The strange case of Donny van de Beek
If this classy player gets onto the field, it tends to be too little, too late. He may be wondering why United bought him
Everyone loves an unsolved mystery. Who’s the big baddie in Line of Duty? Who paid for the Downing Street refurbishment? And why the H did United sign Donny van de Beek?
We’re no closer to solving the last one. We’re probably further away, as an already weird United career has taken another twist. Before Christmas it felt like a slight when van de Beek wasn’t on the field. Now it feels belittling even when he does get on. If he starts, as in the FA Cup quarter-final at Leicester, you know the game is low-priority. And when he comes off the bench, it’s almost always as the last resort.
He often appears when United are chasing a winner, which could suggest a degree of trust, but Ole Gunnar Solskjaer makes it feel more like an afterthought or a desperate punt. In 2021, van de Beek’s seven Premier League appearances – all as sub – haven’t even amounted to 90 minutes. They have lasted 8, 45, 5, 11, 8, 6 and, at Leeds on Sunday, 1 minute. Even the 45 was less than flattering: United were already 4-0 up against 10-man Southampton.
‘It feels all too apt that his best moment at United, the dummy for Mason Greenwood’s goal at Leicester, involved not touching the ball. He has become the ghost of Old Trafford’
In the autumn, some of his appearances were luxurious 20-minute affairs. He even started a couple of league games, at Southampton and West Ham, though he didn’t sparkle in either. This is part of the problem: his early marginalisation has perpetuated itself, leading to a drop in confidence and then performance, which in turn made Solskjaer less likely to pick him.
And yet, even at this low ebb, van de Beek still shows touches of class, like his dummy for Mason Greenwood’s goal at Leicester. It feels all too apt that his best moment for United involved not touching the ball. He has become the ghost of Old Trafford.
He started that day, as in all bar one of the domestic cup games, in place of Bruno Fernandes. Is this why United paid £35m for van de Beek, to be Fernandes’ understudy? If so, they misjudged him. Both men are No10s, but their styles could hardly be more contrasting. Fernandes is an all-action, impatient, wildly ambitious conductor; van de Beek is a supporting actor, a touch player who could find space and keep possession in a phonebox.
His style is not particularly suited to United. Maybe that was the point. Most of us have something in our wardrobe that we bought because it caught our eye, because it was different, and, while we weren’t entirely sure when we might wear it, we loved the idea of it. And then real life got in the way, and we never took the tags off. It has happened to United before: Alex Ferguson signed Juan Sebastian Veron and Dimitar Berbatov, two beautiful footballers who played a different type of music, at a different tempo, from the rest of the band. (Berbatov had some great moments at United but the nagging feeling that he never truly belonged was confirmed by his miserable exclusion from the matchday squad for the 2011 Champions League final.)
In theory van de Beek is the perfect complement to United’s individualists, somebody who - like another lesser-spotted figure, Juan Mata - can raise the IQ of the team. My suspicion is that he was an aspirational signing, intended to fix United’s biggest weakness from pre-lockdown times: breaking down packed defences. The lack of a pre-season didn’t help, nor did the fact that United started so badly – with the honourable exception of van de Beek, who scored on his debut, from the bench of course, against Crystal Palace. After losing three of the first seven league matches, Solskjaer was shackled to the short term rather than figuring out how to use a new flavour. But that doesn’t explain what has happened in the last 26 games, when United have lost only once.
If van de Beek was purely a No 10, his treatment would be easier to understand. Fernandes is undroppable – the end. But attacking positions are much less rigid in modern football, and van de Beek is Ajax-educated: not quite a total footballer, but capable of playing from the left, as Paul Scholes did so effectively for United (if not England) and Paul Pogba does now, and probably anywhere in the front six.
It doesn’t help that Solskjaer has become a reluctant interventionist, slow to change things both within games and between them. And he has an inner circle he trusts – particularly in the league, where he rotates the least. Though they are different types, the fact that Dan James has started ten league games to van de Beek’s two feels like an act of cultural vandalism.
Van de Beek is the kind of player – intelligent, classy, Dutch – that all right-thinking people want to do well. Most of us will hope he has second-season syndrome in reverse, but it won’t be surprising if United sell him to fatten the pot for Erling Haaland or Harry Kane. And you couldn’t blame van de Beek for hoping Ajax serenade him with the Fine Young Cannibals: Donny, we’re sorry, won’t you come on home. He knows that, if he does go back to Amsterdam, there will be no more musical differences.
If he does leave in the summer, we’ll all die wondering - about what he might have achieved at United, and why they bought him at all. At the moment, his signing feels like a half-Beeked idea.