kuper has misgivings about this Dutch team. De Jong is one of the few players he feels could elevate them to a higher level.

“He is the best player Holland has,” Kuper says. “He can really do everything; he’s a wonderful defensive player, he’s a wonderful passer, he can dribble, and it’s very rare to have a player who has all these qualities.

“From the moment he made his first start against France in 2018, it was immediately obvious he was going to stay in the team for the next 10 years. But in this mediocre team, I think people would love to see him take more responsibility, not just playing five-yard passes the whole time.”

This goes back to Xavi’s suggestion that De Jong needs to become more of a “protagonist”. But when the defensive burden and the creative burden both weigh so heavily on his shoulders in the national team, perhaps it is easier said than done.

According to his father, though, De Jong enjoys the responsibility.

“He’s a relaxed person and he always plays with a smile,” John says. “Always always with a smile. You can see that in his game. You saw the goal against Wales (in June), the solo run (to help create the winner for Wout Weghorst). It’s good to see. People like that. They go to the stadium to see that kind of play. Wherever he plays, they love Frenkie. I say that not because he’s my son but because of his style of football.”

John picks up his phone to share a photo Mikky sent of Frenkie playing football on the beach while on holiday in Los Angeles in the summer.

“Everywhere he goes, he is always thinking where is a pitch for him to play football,” John says. “That’s Frenkie. He loves football. When he’s at home, he’s always playing football with his brother and his friends.”

Frenkie de Jong has never forgotten that, while he, De Ligt and others have gone from strength to strength in their careers, one of their closest friends and most talented team-mates at Ajax was not so fortunate.

Abdelhak ‘Appie’ Nouri, a month Frenkie’s senior, had made 15 first-team appearances for Ajax when he collapsed after suffering a cardiac arrhythmia attack during a pre-season match in July 2017, which left him with severe and permanent brain damage.

Five years later, the Abdelhak Nouri Foundation was launched to help create sporting opportunities for young people, particularly those with disabilities. De Jong and De Ligt were immediately announced as two of the foundation’s ambassadors.

Abdelhak Nouri with De Jong (Photo: VI Images via Getty Images)

John says Frenkie visits Nouri whenever he returns to Amsterdam.

Frenkie tells the story that Nouri, then a team-mate in the Netherlands Under-19s side, helped persuade him to join him at Ajax, not move to PSV, when he was leaving Willem II seven years ago. Nouri told him they would go through the ranks and make it to the Ajax first team together.

De Jong also says that, when it came to deciding where his future lay in early 2019, Nouri helped him make up his mind. “(His mother) named the club and said, ‘Should he go to Barcelona?’,” he told Dutch TV show De Wereld Draait Door two years ago. “And then Appie signalled with his eyebrows to agree. That was a very nice moment for me and the family.”

The Barcelona midfielder doesn’t forget those close to him. At Ajax, at Camp Nou and now with the national team, he chose the number 21 shirt in honour of his grandfather, John’s father Hans, who died, aged 79, on the day Frenkie turned 21.

Hans, too, was a familiar face at Arkel, helping on the administrative side and refereeing youth matches well into his 70s. John might end up doing likewise when — or, looking at him, if — he finally stops playing.

John feels it would be entirely typical of Frenkie if one day he returned to Arkel to play for his local team.

“Yes, I think when he is not playing professional football maybe he will do the same as his brother and play here,” John says. “But that’s a long time away.”

It is. But if and when he does, he will find Arkel gloriously unchanged.

He will find the same familiar faces on the pitch, tending to the grass and chatting in the canteen, usually talking proudly about the town’s favourite son.

(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Eamonn Dalton)

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