Steven Bergwijn was running in celebration before his debut goal for Tottenham against Manchester City hit the net, the one with which he announced his £25m arrival from PSV Eindhoven at the start of this month and sent jaws crashing to the floor all around his new club’s stadium.
“If you look at the highlights, you can already see me run,” the 22-year-old says. He knew from the moment he took the perfect touch on his chest and certainly from when he made the sweetest of volleyed connections. But, really, Bergwijn knew before the game. He knew because of a promise he had made.
To understand Bergwijn is to understand his friendship with Appie Nouri, the Ajax playmaker who had the world at his feet until the day in July 2017 when everything was ripped away. Bergwijn remembers how he had played in a pre-season friendly for PSV against RKC Waalwijk, scoring twice and feeling good. Then came the news from Ajax’s game with Werder Bremen. “My world collapsed,” Bergwijn says.
Nouri had felt unwell and he almost placed himself on the ground, with the back of his head on the turf. He lost consciousness, suffered a cardiac arrest and, all of a sudden, this seemingly fit and healthy footballer was fighting for his life. Although he survived, he suffered catastrophic and permanent brain damage.
Bergwijn met Nouri in the Ajax youth system when they were seven and they quickly became inseparable. “Since then we are best friends, brothers,” Bergwijn says. They shared the same field for six years until Bergwijn’s departure for PSV and they would continue to play together thereafter for the Dutch junior teams.
There is no update on Nouri’s condition. The situation is impossibly sensitive and his family are keen to guard their privacy and that of their son. Suffice to say it is grave and Bergwijn’s voice crackles with emotion as he discusses it.
“When I heard Appie had brain damage, I just can’t describe my feelings,” Bergwijn says. “At that time I didn’t sleep so much. In the first weeks I was scared to play, scared to go on the pitch because Appie was a young boy and out of nowhere … It was difficult. It’s still difficult. I speak to his brother every day but it’s still difficult.”
Bergwijn speaks to Mohammed Nouri, Appie’s youngest brother, and their conversation before the City game was particularly poignant. Bergwijn has previously said that everything he does, he does for Appie. “I spoke with his brother and he told me: ‘You’re going to score for Appie,’” Bergwijn says. “And I said: ‘OK, watch me, I’m going to score.’ I did it.”
Bergwijn’s celebration – middle finger crossed over his ring finger and hand held up over his face – has been much discussed. “It’s one I have done all through my career,” he says. “One of my friends told me to do it, so I did. I hope they will have it on Fifa [the video game] one day.”
When the goal went in, Martin Tyler provoked no little mirth when he roared in commentary: “Stevie Wonder!” but the nickname seems to have stuck. “Ah, Stevie Wonder,” says Seb on the training ground reception as he welcomes in journalists for this interview. The affection is plain. The club ambassador Ledley King is knocking around and he simply describes Bergwijn as a “lovely person”.
With all the tattoos, the muscular frame and the pedigree as a PSV winger, there have been the inevitable comparisons to Memphis Depay, who is now at Lyon. Yet they are different characters. Whereas Depay is extravagant, Bergwijn is quiet, softly spoken. He is a devout Christian and one of his tattoos contains the opening line of Psalm 23 – The Lord is My Shepherd. But it is another two, emblazoned across his knuckles, that offer insight into his single-mindedness. “FEAR NONE,” they say.
Bergwijn fell out of love with Ajax and, if the club’s youth management at the time – headed up by Jan Olde Riekerink – could do it all again, they would surely make different choices. When Ajax tried and failed to re-sign Bergwijn from PSV last summer, it felt like an admission that he had been one who got away.
Ridiculously the seeds of the parting were sown over a dispute about a pair of regulation black-and-white Adidas boots. Bergwijn’s were worn out and so he asked the kit man for new ones, only to be told to forget it. Ajax would decide when it was time for a new pair. They were in charge. Bergwijn asked his father, also called Steven, and, seeing that his son needed them, he bought him a pair. When Bergwijn turned up in them the next day, the hierarchy were angry.
All very bizarre but things snowballed and would reach the point of no return at a tournament towards the end of the 2010-11 season. Incensed at why his son was not playing, Steven Sr staged a one-man protest, waving a white handkerchief at the coach, Orlando Trustfull. What made the scene even more comical was that Trustfull was on the opposite touchline to him and might not have noticed. It is believed that the assistant referee on Steven Sr’s side – who was provided by Ajax – told Trustfull.
“I didn’t have the feeling at Ajax any more and, if that’s gone, you have to leave,” Bergwijn says. “If I have no feeling, when my heart isn’t there, it’s over.”
Aged 13, Bergwijn did not want to move from Almere, his hometown, which is half an hour outside Amsterdam, to Eindhoven, where he had been offered digs by a local family. And so his father would drive him there and back for training each day – a round-trip of at least three hours. Steven Sr was not a professional footballer but Bergwijn says his uncles were, with one of them having been on the books of Roda JC.
“The alarm went off at 5.30 every morning,” Bergwijn says. “My dad drove me to Eindhoven for training at 9am, he slept in the car, it finished at 11am, then we went back and I’d be in school in Almere until 4pm. We did that for four or five years. After that I started living in Eindhoven.”
The sacrifices have come to feel worthwhile, particularly after the dream move to Spurs, which did come with controversial trimmings. Bergwijn had phoned the PSV interim manager, Ernest Faber, on the morning of the club’s game against Twente on 26 January to tell him he wanted the transfer and to seek his blessing for a trip to London to tie things up, which he got. PSV, though, forbade him from travelling as they did not have an agreement with Spurs. Bergwijn travelled regardless.
Cue a period of drama and haggling, during which Bergwijn took the unusual step of releasing a video in which he insisted he had not refused to play against Twente. In the end everything was resolved and Spurs had a player their scout Brian Carey had watched extensively for two years. Other clubs had wanted him at various times, including Internazionale, Sevilla and Leicester. To Spurs it felt like a coup.
“My father called me and said: ‘Pack your stuff, you’re going to London,’” Bergwijn says. “It was fast. I didn’t expect to make the transfer in January. I thought in the summer. But if Tottenham wants you, you can’t say no.”
Bergwijn has played only one Premier League game but what struck him against City was the intensity and physicality, which he also noticed in PSV’s Champions League game against Spurs at Wembley last season. One thing is clear – he has the physique to cope.
Bergwijn was relatively slight when he joined PSV and it meant he had to concentrate on his game intelligence and technique. But he slowly filled out, to the point where he acquired what the Dutch like to call the frame of a “wardrobe”. “It’s genetic. I’m not so much in the gym. I don’t push weights. It’s natural, core.”
At PSV Bergwijn learned from a few old masters on the coaching staff, namely Ruud van Nistelrooy, Luc Nilis and Boudewijn Zenden. He can now feel the surge of expectation levels but, asked whether he could achieve the same status in England as Van Nistelrooy, he does not seek to dampen them. “That’s why I’m here,” Bergwijn says. “You want to be the biggest, the greatest. I hope I can be that big in England.”