What is Frenkie De Jong?

Frenkie De Jong is an exceptional talent, but he must play the right role. It’s just that nobody is sure just what role that is.

Erik ten Hag brought De Jong up to Ajax’s first team from the academy ranks as a centre-back, then converted him into a freewheeling defensive midfielder.

At BarcelonaErnesto Valverde attempted him as Sergio Busquets’ heir before realizing that he was more like an Ivan Rakitic central midfielder.

Ronald Koeman, the Camp Nou manager, stated that De Jong had to play in a double-pivot, as he had done with him with the previous team. NetherlandsHe was drafted by the national team and ended up being a second striker at Barcelona.

His latest Barcelona coach, Xavi, has tried all of the above, and yet at 25 years old De Jong doesn’t even have a sure place in his team.

For a player once subject to breathless comparisons, this is not how it should go. Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff.

People don’t talk about you like that unless you’re different from everyone else on the pitch. But there’s good different, where coaches shuffle around their best players and invent new tactics to accommodate your genius, and then there’s… the other kind.

Here’s how De Jong is different, in one simple stat: he takes his time on the ball.

Of the 156 midfielders who received at least 250 passes from one club during the five last full seasons, 156 have been selected. Champions LeagueDe Jong is first in the average time he takes before his next action (3.2 seconds at Ajax). De Jong also ranks third at Barcelona (2.9 seconds).

Let’s go back and read that again. Mix yourself a drink and put your feet up — De Jong will still have the ball when you’re ready to continue.

That’s not necessarily good or bad. Some of the world’s best midfielders are leisurely in possession, such as Manchester City’s Bernardo SilvaJoshua Kimmich, of Bayern Munich (2.8) Busquets, his Barcelona colleague (2.2), keeps it moving.

But even if a stopwatch doesn’t measure quality, it can capture something about style.

Koeman, who knows De Jong as well as anyone after coaching him for the Netherlands and Barcelona, once said that his countryman’s most extraordinary quality is patience: “In a lot of situations, he has the ability to postpone the decision when in possession, and then to give a pass from which everyone thinks, ‘Hell, yeah. Excellent thinking — that’s how simple it can be’.”

One reason footballers don’t spend longer on the ball, of course, is that the other team would like to take it away from them. If you’re the type of player who likes to “postpone the decision”, you have three basic options: you can play in a part of the pitch where the defence won’t chase you, you can beat their pressure, or you can run away from it. De Jong can do all three.

Let’s start with his positioning.

Since space and time are hardest to come by in the middle of the opponent’s defensive block, a player who wants to have more of them will move deep or wide — or, in De Jong’s case, both. He likes to start the build-up between his team’s centre-backs and the left-back, where he can receive the ball in space, facing play.

It’s a good spot for him — De Jong says he’s at his best as “the first player to receive the ball from the defence and link with the attack”.

Dropping to a position outside the centre-backs makes it easy to collect the ball from your back line, and the natural rotation his movement sets off — left-back up the wing to make room for him, winger into the midfield area where De Jong used to be — helps scramble the defence, creating lanes for him to play forward.

To defend this rotation, opponents need to have a plan. The hole in his defence’s centre is created if the player who normally marks De Jong in midfield follows him further. It allows another defender to take De Jong, which opens up a passing option nearby. And if they don’t sort it all out fast and get their angles right, De Jong gets time on the ball to do his thing.

Space is great if you can find it, but sometimes you have to earn time on the ball the hard way — by beating a man. De Jong is a fan of this too. “You can hardly put him under pressure,” Ten Hag has said. “That is such a great gift.”

Many Barcelona midfielders have a routine to escape from pressure. Busquets loves to pass the ball to his opponent, then pull it back and turn just enough to make him miss. Xavi used to play and would drag a defender around on one side. Then he would turn the ball in a circle, with the ball glued in his instep.

De Jong’s favourite move is basically the inverse of Xavi’s “pelopina”. He’ll receive the ball like he’s about to turn to his left, the more natural direction for a right-footed passer. When his marker cheats on that side, he will jump over the ball and turn to his right using his outside right boot.

Even though the idea is similar to his now manager’s old turn, De Jong’s inside-out mechanics lead to a different outcome. Xavi would then complete his slow and smooth circle, ready to pass to a friend he had chosen. De Jong’s jump-spin ends with him knocking the ball forward with the outside of his foot. His body is made for a dribble, and not a pass.

We now come to the third and final way to save time: run away from people.

FBref data states that De Jong carried the ball 4.8 yards for every pass he attempted last season, which puts him in the 83rd percentile (the top 17 per cent) of all central and defensive midfielders in Europe’s top five leagues. If you only count forward-carry yards per pass, he’s in the 94th percentile. “He is a wanderer, an adventurer,” Ten Hag has said. “He’s always on the move, like a shark.”

