Bobby Adekanye arrived in Alphen aan den Rijn, a small town 40km south of Amsterdam, as a small boy from Nigeria. Football was his way of finding his place in a new culture. He was talented, but not the best in his neighbourhood.
“When I went outside to play with the other children, some of them told me about a kid called Noussair Mazraoui — they told me he played for Ajax,” recalls Adekanye. “There was a street pitch in our town. Noussair came over and I instantly saw that his ball technique was better than anybody I’d seen.
“Back then, I couldn’t speak proper Dutch, so I was always speaking English. That was how we communicated. One day, his dad (Mustafa) came by and asked: ‘Are you new here?’ I replied and we instantly knew each other. To fast-forward the story, when I got scouted for Ajax, his dad would take both of us.”
At the time, Ajax’s academy was the outstanding football development centre in the Netherlands. However, with their De Toekomst campus a 45-minute drive away and Adekanye’s parents lacking a Dutch driving licence, he would have been stuck without the Mazraouis’ help. Adekanye remembers how he and Noussair would spend those car journeys — helping each other with schoolwork, sharing music, but more than anything, talking about what appearing for the Ajax senior team would mean.
“His father would always try and watch both of our training sessions,” Adekanye remembers. “Then, on the way home, he would give us one piece of advice to make us improve every day. I listened as if he was like my father — but the piece of advice he always returned to was to never give up if you want something. Grab it and prove everybody wrong.”
It was excellent guidance. Adekanye was signed by Spanish giants Barcelona, almost made the first team at Liverpool of the Premier League, played for Lazio in Italy and is now a striker for Dutch top-flight side Go Ahead Eagles. And Mazraoui? He is Manchester United’s impressive new €15million (£12.8m) right-back, after spells in the first team at Ajax and serial German champions Bayern Munich, and a run to the World Cup semi-finals with Morocco in 2022.
Bobby Adekanye in action for Lazio in 2019 (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)
It is some renaissance story. Back then, even as his family helped Adekanye, Mazraoui was having his own difficulties, and on the verge of being released from Ajax’s academy. The moment everything changed came — as Mazraoui himself recalled in an interview on YouTube with former Dutch international Andy van der Meyde in 2018 — via a pep talk from an unlikely source.
“There was only one person who said I would make the first team,” Mazraoui said. “It was to do with the way I was growing. His name was Ruben Jongkind — and he was not a football coach, but a running coach.
“So I just thought: ‘He doesn’t know what he is talking about, he’s just talking nonsense to give me confidence.’ But it turned out he was right.”
Jongkind picks up the phone and immediately breaks into laughter as he hears Mazraoui’s words back. “I remember it well!” he says.
That he was a running coach rather than a football coach is not strictly true — at that time, he was head of talent development in the Ajax academy, a role that encompassed both education and physical training. The gist, however, is accurate.
It was pouring with rain that particular evening, and Jongkind was the last coach still in the academy office. A knock came on the door, with Mazraoui’s slender frame on the other side of it.
There was context behind Mazraoui’s search for answers. His 1997-born age group was one of the most talented in Ajax academy history, containing the likes of Donny van de Beek and Abdelhak Nouri. Frenkie de Jong would later join them after signing from Willem II in the southern city of Tilburg, while from under-16 level onwards, Matthijs de Ligt played two years above in that side.
“(Mazraoui) was never mentioned in our coaches’ meetings,” says Jongkind. “He was just one of the players to fill up the squad.”
“Whereas De Ligt made his debut at 17, was Europe’s Golden Boy, and transferred for €85million (£71.7m/$93.7m, to Italy’s Juventus in 2019), Mazraoui was the complete opposite,” adds Jasper van Leeuwen, Ajax’s head of academy recruitment during this period. “In the academy, he was always overlooked. And because this generation was so strong, he was always in that age group’s second team because he was very small and very skinny, although he was technically very, very good.”
Noussair Mazraoui as a 20-year-old at Ajax (Eric Verhoeven/Soccrates/Getty Images)
At this point, that technical ability was saving Mazraoui — he was “out of everyone’s league” in Alphen aan den Rijn, according to Adekanye. Around then, the pair were chosen to participate in an academy keepy-uppies competition at the Amsterdam Arena during a first-team game: Mazraoui won it, Adekanye came second.
Nevertheless, Mazraoui was drowning in the physicality of 11-a-side matches.
“Back then, he was a midfielder, not a right wing-back like he is now,” says Van Leeuwen. “He was a No 10 or a No 8 — not even a defensively-minded No 6. Our academy vision was to try to develop him as a multi-functional player, to not rush it, and to specialise his position later. But the youth coaches then had better midfielders and better right-backs.”
