Former goalkeeper Jan Jongbloed has passed away: “Typical Amsterdammer”

“I heard it from his daughter,” says Leo Driessen on NH Radio about Jan Jongbloed. “Yesterday Jan slept peacefully.”

Jongbloed was active as a goalkeeper between 1959 and 1985 and the Amsterdammer was part of the golden generation of the seventies. Jongbloed played a total of 24 international matches, he was under the crossbar of the lost World Cup finals in 1974 and 1978. “Sometimes the image emerged that he was a lazy goalkeeper, but that image is not correct. I saw him as a professional , who only dived when he really had to.” A striking moment was that Jongbloed played the 1974 World Cup final without gloves.

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Jongbloed started his career in 1959 at the Amsterdam club DWS. The biggest success was the title in 1964. “My first impression of him was the DWS – Feyenoord match in the Olympic Stadium”, Driessen recalls. “As a little boy I was sitting in the stands and saw that he collided with the striker of Feyenoord. And where the striker had to be cared for for a long time, Jan got up right away. He was rock hard.”

He played a total of 717 matches in professional football. He only stopped at the age of 44 after suffering a heart attack during a match. “Otherwise he would have continued.” That was a year after a dramatic event in his life. His son Eric-Jan was struck by lightning in 1984 while playing a football match for DWS. He passed away at the age of 21.

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After his active football career, Jongbloed was still employed in various positions at Vitesse between 1988 and 2010.

On Saturday in a new broadcast of NH Radio Sportcafé, Driessen and his guests will extensively look back on the special life of Jan Jongbloed. “Of course we won’t let that pass us by.”