Matthijs de Ligt watches with awe at Giorgio Chiellini’s football intelligence. In an extensive interview with The Guardian the 22-year-old defender praises, among other things, how his colleague at Juventus manages to calculate game situations, in which De Ligt also discovers steps in himself. In addition to his progress, the stopper looks back on the great pressure that was placed on his shoulders at an early age.
In the summer of 2019, De Ligt made the switch from Ajax to Juventus for 85.5 million euros, where he received two experienced teachers with Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci. The 33-time international thinks he has ‘became calmer’ since the SW transfer and ‘can read situations better than before’. With the latter, Chiellini comes up again: the 37-year-old Italian is an enormous source of inspiration for De Ligt in terms of defensive instinct.
“Giorgio is 37 and he plays as if he is reading a book,” says De Ligt. “He knows: OK, this is going to happen now, and then it will happen. Of course he didn’t have that instinct when he was twenty. That has gotten better with experience. But you also have to have a bit of a feeling for it. The feeling for where something can go wrong, or where someone will play the ball. That’s a natural thing. I think all good defenders in the world have that.”
In addition to football intelligence, a lot of ‘dirty work’ is also needed on the defensive side in Italy, according to De Ligt. “The dirty work is so important. People call it dirty, but I love to head the ball away and enter duels. I’m good old school in this respect. A lot of defenders just stay in position and cover the spaces. But I also like to play one-on-one. At Ajax I was used to playing very high on the field. Sometimes a little too much, maybe. That’s quite risky. At Juventus it’s more about finding balance.”
‘Finding balance’: it is something De Ligt has also grown into mentally. The former Ajax player
received various accolades as a teenager, such as the title of ‘youngest debutant of the Dutch national team of all time’ in 2017 and the Golden Boy award in 2018. That caused pressure, but that is part of it, according to De Ligt. “The important thing is you see the big picture. As a player you have to love the pressure because it says you’re something good. Seeing it like that creates a lot of space in my head.”