Micky van de Ven: The centre-back of the future who Tottenham can’t live without

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It was April 2019 and Wim Jonk was preparing to come home. The former Ajax and Holland midfield legend was about to take over at Volendam, his home-town club and the team where he launched his career.

Jonk and his staff had previously worked at Ajax with Johan Cruyff, overhauling the academy in line with Cruyff’s specific vision. Now he needed to know the young players he would be working with. So he went to watch Volendam’s youngsters play in the Under-19 Division 2. Jonk was not impressed with the level of the players — Volendam were bottom of their league — except for one boy, just 18, who caught his eye. Jonk called Jasper van Leeuwen, his incoming technical director, to come and watch their next game.

By half-time in Volendam Under-19s’ next match, Jonk and Van Leeuwen had made up their minds — the boy needed a contract. The old club leadership had not rated Micky van de Ven and saw him as fourth choice. He had already been told to start looking for a different club for the 2019-20 season. When one local agent cornered Jonk and Van Leeuwen during the game he demanded to know which of the Volendam Under-19s would be getting new deals. He rolled off a long list of Volendam players asking if they would be retained. When Van Leeuwen told him that Van de Ven would be kept on, the agent’s jaw hit the floor.

This was the week when Van de Ven’s life changed forever. Within days he was sat down in the Volendam boardroom with Jonk, a local hero, agreeing his new deal at the club. “After that,” says Van Leeuwen, “a whole new dynamic started.”

Volendam gave Micky van de Ven his first taste of senior football (Cees van Hoogdalem/Soccrates/Getty Images)

Six years on, Van de Ven is now one of the most exciting and distinctive young centre-backs in European football. He is coming to the end of his second year at Tottenham Hotspur, where from his first game he has become arguably Spurs’ indispensable player, the man who makes their ultra-aggressive style work on the pitch. At his best, he looks like a defender from the future.

The story of the last two years at Spurs has largely been the story of whether or not Van de Ven is fit. And, while his long spells out this season with two different hamstring injuries effectively capsized Spurs’ Premier League campaign, his return from injury has been integral to Spurs’ progress to the Europa League final. He has started their last five European games, playing the full 90 minutes in four of them.

Without him, Spurs would be watching Wednesday’s final at home on TV. Now they are one game from a historic achievement.

None of what Van de Ven has achieved would have been possible, at least not in the same way, without that crucial week in 2019. But the story goes further back. Like so much of the top end of modern football, all roads lead back to Cruyff.

You have to go back to 2010, when Van de Ven was just a boy whose dad would take him to Ajax games. This was when Cruyff returned to Ajax, the club where he made history as a player. His goal was to bring the whole club back into line with his principles, to reassert the identity that had been lost. And his particular focus was the academy. He worked with his former players Jonk and Dennis Bergkamp, as well as Van Leeuwen and Ruben Jongkind, all trying to implement his radical vision.

At the heart of it was a sense of what academies were actually for. Cruyff never saw the point in building dominant youth teams that could routinely beat their peers. The real challenge — and the real reward — was in developing the individual players themselves. This was what he had done to the academies of Ajax and Barcelona in the past. And now he wanted to do it again.

“We were in the lucky situation to be working with Johan Cruyff at Ajax,” explains Jongkind. “Not focusing on the results of the teams, but more on the development of the individual players. We basically were the first ones in the Netherlands to really have a focus on individual development with a club. And our vision when we watch matches, we put on our glasses to really look at individuals.”

Wim Jonk, right, has been a great source of advice for Van de Ven (Soccrates/Getty Images)

The other part of the plan was to look at the upsides of young players, the special skills they had that they could use on the pitch, rather than worrying about the things they could not do or whether they fitted any particular mould. “The most important thing is to look at what players could be able to do in the future,” Jongkind says. “The other thing is to look at the weapons of players, the things that really stand out, that are peculiar or striking. Those are the things, the talents you can build on. Can we develop and help this player to make his talent world-class?”

This policy had flourished when Jonk, Van Leeuwen and Jongkind had worked together at Ajax. After a poor few years of youth development, their reforms led to a flowering of young talent in the mid-2010s: Matthijs de Ligt, Frenkie de Jong, Donny van de Beek, Justin Kluivert, Noussair Mazraoui, Ryan Gravenberch and Sergino Dest — players who helped Ajax to the 2017 Europa League final, the semi-finals of the 2019 Champions League and who all went on to earn the club hundreds of millions in transfer fees.

“It’s a system that is a little bit diametrical to the normal system of development,” Jongkind says. “People look at the teams — under-19s, under-17s — and put the players in. But we approached all 200 players in the academy as individual potential diamonds. Stones that we have to make into diamonds.”

When Jonk, Van Leeuwen and Jongkind showed up at Volendam, stones that could become diamonds was exactly what they were looking for. Find a few of them, develop them in the right way, raise the value of the squad, and Volendam would be back on the right track.

And so when they first saw Van de Ven with the under-19s, it was a revelation. If you are looking for strengths — or as Jongkind calls them “weapons” — then what could possibly be better than a teenage centre-back with Van de Ven’s unique athleticism? “His physical ability was so high,” says Jonk. “So that’s the starting point.” “It was exceptional what we saw,” says Van Leeuwen. “Not everything exceptional, but some exceptional things. And other things were quite poor, and really had to improve.”

Even Van de Ven’s weapon — his athleticism — had to be worked on and developed. Being fast is one thing, but being able to use it on the pitch time after time is something else. His only experience at this point was in the second tier of under-19 football. The physical demands of the senior game at the top level are very different. Especially when you have to play 50 or 60 games every year.

