Is a bad season enough to judge a 21-year-old footballer?
Let’s start with one of the memes you’ve seen on social media. It’s November 8, 2022, in Cremona Milan plays the advance of the midweek round to shorten the distances from Naples in the standings. Pioli makes a rather massive turnover, and thanks also to Carnesecchi’s exceptional saves, the game struggles to unlock. Fifteen minutes from the end, to sort things out, enter Charles De Ketelaerethe symbol of the Italian champions’ transfer market: an attacking midfielder who oozes class even when he’s stationary and doesn’t touch the ball, one of those few players – increasingly rare in contemporary football – capable of giving pause to the action, of shining for the intelligence and not for the physique.
About ten minutes after entering the field, De Ketelaere dictated a deep pass on the short side of the Cremonese penalty area. He is hidden on the right, and to get rid of the opponent’s marking he tries a dribble in the strait. For those who saw him play in Bruges is nothing new: a simple one played at De Ketelaere. Since the beginning of the season, however, things have not been going very well for the Belgian and every time he leaves from the bench, his self-esteem seems to get worse. For players like De Ketelaere, the ethereal dimension of football is even more important, the one that comes from the head.
Just after the swerve with which he would have liked to cross with his left foot towards goal, De Ketelaere’s body is swallowed up in a kind of hell that comes out of our dimension. It is an inexplicable, Fantozzi-like, simply atrocious fall. As if he had been captured by the demons of the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks, CDK’s long legs no longer follow the orders of his brain, and slip on an imaginary banana peel. De Ketelaere involuntary protagonist of a Chaplin film, of increasingly offensive parodies that compare him to a pitcher, to a player without any qualities. Slow, clumsy, imprecise.
Indeed, after seeing him play so badly for an entire season, many have come to this conclusion. There is no middle ground in the opinion that the Milan fans have of him, also due to the terrible performances: in less than twelve months De Ketelaere has gone from being the heir to the scepter from Kakà’s playmaker to attacking midfielder unpresentable, who finished the season with one assist and no goals.
Things haven’t always gone like this, and indeed I challenge you to watch some games – or rather some clips – played by De Ketelaere at the beginning of last season. There is the assist for Leao against Bologna, CDK’s only contribution to Milan’s offensive statistics, created after a ball recovery in midfield and a non-trivial management. Or there is the pass that unmarked Theo Hernandez on the occasion of Giroud’s goal against Napoli: a through ball that only a fine thinker of football can imagine. And indeed De Ketelaere is. I know it may even seem ridiculous to you to defend his uniqueness after a whole year in which he seemed to no longer know how to play football, even by mistake, but we really want to judge a 22-year-old footballer from just one season, the first in one of the top European leagues ?
By now the doubts about De Ketelaere have also surrounded the reflections of the clubs. Since the transfer market began, his has been one of the names to leave Milan. «He hasn’t been called up because there’s something on the transfer market, you know. We expected more from himexpects more Charles from himself» Pioli admonished him in one of the last press conferences, almost definitively marking CDK’s future at Milan. In the last few hours there has been talk of a transfer to Atalanta, even if it seems that the huge commissions requested by his agents could be a problem. Not only that: De Ketelaere has been on the market since the beginning of July but no team seems really interested in him. For some time there has been talk of an interest from Aston Villa, which however in the end changed objectives, and the only club interested in the loan, according to the Journalis PSV.
Of course it is the fault of the increasingly dark performance of De Ketelaere. Fans have started to be amazed by even the most mundane things, and if you look for CDK’s season highlights on Youtube you’ll find videos full of horizontal passes or oriented controls that you would see any professional footballer do. Over time De Ketelaere has become a ghost: even in the few minutes in which he took to the field he only touched a few balls, his team-mates started to lose faith in him and involve him less. His body seemed sensationally fragile, unsuitable for 1920s football, his slowness – which in the moments in which he manages to play well gives him the charming look of a vintage player – was excruciating. Not to mention the attempted dribbles.
De Ketelaere was to be the prince of Milan’s new beginning, the face of a young team but already champions of Italy, capable of winning by playing through the connections of its best players in attack. He should have made Milan less dependent on Leao and Theo’s snatches, or Giroud’s heavy goals. Instead, things went the other way. In the two most important games of the season, against Inter in the semifinals of the Champions League, De Ketelaere didn’t play a minute. Pioli relied more willingly on Origi and Saelemaekers rather than on the summer market man. He focused on the safest possible second-hand, because De Ketelaere had become a luxury to spend once the result was already achieved. In short, it is no coincidence that in the second round CDK only played three games as a starter.
