Ricardo Willemse is scrubbing back and forth through a video on his phone of former players wishing Spartaan’20 luck before a title decider at the end of last season. He is trying to find one face in particular among the Dutch amateur club’s many notable alumni.
There are well wishes from Denzel Dumfries, the Inter Milan and Netherlands right-back, but that’s not the clip he wants. Nor is the especially long and heartfelt message from Bruno Martins Indi, Dumfries’ international team-mate.
Finally, Willemse finds who he is looking for. Joshua Zirkzee’s contribution, filmed while travelling with the rest of the Bologna squad, is short, sharp, to the point and delivered absolutely deadpan. No wonder it has been so hard to find. The message from Manchester United’s new centre-forward barely lasts five seconds.
Willemse, who was Zirkzee’s coach in Spartaan’s youth setup, bursts out laughing after it plays. When he received it, he passed it on to Zirkzee’s father. “Can’t he do anything like a normal guy?!” came the reply.
Willemse finds it amusing because, in that video, he recognises the same cool, calm, ever so slightly reserved young man he knew as a boy.
“You could see it in how he moved around on the pitch. Phlegmatic, composed, confident in his own ability. Sometimes he would score an amazing goal but he wouldn’t celebrate. He’d turn around and walk back,” he recalls with a smile. “I didn’t like that, no expression!”
Willemse tried to find out why Zirkzee would not celebrate as a kid but never got close to an answer. “It was a little bit arrogant,” he says, before stressing, “but not on purpose. It’s just the way he is.” That arrogance was only ever seen on the pitch, too. “Outside he was very social, just a regular guy.”
And even if the good luck message was a little on the short side, it demonstrates that Zirkzee is someone who has never forgotten where he came from. Even if where he came from occasionally forgets him.
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Following the end of Bologna’s Serie A campaign and before the start of the European Championship, a Porsche rolled into VV Hekelingen’s car park.
A former player was back and hoping to have an impromptu kickabout with some old friends on the pitches where his career began. Unfortunately, nobody on site at the time recognised Zirkzee, despite his signed shirt and photographs hanging up in the club bar.
“They asked him to leave!” says Ferry Verbeek, who was one of Zirkzee’s first coaches at Hekelingen.
Undeterred, Zirkzee still returns to his first club every so often. The ground is around the corner from where he grew up, in a sleepy suburb of Spijkenisse, a town south-west of Rotterdam.
His parents, Remco and Doris, started bringing Zirkzee to train at Hekelingen after being turned away from another local club for being too young. He was still aged just four at the time, but Verbeek recognised his talent immediately.
“His father said, ‘How special is this?’. I said very special,” he recalls. “I’d never seen this before. Every year I have 80 players from age three and a half until six, but he had a lot of skills. He could go the whole pitch over, nobody getting in his way.”
Zirkzee signs his old shirt at Spartaan (Courtesy of Spartaan)
Verbeek remembers Remco filming Zirkzee’s matches from the sidelines so that he would be able to guide his son on where to improve.
His father’s desire to test Zirkzee’s talent eventually took him to Spartaan’20, where around 2,500 players aged between five and 17 from Rotterdam and the surrounding areas apply to join every year. Only a handful are selected.
Zirkzee arrived as a nine-year-old but played a year up as part of the under-11s side coached by Willemse, with Remco wanting his son’s obvious natural ability to be developed and challenged.
That proved easier said than done. Zirkzee was tall for a nine-year-old, with a physicality that would allow him to dominate most opponents, but that was combined with remarkable technical ability. “He was already at that time complete, left foot and right foot,” Willemse recalls.
In that age group, Spartaan played seven-a-side, with Zirkzee as one of two split strikers, drifting wide. “His great quality was from that winger position, coming in from the inside and then shooting in the far corner — a bit like Arjen Robben. Inside of his foot, around the ‘keeper, then he’d turn around and…”
Willemse breaks off and does his best impression of Zirkzee’s non-celebration, complete with a vacant, dead-eyed stare.
Zirkzee (circled) with his team-mates in Spartaan’s under-11s (Courtesy of Spartaan)
Playing behind Zirkzee was Tim Santcroos, a midfielder who later went on to become a coach at Spartaan himself. Santcroos remembers his first impression of his former team-mate vividly, watching on from the sidelines on his first visit to the club.
“He was at the end of the pitch, almost out of play, then he did the perfect ‘akka’,” he says, describing the street football skill similar to the ‘elastico’ popularised by Ronaldinho. “Unbelievable. I was looking at my dad like, ‘I’m going to play with this kind of player?!’”
Santcroos and Zirkzee struck a chord, though, and combined in a team that blew much of the competition away, rivalling far more established counterparts from Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven, even winning one continental tournament featuring youth sides from leading European clubs such as Benfica and Celtic.
“They had to make some super competition to make it harder for us. The first match, I think we won 13-0,” he says. “The kick-off we had, me and Joshua were doing one-touch through the whole defence to score.”
Such was Zirkzee’s ability, it was at times difficult to keep him sufficiently challenged and some of those who worked closely with him at Spartaan wonder if that was the reason he did not join one of Dutch football’s biggest clubs right away. Instead, his next stop was ADO Den Haag.
“The first goal, I remember like yesterday,” says Daniel van der Meulen, who brought Zirkzee in for a trial in Den Haag. “It was a chip from the halfway line over the goalkeeper. Already, the boldness and quality of that told me a lot of things about his character: that this guy is something special.”