De Jong is a straight-line runner when he gets moving. He really only uses his left foot to dribble. The deception is in his body — the way he shifts his weight to convince you he’s about to cut, the way he speeds up and slows down almost imperceptibly to make tacklers miss. He ignores contact like an ant. NFLRunning back, and dancing over stretched legs like a member the Royal Ballet.

See how he uses acceleration and his body to avoid potential tacklers on this run Wales in June…

Notice how he doesn’t release the ball until the Welsh right-back cuts in toward goal to try to stop his run, which opens a passing lane to the free man on the wing. “He is among the best at pinning and dividing,” Xavi has said, using a Spanish term for making a defender commit to the ball to free up a team-mate.

That’s pretty much the deal with De Jong. He’ll try everything — rotations, take-ons, long carries — to postpone the decision when in possession. He’ll move the ball forward and commit defenders and find an open team-mate. His ability to move through midfield and disorganise opponents in a way that few other players can will be able to match his skill. This is what makes him unique.

Conveniently enough, he does all of those things best in one position — as a defensive midfielder. So why doesn’t he play there much?

The short answer is that what’s best for De Jong may not be best for his team.

Take a look at another passage from the Napoli game in February we showed you grabs of earlier — the first leg of a Europa LeaguePlay-off round tie in which he was replaced by Busquets at the midfield base in a 4-3-2-3.

Barcelona has won the ball in midfield, and they are now starting to build up. Instead of staying in position goal-side of Napoli’s forwards, De Jong drops to just outside the defence, where he’s redundant, and holds the ball in front of his centre-backs for four seconds before dribbling back up into midfield after deciding there is no pass on.

By the time he picks a pass, nearly seven seconds after receiving the ball, he’s in a crowd of defenders with no good options.

Yes, De Jong has collapsed Napoli’s lines with his solo run, but his team are a mess, too — everyone else is reacting to his dribble on the fly.

This is compared to a similar situation in the second half of the 1-1 draw at Camp Nou. Busquets had come on for the Dutchman shortly after Barcelona equalised.

Instead of dropping to the ball, Busquets backs away and waits for his centre-backs to break through Napoli’s pressure. Three of his team-mates make automatic runs when he receives in space at the half-turn. This allows him to spot a streaking Jordi Alba without having to search for him.

Xavi hasn’t been shy about pointing out De Jong’s struggles with positional play.

“Frenkie is grasping a lot of tactical concepts that he did not understand before,” he said in February, after moving him back to central midfield for the second leg of that Napoli tie (Barcelona won 4-2 in Italy, with De Jong scoring their second goal of the night). “He’s learning how to be the free man in the midfield.”

In his three seasons with Barcelona, De Jong was considered a defensive midfielder by four different managers. All four of them ended up disliking it.

Koeman applied for the job in 2020, insisting that his Dutch counterpart must play on the left side a double pivot like he did at Ajax or for his Netherlands side. The experiment lasted for half a season. “It is the player himself who has changed,” Koeman said when he returned him to central midfield.

It’s true that De Jong has discovered some things about himself in Catalonia. He’s a gifted off-the-ball runner who stretches the lines in Xavi’s new-style 4-3-3Finds shots near the goal. His rangy, inconsistent defensive style, which covers a lot of ground but doesn’t win a lot of balls, works better in a high press than in his own half. Combine these qualities with his ball skills and you get an advanced midfielder who’s pretty good, sometimes great, even if he’s not Extraordinary.

The one skill that does make him special — those long, disruptive, clock-eating carries out from the back — just hasn’t been worth building a side around.

Ajax and Barcelona actually have slightly worse Champions League results. Expected Goal (xG) difference across the next two possessions when De Jong takes off on a progressive carry compared with when he doesn’t. That includes only carries where he successfully moves the ball at least 25 per cent of the remaining distance to the opponents’ goal. The average might drop further if he makes less successful carries or loses the ball along his journey.

Maybe blowing up both teams’ shapes but leaving a hole at the base of your side’s midfield isn’t always a great trade-off at the top of the modern game.

There’s one more number worth thinking about here.

FBref tracks something called “on-off,” which is the difference between how a team perform when a player is on the pitch and when he isn’t, measured in goals or expected goals. This stat is most familiar to basketball and ice hockey fans. good reasons why it doesn’t work nearly as well in football as in those sports. The results can still be revealing.

In De Jong’s case, what on-off data suggests isn’t great. De Jong played five seasons of league play in five countries, with less than five coaches. His team has performed far better when he is around than when he was away.

That hasn’t shaken fans’ faith that there’s a transcendent player in there somewhere, just waiting to jump-spin into the perfect position and dribble his way into the history books.

But while the right tactics might still unlock the genre-bending star everyone thought De Jong would become, there are now several years of evidence that it’s not so straightforward to carve out a role that makes the most of his extraordinary strengths while covering up his ordinary weaknesses.

Some players are able to spend their entire career searching for the perfect fit. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on buying time, eventually it will run out.

(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Sam Richardson)