Frenkie de Jong: the next great Dutch player

Although the Netherlands is a really small country with 17 million citizens they were the birthplace of a lot of great footballers like Johan Cruyff, Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten or Edwin van der Saar. In recent years the national team and the whole Dutch football struggled for the first time. They could qualify neither for the European championship in France nor for the World Cup in Russia. And also, in European football, there are less and less Dutch players who play for the best teams. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. With Frenkie de Jong and Matthijs de Ligt, the Netherlands have great prospects both playing for Ajax Amsterdam. Ajax Amsterdam had always great talents, with de Jong they have the next player who could move to one of the biggest European clubs.

In this piece, I am going to analyse Frenkie de Jong who is probably a type of player you never watched play. With only 21-years he already attracted attention from the biggest clubs in Europe. In the first place, it is Barcelona who is really interested in signing him in the next transfer period. The thing with Frenkie de Jong is that you can´t say if he is a defensive midfielder, deep-lying playmaker, a box-to-box midfielder or a centre back. He can just play every position and fills every position with his unique skill-set. Actually, we maybe have to invent a new position for Frenkie de Jong because he doesn´t really fit the criteria’s of our common positions.

Frenkie de Jong – he always dribbles

Over the course of the last decade, the football evolved pretty fast. Teams nowadays have perfect athletic conditions and defending compact is more a standard than an exception. That’s why teams are less and less taking risks because they are too afraid of conceding a goal. Consequently, you rarely see players dribble in their own half. With Frenkie de Jong this is different.

The young Ajax boy loves to dribble. If you have to characterize de Jong with one action you should probably pick his dribbling´s over 50 meters from Ajax Amsterdam´s own goal into the half of the opponent. Those dribbling´s set him apart from other youngsters in Europe and makes him such a special player-type.

But, Frenkie de Jong´s dribbling´s aren´t just pure risk. They seem to be always the best choice in that specific situation. Because de Jong seems to weight the value of every action carefully. His action´s more or less always make sense and help his team progressing the ball into the final third. You can rarely observe de Jong playing a simple four meters pass because he just loves to solve such situations with clever dribbling´s.

Frenkie de Jong changes the dynamic

As I mentioned, Frenkie de Jong sometimes even plays as a centre-back. In that position, his abilities are extremely valuable to overcome the first line of pressing.