Frenkie de Jong's El Clasico nightmare should worry Barcelona
By Tom Gott
It wasn't too long ago that Frenkie de Jong was an outside Ballon d'Or contender and destined for superstardom.
He joined Barcelona in 2019 for a whopping €75m, after which De Jong was tipped to channel Johan Cruyff and become the next great Dutchman to dominate at Camp Nou.
These days, it's all going wrong.
Things hit a new low for the midfielder during Sunday's meeting with Real Madrid, in which De Jong was worse than non-existent for each of his 77 minutes on the pitch before being hooked by Ronald Koeman.
Now, we know that he was playing with an injury, so we've got to give him a little bit of slack, but the biggest concern for De Jong is that, these days, there's no guarantee that he would have actually done much better if he was fully fit.
The concern with De Jong is that, while his technical ability is superb, he doesn't really do a lot with it. He doesn't always defend well and is guilty of not linking midfield and attack well enough, but he'll post supremely high pass accuracy numbers and do a whole lot of running around.
De Jong embodies all that is going wrong at Barcelona now. The players are (mostly) incredibly talented but they're just not doing anything.
This year, the 24-year-old has failed to separate himself from Barcelona's pack of mediocrity. Those around him are struggling, but none of them cost €75m and few have been surrounded by the same level of hysteria as De Jong. Fans are entitled to expect him to stand up in a crisis like this.
He's second in completed passes in the squad (439), behind only Sergio Busquets (627), yet the progressive distance of those passes is nowhere near his senior midfielder and is more in tune with the rest of the squad's struggling stars. It's a lot of passing for the sake of passing. It's trying to be tiki-taka without actually tiki-ing or taka-ing.
In a team which is crying out for creativity, control and composure, De Jong isn't offering any of that, and with most other players failing to pull their wait as well, everyone's shortcomings are getting exposed.
Since moving to Barcelona, not only has De Jong failed to blossom into a world-beater, but he has actually regressed to the point that his spot in the starting lineup is genuinely under threat by 18-year-old Pedri and 17-year-old Gavi, the latter of whom has only arrived on the scene this season.
Some of the blame can be directed at Koeman, who continues to play De Jong in a more advanced role than he was used to at Ajax, where he was shining as a unique centre-back/midfielder hybrid. He's being asked to play a game for which he is not really suited.
Having said that, De Jong's job now is to recover possession, break the lines and play a killer pass. It's not too dissimilar to his role at Ajax, just a little higher up the pitch.
Something's just not clicking. Koeman may not be using him correctly, but De Jong isn't fulfilling his end of the bargain either, and his upcoming spell out with injury may actually end up being a blessing in disguise for him.
A spell out of the spotlight to piece himself back together may be exactly what De Jong needs. The way things are going now is unsustainable, and while he's not solely to blame for that, he could benefit from a chance to get back to basics and build up from square one again.
De Jong's time to figure things out in the starting lineup probably should be finite at this point. Gavi is outperforming him and Pedri's quality is no secret these days, and once the latter recovers from his own injury, De Jong is going to have a tough time justifying his spot in the squad.