How Zakaria Bakkali Lost Control of His Own Career | NOW

Somewhere in the middle of the balance sheet, the growth brilliance in Bakkali continued to glow, prompting clubs to invest in him again. New in that row is RKC Waalwijk, which will take on PSV this weekend. He left that club astonishingly two times: on his debut and when he left.

Valencia, Deportivo La Coruña, Anderlecht and Beerschot: they all pushed aside the stories about a questionable mentality and a troublesome environment. They saw the flame in Bakkali still burning after difficult years.

Or: they wanted to see it glow. Not much later, the clubs were each an illusion poorer and a disappointment richer. The turning point had not come. RKC Waalwijk joined this summer in the list that still believes in the flash football player.

Admittedly: Bakkali is only 26 years old and also in North Brabant he shows things in training sessions and in practice matches that his teammates think: he is so much better than us. No one has ever doubted his football qualities. Not even Vincent Kompany. He only broke down at Anderlecht because of the well-known story around it.

Zakaria Bakkali also did not live up to expectations at Anderlecht.

Bakkali pinged everyone sick as a child

It is July 30, 2013. The football fan looks with bewilderment at a seventeen-year-old boy in the red and white of PSV in the preliminary round of the Champions League tearing apart the defense of Zulte Waregem with a few flashes. A new star is born.

They already know that at PSV. At the age of twelve, the Eindhoven residents pluck Bakkali away from Standard Luik, which in turn takes him away from FC Luik. He is never an official member of the latter club, but he does play along. That’s how it goes in the Fiery City.

For that, Bakkali pings everyone sickly on the concrete of Bressoux, even the older boys. They call it Cour Jaket, a small square lined with red bricks, with flats and dilapidated corrugated iron in the background.

A run-down neighborhood is Droixhe-Bressoux, which makes the news because Nacer Chadli, Christian Benteke and Mehdi Carcela make it from bricks to grass – in another, poorer neighborhood, that is. The neighborhood’s newest growth brilliance lives on Rue Raymond Geenen, one of the ‘better’ parts.

Help out of poverty

But even the bling of all the stars who grew up there often pales in comparison to the neighborhood’s crime rate. On the banks of the Meuse, the Liège district is one of the poorest parts of Belgium. Time has stood still.

Bressoux-Droixhe is a melting pot of cultures and a neighborhood where you almost have to play football to escape poverty. It drives boys to the many squares in the area and any player with even a little talent becomes the beacon of hope. From that moment on, he no longer only plays for himself, but also works on the future of the whole family.

In the case of the Belgian-Moroccan Bakkali, these are three brothers and three sisters. Mother Bakkali dies at a young age and his father becomes incapacitated due to back problems. PSV offers a helping hand to the degeneration of the suburbs, where children are constantly balancing on the edge. The squares may offer an escape from the temptation that lurks on every street corner, but the football on concrete is still an extension of the street.

In that sense, the grass in Eindhoven provides a better framework. Father and son Bakkali get into the car every morning at 5 a.m., but the first year is not only grueling. Twelve-year-old Bakkali becomes somewhat isolated in a foreign environment because of the language and misses his familiar Liège. He wants to go back to Standard.

PSV will keep him with an apartment and a car from the club in Eindhoven. Even then, when the two live nearby, father is always next to the line. Likewise on free afternoons. While his batch has already gone home, father watches as his son refines his kicking technique. Abdelkader Bakkali is Zakaria’s foothold.

Zakaria Bakkali with then PSV coach Phillip Cocu before a duel with AC Milan in 2013 in the preliminary round of the Champions League.

At some point it goes wrong

Willem Weijs is a youth trainer at PSV at that time and will meet Bakkali again years later, in 2021, at Anderlecht, where he is then an assistant coach. “Not only was he incredibly talented, but he was also a nice guy. And when I saw him walking onto the field with a bag of balls in his spare time, I thought: that’s okay too.”

Bakkali is also doing well for many years, but at a certain point things go wrong. Weijs himself noticed a first change after the Nike Premier Cup. At the world’s most prominent youth tournament for football players in his age category, Bakkali, just under sixteen, is voted best player. Suddenly brokers and clubs tumble over each other; everyone wants something from the young PSV player. “It seems as if there is a life before and a life after that tournament,” says Weijs.

Bakkali eventually signs ‘just’ with PSV, which fixes him until 2015. But when he makes that glorious debut in the main force more than a year and a half later and already plays for the ‘Red Devils’ within a few months – national coach Marc Wilmots even compares him with Eden Hazard – all hell breaks loose again. The future of Bakkali, still only seventeen years old, is once again open to him.

Zakaria Bakkali next to Adam Maher during the 2013/2014 season at PSV.

‘Everyone started talking’

A year later, in the summer of 2014, PSV is completely done with Bakkali. He keeps telling me to sign up, and then he doesn’t. “In the end, money and a difference of culture went wrong,” says Marcel Brands now.

“We went very far within our budget, but at a certain point the boy was so busy that everyone inside and outside the family started talking. Bakkali himself was a man without too much swagger, he was just a football animal, but at a certain point he was no longer in control of his own career.”

In a reconstruction of Football International from 2014, a fickle Bakkali is also portrayed. Because everyone wants everything from him, he changes numbers as often as his underpants, which he then forgets to pass on with all the consequences that entails. “We pampered him way too much”, it sounds in that story through the PSV employees.

For example, Bakkali would get an iPad for his birthday and he can afford a little more than the rest. Now, almost ten years later, Brands is more nuanced about this. “I don’t think he received preferential treatment. We wanted to go far for him, though. I put a lot of time and energy into that contract extension.”

Weijs: “I also worked at Ajax later and there is less room for this kind of behavior. That is the culture of the club, where PSV is just a bit softer than Ajax. And culture cannot be changed one-two-three.”

Bakkali himself punctually in an interview in October 2015 in Sports/Football Magazine to have received too little aid. “What I went through, it destroys players. If they had behaved well towards me, I might still be here.” And also: “The media have done their best to make me dirty. PSV has tried to give me an image that did not correspond to reality.”

In the service of Valencia, where Zakaria Bakkali did not impress.

‘It was very painful to meet him’

The story after that is known. Valencia picks him up on a free transfer, but there he only shows a shadow of who he was in his best years at PSV, which he experienced ironically at the age of seventeen.

Also at Deportivo La Coruña and Anderlecht there is first hope, followed by disappointment. “It was very nice to meet him, but also very painful,” says Weijs, who entered the Brussels team when Bakkali had already been returned to the second team.

“He was clearly overweight and I also tasted shame that we finally met here after that hopeful period at PSV. He said that he was going to get fit and that nothing had been lost yet, but I heard that he was also at RKC again. just came in with extra pounds…”

“It’s also not the case that he is only twenty, is it? That the penny has yet to drop. He has already repeated this so often that it looks like a repeating story. Although I hope that he will now show how at RKC he can play football very well.”

And hope: it will continue to glow as long as the growth brilliance is not extinguished. However much he is the breeding ground for disappointment.