As birds chirp around tiny Icahn Stadium on Manhattan’s Randall’s Island Park, screams ring out. “Hunt, hunt, hunt! Keep going!”, shouts Frenkie de Jong during the practice match against Uzbekistan. He wants aggressive pressure on the right front – by Tijjani Reijnders, Denzel Dumfries and Crysencio Summerville. Shortly afterwards, the Dutch national team conquered the ball.
During a drinks break, De Jong and captain Virgil van Dijk can be seen standing close to Ronald Koeman, when the national coach holds a tactical discussion on the sidelines. Other teammates stand in a circle around it, slightly more at a distance.
As is also striking what De Jong says to the press in New York, after the disappointing performance. “It is clear that we have to adjust things.” The positioning in midfield – De Jong is too close to Ryan Gravenberch as a controller – is not good. The effect of that adjustment was visible on Sunday in the first World Cup match against Japan (2-2): the coordination is better, Gravenberch is ‘higher’ and gives two assists. In that match, De Jong tactically directs players with subtle instructions; he leads the attack build-up and makes it clear when pressure should be put on the opponent.
New hierarchy
Frenkie de Jong’s influence on the Dutch team is growing almost silently. This leadership role is also what Koeman expressly expects from him, the national coach said in conversation with NRCin Brussels in February after a UEFA conference. “He has to take that responsibility, he is no longer a talent.”
What that means for the hierarchy became clear during the World Cup preparations: De Jong is the new vice-captain, behind Van Dijk, until recently Nathan Aké was. “I think it comes and has happened naturally for me,” said De Jong at the end of last week in Dallas, when asked about those responsibilities. “I have more experience, I have been with the group longer. I feel good about that.”
Frenkie de Jong (29) – born in Gorinchem, raised in Arkel – is one of the defining players of the Dutch team. Aided by his graceful playing and sympathetic appearance, he is undeniably popular. Football magazine Santos made for the World Cup a special of two hundred pages about him (with the cover headline: ‘Frenkie, save us’). Since his breakthrough at Ajax, the name Frenkie has been on the rise, with 175 babies born last year.
At the same time, criticism is never far away. In summary: he would play too much ‘safe’ wide and have too little impact. The head footballer of The Telegraph pleaded This week, he even decided to put De Jong on the bench during the second match, which the Dutch team will play against Sweden in Houston on Saturday. Ruud Gullit mentioned rather calls him a “postman” because he runs too often with the ball – a statement that has haunted De Jong for a long time.
This is how the Oranje key player divides public opinion. Something that people who worked with him found themselves talking about NRC about surprising; they have no doubts about his qualities.
How has De Jong developed in recent years at FC Barcelona and Oranje? How important is he for coaches? Is he overrated – or underrated?
Frenkie de Jong scored against Levante earlier this season, one of the few goals he scored.
Photo Getty Images
His best position
There was some “frustration” and “impatience” on the part of twenty-year-old De Jong when Erik ten Hag started as Ajax coach in January 2018. He was not a regular starter that season and there was uncertainty about what his best position was. “He still had to invent himself,” says Ten Hag, looking back.
That year, De Jong played mostly as a central defender, while he saw himself as an attacking midfielder – the classic ‘ten’. “He really had that in mind,” said Ten Hag. There was some “discussion” to convince him that a position lower down the field in a more “strategic role” suited him better.
“The strategist,” Ten Hag therefore called him, as a link between the lines. “Frenkie always has time and space,” he says. “With Frenkie you have the feeling that you have an extra player,” says then assistant coach Alfred Schreuder. “He has the courage to let opponents get close, creating space elsewhere.”
His ball control, acceleration and agility make it almost “impossible” to put him under pressure, says Ten Hag. He often creates a surplus with his dribbles past opponents. He masters this exceptionally well, especially in the “first and second phase of construction”.
But he does not have that ability as an offensive midfielder in the final phase of the attack – in jargon the ‘final third‘. Ten Hag: “Until the final third he has the best overview – I don’t know a better one in the world. But in the final third he doesn’t have that.” As soon as he enters the opponent’s penalty area, “he is not clinical either.”
This is how De Jong grew at Ajax into the controlling midfielder that he still is at the core. He still shows his rushes, clearances and defensive interceptions with which he made his international breakthrough with Ajax in the Champions League in the 2018-2019 season, now at FC Barcelona and the Dutch team.
Although he may have become a little less adventurous in his playing style, De Jong admits NRC and other media in an interview in Zeist at the beginning of June. “When I look back at my time when I first came through, I dribbled just a little more than I do now.” Is he more businesslike? “I don’t think my mentality has changed in the sense of: okay, I would shoot the ball now because something could go wrong.”
The pivot point
Expectations were high around his arrival at FC Barcelona in the summer of 2019. The fact that he has now mainly played in the starting line-up there for seven seasons is a “victory in itself”, he thinks. Financial Times-journalist Simon Kuper, author of FC Barcelona – The Empire. Also because, according to him, De Jong doubted whether he could handle the level.