“Whenever I came into contact with physical players, I fell to the ground,” Mazraoui explained to Van der Meyde in that YouTube interview. “So then I played right-back, only then I was up against very fast left-wingers. They simply kicked the ball past me and outran me. I never did well there either.”
The club came to a decision. During their next round of squad cuts, Mazraoui would be released. The player later revealed to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad that he was considering studying to become a lawyer instead.
“They didn’t see the quality in him,” says Adekanye. “Everyone was growing except him. I remember once, I gave him advice — to leave Ajax and look for another journey at a different club. But what he told me stays with me: ‘I believe in my quality. I hope when they give me my chance, I will grab it.’ And I admire that. It takes a lot of courage, big courage, to stick to your points when you know that a lot of people don’t believe in you.”
But even courage needs reassurance sometimes.
When Jongkind saw Mazraoui at his office door that rainy night, knowing his precarious situation at the academy, he decided to spell out the situation as he saw it.
“I knew he was undervalued because he was so small and thin, so I told him some things,” Jongkind says. “I reminded him that he was born in November, and told him about the relative age effect (a bias towards children born earlier in the year who are more physically ready).
“‘You’re late to mature, but look at your father, he’s a big guy. You will grow a little later, you need time, but you have all the skills. You need to get stronger — mentally stronger, too — because you are lagging behind the average. That is not a problem, because you will pick it up later, as long as you believe you will make it.’
“And that is what he remembered.”
One part of Mazraoui’s game that Jongkind, whose background in athletics made him a specialist in judging motor skills, had spotted was his movement — not the speed or power of it, but the fluidity with which he covered the ground.
“In the technicality of his running, it was already clear that he was very agile, very light-footed — so he ran smoothly with good frequency and foot placement,” Jongkind says. “He was a light runner and that’s important for football. You need to run on the front part of your foot, so you can turn quicker — imagine that if you land on your heel, it takes longer for your centre of mass to shift and for you to move. He landed on the front of his foot naturally.”
At the subsequent coaching meeting, Jongkind and other senior figures in the academy setup pushed for Mazraoui to be retained. There would be one significant change — far from being at the front of his class, the teenager was held back a year.
“The rationale was that we would see how good he really was, because he’d play with those who are his age biologically, at a different rhythm,” Van Leeuwen says.
“He’s only two months older than many in the year below, so the coaches got it,” Jongkind adds. “And then he looked like Ronaldo in training — so we thought that maybe we should give him another year.”
Mazraoui’s place in the academy was secure and he began to progress — not dramatically, but steadily enough to inspire confidence that he would secure a professional career. Those involved in his development credit dad Mustafa with keeping his son on track during this period — applying lessons he himself had learned after emigrating to the Netherlands from the northern Moroccan city of Tetouan as a young man.
“When we were back home, playing on the court, he wasn’t moving around with a lot of people,” remembers Adekanye. “He was always at home or outside playing football. You could see on the bus that he wasn’t a troublemaker, but a quiet one. I don’t want to say the word mature, because he was still young, but you could see the big potential in him — he knew what he wanted and knew he was going to go for it.”
Van Leeuwen also recalls Mazraoui’s drive: “Yes, some people saved him from being released, but it was Noussair’s own personality to keep fighting and not give up. Lots of players have a relatively easy ride because they’re being hyped as top talents. He always had to fight for his future.”
Mazraoui had to fight for his future at Ajax (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images)
As Mazraoui grew, he learned adaptations that still aid him now. One is how to leverage his body to exert the maximum opposing force against opponents — at just over 60kg (132lb/less than nine-and-a-half stones), it was necessary for survival. But despite this, by the time he graduated from the under-18s into Jong Ajax (the club’s reserve team, traditionally made up of recent academy graduates), Mazraoui looked a long shot to earn a first-team contract.
As he put it in an interview with Moroccan outlet Marokko Nieuws in 2017: “Whereas the other players came to De Toekomst in their Mercedes, I came by bus.”
On Wednesday evening, Manchester United will face FC Twente in the Europa League and speaking on the eve of the game, Mazraoui elaborated further when discussing a reunion with former Ajax youth team-mate Carel Eiting, expected to start in midfield for Twente.
“I think Carel was viewed as more of a talent, a bigger talent than I was,” he said. “But ultimately, everybody travels their own road in football. I know that Carel in the early days had an injury that caused him a great deal of trouble and his recovery took a long time. So at that point, our paths diverged. That’s the beautiful thing about football. Where you end up is dependent on a great many different factors and possible points of divergent paths.”
But at points, the reality was not so beautiful — he endured a period as the only player in his team who hadn’t signed professional terms.
“He played literally every position in Jong Ajax,” says Adekanye. “Left-back, right-back, centre-back, midfield, left wing, right wing, even striker — they couldn’t take him out of the team.