“He was a tall, skinny boy, super-fast, but his movement — the mobility, the agility — was really poor,” Van Leeuwen explains. “So he had to really be rebuilt.”

“We basically took him apart and re-assembled him,” says Jongkind. “With the ideas we already had a lot of experience with from Ajax. With specialists, people who understand the body, who came from athletics and American football.”

Van de Ven in action for the Dutch U21 side vs Gibraltar in 2022 (Peter Lous/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

Once the fundamentals of Van de Ven’s running mechanics were changed, he was ready for more power. With training and nutrition changes, he added almost 10kg in his second season there. The key was to add strength without compromising his speed. And as Tottenham have found this season, perfecting the mechanics of a unique athlete remains a work in progress.

Of course, football is not just about athleticism alone. “We basically treated him as a youth player of 12 years old,” Jongkind says. He had so much ‘over-capacity’ athletically but he needed more to his game. So they gave him a tailored approach, working hard on his first touch and technical skills. Jonk took him aside and worked on his defending and game intelligence. He had played on the wing as a boy and needed more specific instruction. They made him a captain to improve his leadership skills, and to make him an example for the rest of his cohort to follow. Jonk always told him he was good enough to win 80 caps for Holland and that should be his goal.

By October 2019, Van de Ven was in the first team. It was a new era for Volendam and Van de Ven was at the heart of it, this new young team rebuilt around the principles of Cruyff himself. “At Volendam, we were by far the youngest team, even one of the youngest in Europe,” says Jongkind. “Because we approached it from a development side. This is how we create value with our approach. Inspired by Cruyff’s vision of football and talent development.”

The influence of Cruyff was not just limited to the development coaching. It was also true of how Volendam played on the pitch.

Jonk wanted Volendam to play in the way that Cruyff taught him back at Ajax: attacking, proactive, dominant football. Their meagre resources were to be no restriction from playing the way he wanted. Right from the start Jonk showed his players footage of Barcelona and Manchester City and told them what they could learn.

So Jonk would always encourage Van de Ven to take the initiative — to drive forward with the ball, to become the extra man in midfield, to use his pace to catch the opposition off guard. “You can go!” Vonk would shout from the sidelines. “Make an extra man in midfield! Do it!”

By the start of his second season at Volendam, Van de Ven was already attracting attention. Even to analysts looking at his data alone, who did not necessarily know how fast he was, his remarkable numbers for passes, shots and duel success stood out. By the end of his second season, he was on his way from the Dutch second tier to Wolfsburg, with a legal dispute over the fee Volendam were due.

A move to Germany saw Van de Ven test himself against better forwards (Soeren Stache/Getty Images)

After two years in Germany, he came to Spurs in summer 2023 and found a new manager in Ange Postecoglou who wanted to play his own brand of aggressive, front-foot football, playing out from the back and defending high up the pitch. Postecoglou’s football is as Cruyffian anything in the world game right now: constantly on the front foot. And it only works when Van de Ven is there at centre-back.

Van de Ven may in fact be less brave in possession now than he was at Volendam. “He took more risk (with us) than he does these days,” Jonk says. “Now I see short passes, not long passes or through passes. He is playing a little bit conservative.”

Even if he does not take as many chances in possession as his team-mate Cristian Romero, there is still something distinctly Cruyffian about Van de Ven. “His drive to take the initiative is definitely Cruyffian,” says Van Leeuwen. “Also his dribbling is. Personally, I think taking more risks with passing would make him a really Cruyffian defender, that part is still missing a bit. But nobody is perfect.”

Jonk is an assistant coach for the Dutch national team and even now, four years after Van de Ven left Volendam, he is still working hard to develop his game. Only a few weeks ago, he sent Van de Ven some clips on how he can keep improving. “The through passes, and defending forwards, because that is his strength,” Jonk says. “He can defend half the pitch, because he is so pacy. And then you have a smaller area to play in. And that is really Cruyffian. Because you want to play in the other half of the pitch rather than in your own half.”

Van de Ven has played a crucial role in Tottenham’s run to the Europa League final (David Lidstrom/Getty Images)

This remains Van de Ven’s greatest weapon. If Cruyffian football demands pushing your defence up to the halfway line, it means defending the largest space possible. It is impossible to do that without defenders quick enough to cover it. And no centre-back in world football does this better than Van de Ven.

Of course, Cruyff himself was happy to have Ronald Koeman and Pep Guardiola at centre-back for Barcelona, both selected for their skill rather than their speed. But that was 30 years ago, and in the sped-up football of the 2020s, pace is indispensable. So many of Europe’s best teams — Manchester City, Barcelona, Bayern Munich — want to defend high up the pitch. It is so much harder to do that without a player like Van de Ven.

When Van Leeuwen watches Hansi Flick’s Barcelona, he knows how valuable Van de Ven is. “They are very high up the pitch, they are being killed all the time with these counter-attacks,” he says. “I was constantly thinking that top teams, to play high-pressure football, are going to need guys like this.”

There is something futuristic about Van de Ven at his best; implausibly fast, technically smooth, transforming not only how the team plays but also where they play, allowing them to set up camp in the opposition half. He is the missing piece that allows Tottenham to function. Take him out and the whole thing falls apart. But put him in and they can play Postecoglou’s Cruyffian game. Lifting the Europa League on Wednesday would not just underline Van de Ven’s current excellence but offer a glimpse of the football future inherent in him.

Top photo: John Walton/Getty Images

This news was originally published on this post .

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