But it is not (yet) a great sporting success. According to Kuper, this is partly related to his position as a controlling midfielder just in front of the defense – pivote in Spanish (pivot). “The most important thing in that role is that you should never lose the ball.” So, as guardian of the balance between attack and defense, he is often somewhat invisible.
What complicated his time at FC Barcelona is the financial and sporting crisis the club was going through. The pandemic broke out in his first season, after which Barça ran into major financial problems (due to managerial hubris, the foundation was already shaky before corona). Partly as a result of the high debt burden, Lionel Messi left the club in 2021, a turning point in the modern history of FC Barcelona.
Yet he managed to conquer his place in the selection in that turbulent force field. De Jong was “popular” with key players such as Messi, Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets, says Schreuder, assistant at FC Barcelona under Koeman from 2020 to 2021, shortly after his first period at Ajax with Ten Hag. “I saw that in how they treated him, how he was involved in the training. It was as if he had been playing there for years.” De Jong himself is now one of the most experienced players – he regularly wears the captain’s armband.
Until the final third he has the best overview. But in the final third not
A crucial period in his Barça time is the summer of 2022. Due to the financial problems, the board wanted to sell De Jong. Manchester United, with coach Ten Hag, was willing to pay a lot for him. “I really wanted to bring him to United,” Ten Hag says now. That summer, the coach spoke to De Jong “several times”. “We pulled out all the stops.”
In an attempt to persuade him, United went as far as to make a video featuring De Jong alongside some of their club legends, wrote The Athleticthe sports branch of The New York Times. A deal seemed close, but De Jong preferred to stay at his dream club. In terms of life outside football, he is enjoying himself in Catalonia – he and his wife Mikky now have two sons who are growing up there.
“I think it’s a shame that he didn’t take that step, then he would have been even better,” says Ten Hag. The fact that he decided to stay – despite pressure from Barcelona’s top management to make a transfer – says something about his steadfastness. Ten Hag: “That’s what he is, a free spirit. He is independent.”
Due to his technical skill and speed with the ball, it is very difficult for opponents to put pressure on De Jong
Photo ANP
This was also visible in his confrontation with the Spanish press, after details of his contract were leaked. Information that he believes is incorrect. “I find it incomprehensible that you are not ashamed to write that,” he said in a press conference in early 2024. This while De Jong, according to Kuper, is “conflict-avoidant” by nature.
“I know how this works,” De Jong said in 2025 in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “I know there is someone at the club who says: ‘Put pressure on Frenkie, because we want to sell him this summer’.”
The El País journalist who interviewed him, Juan I. Irigoyen, says otherwise NRC that De Jong is one of the few players without PR people to guide him. Partly for that reason he has no “protection” in the media. “I don’t want friends in the press who talk well about me and always defend me,” De Jong says in the interview. “If I play badly, they have to say so; and if I play well, too.”
Rare flute concerto
At the end of 2024, during his difficult return after a persistent ankle injury, De Jong received a rare flute concert from the Barça crowd. He seems to have put that difficult period behind him. He is now back at top level – apart from a hamstring injury this spring.
He says he gets “a lot of freedom” in the extremely attacking style of play under German coach Hansi Flick, who has given the club new energy. Under Flick they won two national titles in a row (2025, 2026), after De Jong won his first in 2023. In terms of sporting future, there is peace after he extended his contract until 2029.
His influence on the game of FC Barcelona is difficult to capture in statistics. What exactly does it say that he ‘only’ scored twenty times and provided 31 assists in almost three hundred matches for the club? And with the Dutch team two goals and nine assists in 67 international matches?
Frenkie de Jong in December 2017 in a league match against PSV, here in a duel with Jorrit Hendrix.
Photo Getty Images
He realizes that his impact is difficult to measure. De Jong told about it in 2021 at a sports conference of the Barça Innovation Hub, in conversation with Vosse de Boode, then head of sports science and data analysis at Ajax. At the beginning of 2019, she gave a presentation with specific tactical data to the Ajax selection about the influence of a player in the build-up to a goal. “I was very high on that,” De Jong said at the conference. “They normally make it [de spelers] always a little joke about me, that I have few goals and assists. Then I showed them this statistic.” In other words: his influence goes further than expressed in goals and assists.
Ten Hag, coach at the time, knows those nuances and the criticism. That De Jong does not have a real long shot (“that was a development point”), that he scores too little (“nobody can do everything”), that he runs too much with the ball (“such nonsense”). Look at what he can do, he says. “That’s an awful lot, isn’t it.”
But, if he were still his trainer, he would challenge him to win more. “He has not won enough given his qualities. He still has to take another step in that he also grows as a team player.” Ten Hag, who spoke to NRC before De Jong would win his third Spanish national title, mentions the Champions League and a prize with the Dutch team. “Those two things have to happen now.”