Matthijs De Ligt: Why world's best have no choice but to make Dutch 'freak' the most expensive defender ever

Once in every generation a teenager arrives fully-formed into the adult game, with almost nothing left to learn, and he instantly has the world of football at his feet. In this generation that player is Matthijs De Ligt.

The Ajax captain is the most valuable player on the transfer market this summer and it is not even close. Christian Eriksen, Eden Hazard and Paul Pogba are all top players but buying them might only get you five years of returns. Buying De Ligt is the football equivalent of an annuity, a guarantee of stable returns over a long period. He will anchor your defence for the whole of the 2020s and well into the 2030s as well. He is one of the surest bets the market has ever seen.

No wonder Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester United are so desperate to sign him, and why he will smash the record for the most expensive defender ever when he does go. Liverpool paid £75million for Virgil van Dijk and within 18 months they had lost one Champions League final, won another, and racked up a 97-point Premier League season. Never has any big fee been vindicated quicker than that. De Ligt is the Van Dijk of his generation - he is eight years younger - and so a buyer would naturally get far more use out of him. Given all of that, what possible fee would be too much for him: £100m? £130m? £150m?

Because De Ligt, in the nicest possible sense of the word, is a freak. Speak to the coaches at Ajax who work with him about what makes him stand out among all the other young defenders in the world. They say that normally, a top centre-back will be an excellent natural defender, the side of the game that is harder to teach, but will need more work on how to play the ball out from the back. De Ligt, though, is an absolute natural at both.

Not many defenders just show up like De Ligt, ready as a world-class all-rounder before they have even turned 20. Two who spring to mind are Gerard Pique - 12 years older than De Ligt - or Rio Ferdinand - another nine years older than him. But compare De Ligt’s trajectory with theirs. When Pique was 19 he was on loan at Real Zaragoza, before he had even made an impression at Manchester United. When Ferdinand was 19 he was playing for West Ham United. De Ligt has lifted the Dutch league title and was seconds away from a Champions League final too. At Ajax they think he is ahead of even Pique or Ferdinand at that age too.

Mauricio Pochettino knows what it means to be a centre-back, not just from his own playing career but from building that fierce Tottenham defence over the last five years. And when he gave a long interview to El Pais before Spurs’ Champions League semi-final second leg against Ajax, he was full of praise for the teenage De Ligt. Again pointing out that players with that natural bravery and talent and charisma do not come along very often.

“I saw natural characteristics in him,” Pochettino said of De Ligt. “Characteristics he brings from the cradle. If I have to describe him, he is someone whose primordial characteristic is courage. With that, you can be a centre-back. Without it, you can play in other positions, but not at centre-back.” Pochettino said that everything De Ligt did was because of that character. “He interprets everything that happens on the pitch because he is brave. He gets there because he is brave. He defends well because he is brave. He anticipates because he is ready to go where nobody goes, because his character demands it. His qualities as a player reflect his character as a person.”

Those personal and football qualities were on show all the way through the season. He was one of the stars of Ajax’s run to the Champions League semi-final, partnering Daley Blind at centre-back, helping them to defend high up the pitch and build up play from the back. It was his thumping header in Turin that knocked out Juventus in the quarter-finals, and another thumping header in Amsterdam that looked like it was going to knock out Tottenham and send Ajax through to the final. Of course Lucas Moura had other ideas and that second half collapse represents the greatest set-back to De Ligt in his career so far.

open image in gallery

open image in gallery

But Ajax recovered to secure the Dutch league title, their first since 2013-14. When the team paraded in front of 100,000 Ajax fans, De Ligt, who has been at Ajax since he was nine, gave a speech, casually holding the silver Eredivisie plate in his left hand and a microphone in his right. He said that his team had shown what Ajax was all about, what Amsterdam was all about, and that they had lived up to the message of the late Johan Cruyff.

It was a moment which summed up the maturity and confidence and presence of a teenager who acts and plays unlike anyone else from his generation. England have to find a way round him - and Van Dijk - in Guimaraes on Thursday night. It will not be easy but they could do with the practice: teams will be trying to find a way round De Ligt for years and years to come.