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Manchester United Should Not Give Up on Forgotten Man Memphis Depay
- Updated: August 1, 2016
In the summer of 2003 I interviewed the PSV Eindhoven striker Mateja Kezman at a south London hotel during the club’s pre-season tour of England.
He was a bright and engaging character, basking in the most successful 12 months of his career, which had seen him become the Dutch Player of the Year, win the Dutch title, and become the top scorer in the Eredivisie with 35 goals, the most ever scored in a single season by a foreigner.
He did not, however, hide his wish to swap the Netherlands for one of Europe’s bigger leagues, and had come close to joining Barcelona the previous summer.
“If someone comes and can afford me, and I think it is a club where I can progress, then maybe I will go,” he told me. “My wish is to stay one more year and then we shall see.”
Kezman got his wish, staying at PSV for one more year, and scoring 31 more goals, before signing for Jose Mourinho at Chelsea.
The Serbian arrived at Stamford Bridge almost with a guarantee of goals, having scored 105 of them in just 122 league games for PSV.
But he was soon to discover the Premier League can be very different to the Eredivisie, as he finished with just four goals from his 25 league appearances, before being discarded by Mourinho after a single season.
For the rest of his career, he passed through some impressive clubs, Atletico Madrid, Fenerbahce and Paris Saint-Germain, but never came remotely close to repeating the glut of goals he scored for PSV.
Last season it was Memphis Depay at Manchester United, who repeated Kezman’s sudden transformation from dominating the Eredivisie to looking lost in the Premier League.
The confident and bold Memphis who arrived having contributed 22 goals to PSV’s title win in 2015 failed to ever really show up in England.
Instead, for the most part, the Premier League witnessed a diminished figure, bereft of his usual swagger, who could often aimlessly wander around the pitch.
For every Ruud van Nistelrooy and Luis Suarez the Eredivisie sends to the Premier League, there are also the spectacular failures like Kezman, and the long forgotten Alfonso Alves, who Middlesbrough wasted £13 …
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