Any attempt by De Ketelaere to escape this fate was truly comical. Of a violent comedy, however, which contains a bitterness that is inexplicable at first glance. The missed ball into an empty net against Monza at San Siro, the wrong header against Torino in the Italian Cup, the other mistake a few meters from the goal line against Monza in the second leg. I could only fill this article with CDK’s blunders, with plays that have filled our bias towards him even when he’s doing something right. And yet I ask myself: would it do any good? Would you add a point of view to the affaire?
Since I’m defending it, you already know my answer is no, but I don’t want to sound ideological. I don’t waste words against superficiality in the judgments of De Ketelaere by bias but for several linked reasons. Let’s start from the pillar that supports this discussion, which has to do with talent.
De Ketelaere will never be the number ten who wins matches alone, but he is an artist who accentuates an intellectual game in an increasingly atrophied sport, in which creativity is associated with risk, and therefore mortally avoided. His use of the outsole, the tendency to play freely between the lines, the through balls that open up defenses for his teammates: this is what De Ketelaere showed us at Bruges and with the Belgian national team, as well as in the first games with the AC Milan shirt. And if the cloud around him today is the one reserved for overrated or inadequate players, we could also start clearing it. It is not so. De Ketelaere’s problems do not touch natural talent: his is an aptitude for a game of the noumenon, detached from accidental contingencies. The attacking midfielder that we saw establish himself in Belgium and in the Champions League was not a bluff. Defending De Ketelaere’s qualities means defending a rare way of playing football, eaten up by the uber-capitalist vortex of the speed and immediacy of a necessarily kinetic style.
And then there is the tactical discourse. If De Ketelaere did nothing, that is, to deserve Pioli’s trust in the last season, the context in which he was inserted must also be considered. In Milan, the role of attacking midfielder takes on peculiar tasks: in the months that preceded the Scudetto he had been a midfielder as Franck Kessie to play in that role, shaping it on its characteristics. The number ten as a raider, surveyor of the midfield but also the first dictater of high pressing. De Ketelaere possesses none of these peculiarities. At Bruges his position on the pitch was fluid, he settled between the lines on the right, but in the last season before his arrival in Italy – the 21/22 – he played mainly as a centre-forward, finishing with 18 goals and 10 assists .
It is not easy to say what the role of De Ketelaere is. As we wrote a year ago on Open the doorbefore Milan made his purchase official: «The ductility with which he carries out all the tasks in a linear way, without flashy peaks, with a Soviet constructivist cleanliness, places him in the mythological category of the Flemish “universal footballer”. The kind of system player who thrives in a collectivized organizationwhich has been forged in a game model where principles and not roles count». De Ketelaere had just destroyed the Belgian championship with his rationalist technique, and we had gotten to know him in the two-legged match against Lazio in the Champions League a year earlier.
Therefore, more than the portion of the field that he should occupy rigidly, we should focus on the tactical context in which a player like De Ketelaere could flourish again. A style of play based on domination through control of the ball, in which the first thought of collective intelligence can also be vertical, and in this sense Gasperini’s Atalanta fits perfectly, but which relies on CDK to rearrange ideas , reflect, make time flow at another speed. Right at Atalanta it is not excluded that De Ketelaere can take on the legacy left by Josip Ilicic years ago: an atypical striker, that is, used by Gasperini as a counterpoint to the team’s pace variations. It is a context that seems even more unfavorable for a frail body like that of CDK, but perhaps it would remind us what a player CDK was at Bruges, how much he can shine in an anthill swirling around him.
It would be easy to recommend some spectacular De Ketelaere matches for Bruges. Seeing it move in harmony with its surroundings, sluggish but effective like a crab strolling along the shore, is strange. At the same time it is a useful reminder. He reminds us that a year cannot be enough to judge the meaning of a player’s career, as AC Milan fans know well, who have also waited a year for absolute idols such as Rafael Leao and Sandro Tonali. We can’t know if it will work for him too, but as of today we still have a duty to believe in the uniqueness of Charles De Ketelaere, in his cerebral and good-looking football, which only a year ago had bewitched Europe. There are fewer and fewer players who shine in this class, and who enrich the biodiversity of football. Those few who survive, who make football a fine art, are close to extinction: let’s keep them close.
2023-08-11 14:00:00
#Ketelaere #Sportellate