Zirkzee’s physicality had left Den Haag’s under-13 coach expecting a slightly more cumbersome player. “When young children grow up, they have a little bit more difficulty in coordination,” he adds. “Then he chipped the ball like that and I was like, ‘OK, this is also something new for me’.”
Van der Meulen was also taken aback by Zirkzee’s ambition. “From the day I met him, he already told me he would win the Champions League,” he recalls.
That confidence in his own ability sometimes had to be scaled back.
“In the beginning, he thought, ‘Yeah, OK, I’ve scored the goals, I’ve arrived, I will play every time’. So I put him on the bench for two matches.” Despite being something of a quiet, even introverted personality off the pitch, Zirkzee confronted Van der Meulen for an explanation.
Zirkzee with his old Spartaan coach Ricardo Willemse (Courtesy of Spartaan)
“He was quite mature at that age, so I explained to him if you want to perform on the level we expect, we also expect that you accept that we are playing in a team and we need you as a team member.” The message got through almost immediately.
“In the end, the mentality he showed me, he was like a one-of-a-kind warrior,” Van der Meulen says. “Always there for the team, blaming himself when things go wrong, being able to proceed in the game after. ‘OK, I failed, it happened, but I’ll try again’. That always remains in my mind about the way 13-year-old Joshua was.”
It was not long until Santcroos crossed paths with his friend again, while playing for NAC Breda, and attempted to warn his new team-mates exactly what they were up against.
“I was saying, ‘Guys, stay next to him, do what you can do’. Josh scored the first goal, so we were behind. I made it 1-1, but I think after that, he just decided he’d be better than all of us. He scored a hat-trick.”
Performances like that eventually brought Zirkzee onto the radar of bigger clubs. In 2016, Van der Meulen joined Feyenoord’s academy and alongside the veteran youth coach Jeffrey Oost, he championed Zirkzee — whose physical attributes were still clear — to the Eredivisie club’s academy director, Damien Hertog.
“You want to calculate if he is contributing to the game because he is bigger, faster, stronger, or is he contributing to the game because of his skills?” Hertog recalls. “That’s always difficult. What I liked about Josh is that he’s so creative in solutions — with the ball and without the ball — which makes him a special player for me.”
Hertog impressed on Feyenoord’s academy coaches that they should not discourage the more unpredictable and inventive aspects of Zirkzee’s game. In fact, they were actively encouraged in one-on-one video sessions, comparing him to a modern great.
“We made some clips of some stupid things — backheels, bicycle kicks, other tricks he showed in games — and we put this with (Zlatan) Ibrahimovic. We used him as an example because he’s also big, he’s also doing these tricks.”
It is a name that comes up often when discussing the young Zirkzee, who cited the former United striker as his greatest influence in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport earlier this year. Santcroos compares one goal Zirkzee scored for Spartaan with a backheel from a corner to the Swede.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic was a hero of Zirkzee as a youngster (Christopher Lee – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
“A lot of people say that (Ibrahimovic comparison) right? My father was always watching and he would always say about the elegance, how he treated the ball, how he was big but had the touch,” says Santcroos.
There is another consistent thread that ran through Zirkzee’s early career, which each of those to play or work closely with him agree on.
“If he doesn’t feel a connection with you (as a coach), then there’s a big chance it’s not going to happen,” says Hertog, who cites Zirkzee’s relationship with Vincent Kompany during his time on loan at Anderlecht as particularly strong and beneficial.
“What’s very important for him was the ‘click’ with the trainer,” agrees Willemse and Van der Meulen says the same, pointing out that Zirkzee may have the ideal mentor to work with him in Manchester.
“A mentor like Ruud van Nistelrooy, who is a legend at the club as well, who knows the perfect positioning of a striker, if he can make the connection with him, then I think it’s a disaster for your opponents. They will struggle to stop him.”
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“Tell Manchester United they owe us €1million (£860,000),” shouts one local sheltering from the August sunshine at Hekelingen when he hears a journalist from England asking questions about Old Trafford’s new arrival.
It would seem he is out of luck. As UEFA’s regulations only share so-called solidarity payments with clubs that developed players between their 12th and 23rd birthdays, Hekelingen will not receive a penny of the €42.5million (£36.5m at today’s exchange rate) paid to Bologna this summer.
“One payment when he went to Feyenoord,” confirms Verbeek, which he believes totalled around €1,000 (£860). “After that, you don’t get another.”
At least at Spartaan’20, where he stayed until he was 12, they expect to receive €70,000 (£60,000) from the United deal for their part in his development. It will go a long way towards sustaining a club that generally survives on sponsorships and playing subs.
But more than anything else, Spartaan survives by its reputation for nurturing, developing and forging long-lasting links with the talent they produce and their connection with Zirkzee remains.
After being part of Bayern Munich’s Champions League-winning squad in 2020, albeit only as an unused substitute in the final, he returned to the club and exchanged his shirt from that night for the Spartaan one that he wore during his days in their youth setup.
Joshua Zirkzee’s shirt hangs on the wall at Spartaan in the Netherlands (Mark Critchley/The Athletic)
Zirkzee’s Bayern jersey now takes centre stage on a wall in the clubhouse, alongside others donated by Dumfries, Martins Indi and Anwar El Ghazi, the former Aston Villa winger. Like other former players to have turned professional, one of the club’s dressing rooms has been named in his honour, too.
There is immense pride at Spartaan in helping to develop a group of players who have reached the top of European football, especially now the latest will often be leading the line at Old Trafford this season. You imagine that even a young Zirkzee would agree that is something to celebrate.
(Top photos: Piero Cruciatti/AFP and Justin Tallis/AFP, both via Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