“But when he came back to our city, a lot of people were still questioning him, because Jong Ajax matches were always on TV. They could see he was doing so well, and they were angry at why he hadn’t been offered a contract. Everyone was telling him: ‘You need to leave, they’re not appreciating you.’ But he stuck to his gut feeling and said it would happen.”
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It was not until Marcel Keizer became Jong Ajax head coach in 2016 that Mazraoui properly received his opportunity. Keizer recognised his stamina and technical ability — and decided the position of right wing-back, in which the 18-year-old would bomb up and down the flank while playing an important build-up role, would suit his skillset.
Mazraoui earned his professional contract — and when Keizer was promoted to first-team manager after just one season in charge of Jong Ajax, he took his new wing-back with him. Though Keizer was surprisingly fired after just six months, with Ajax second in the league, Mazraoui quickly caught the attention of his successor — Erik ten Hag, now his manager again at Manchester United.
Ten Hag told Dutch magazine Voetbal International in September 2018 that Mazraoui had impressed him after just one week of training at a camp in Portugal, even if he asked his medical staff to start working with the player to develop his “fragile” physical frame.
Erik ten Hag was immediately impressed by Mazraoui (Erwin Scheriau/AFP via Getty Images)
Early in his senior career, Mazraoui worked particularly well with Hakim Ziyech, a fellow Dutch-Moroccan, who played in front of him as either a traditional right-winger or an inside right. Generally, Mazraoui would find Ziyech between the lines before moving forward, with their technical ability in small spaces helping Ajax progress upfield.
Later, after Ziyech was sold to Chelsea in July 2020, another current United player, Antony, became his regular partner on the flank. In the 2020-21 season, those two found each other with passes every four-and-a-half minutes — more than twice the rate at which Mazraoui found any other team-mate. The pair regularly enthused about their connection before both departed Ajax in the summer of 2022, Antony to Old Trafford and Mazraoui to Bayern.
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Another player Mazraoui might have had a similar connection with was Nouri.
A midfielder from a similar background to Mazraoui, and who had been a team-mate throughout his Ajax youth career, Nouri had just begun to establish himself in their first team when he suffered a cardiac arrest in a pre-season friendly against Werder Bremen in July 2017, aged 20. Though he survived, Nouri suffered permanent brain damage.
Mazraoui was the closest player on the pitch to his friend when he collapsed, and described afterwards how Nouri had said a prayer as he held on to his hand. The next year, he went to the hospital to be there for Nouri’s 21st birthday. And after Morocco’s 2022 World Cup quarter-final win over Portugal, he was one of the players who held up Nouri’s shirt in the changing room.
Ajax fans show their support for Abdelhak Nouri after his collapse (Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)
Mental strength has been the source of Mazraoui’s success. While he is technically gifted, possesses rare stamina and has now grown into a fleet-footed wing option, his success developed from the desperation to retain his place at Ajax.
“Because he was always struggling to keep his head above water in those teams, all he could do was focus on his own performance,” says Jongkind. “It’s this zen-like or stoic characteristic. Academies are hostile, and you have to fight for survival. That’s why the ones who survive, they are statistically likelier to be a better player. If you have to fight as a small kid, it gives you such a big benefit mentally.”
This summer, Adekanye bumped into Mazraoui in a restaurant in Dubai. Though the pair still visit Alphen aan den Rijn, where they worship at the same mosque, this meeting at a footballer’s hotspot felt symbolic. The pair had made it — from carpools to football’s jet set.
Mazraoui spoke about how he was likely to leave Bayern in the coming weeks. Though on-field he was playing well, there had been controversy off the pitch over a pro-Palestine social media post he shared last October. He and the club held what Bayern publicly called a “detailed and clarifying” meeting, though some people familiar with the matter believe it contributed to him leaving for a knock-down price.
Soon after the summer conversation with Adekanye, Mazraoui joined Manchester United for an initial €15million.
“At that time, last summer, after two seasons at Bayern, I needed and wanted another step based on a lot of reasons,” Mazraoui told reporters on Tuesday. “I felt I could feel better and more comfortable somewhere else, that’s why I eventually decided to change clubs. I don’t think I have to explain why I go to such a club.
“It’s not me who decides the fee. I cannot really say anything about that. That’s the negotiation between Man Utd and Bayern. It works well for me because I was not that expensive. I’ve made a good start. It’s easy for the fans to say I’m a good buy this summer.”
And now, having come within days of being released as a teenager, Mazraoui has played for three of Europe’s biggest clubs.
“If you’d have told that to the youth coaches when he was 14 or 15, nobody would have believed you,” says Van Leeuwen. “You have to keep an eye out for late-maturing players — especially when they have such a strong character.”
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(Top photo: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic, Getty Images)
