Dutch professional footballers can be found in every corner of the world, from the spotlights of the major European leagues to the more adventurous services on other continents. In the About the Border section Football zone weekly with a player who is active outside the country borders. With this time attention for Dayen Gentenaar, who ended up at Al-Wahda in Abu Dhabi in the wake of father Dennis.

By Chris Meijer

When Dayen Gentenaar is asked how he is doing after answering the phone, a somewhat disturbing answer sounds. The reason for this is a phone call he received shortly before, with the message that the trainer of the Under-21 of Al-Wahda has become infected with the coronavirus. “I was already in the car with the driver and was called an hour before the training that it did not go through. For the time being we are not training for two weeks”, sighs Gentenaar. In anticipation of his own coronary test the nineteen-year-old goalkeeper is confined to a luxurious hotel room in Abu Dhabi. For him it’s the third test in a week, since he had only returned to the United Arab Emirates a week earlier. “I had to do a coronation test, wait a week and test again, at the club’s request. When I was tested negative twice and was able to train again once, the trainer was tested positive. I haven’t trained at all yet.”

Thus the return of Gentenaar on the training field of Al-Wahda is put on hold for a while. It is now over a year ago that he ended up in the United Arab Emirates. Gentenaar played almost his entire youth for the Amsterdam amateur club AFC, apart from the first years in which he played for Blauw-Wit Nijmegen and SV Ouderkerk. “I once started as a striker and then my father already told me how to put pressure on and walk free. That helped a lot, I scored quite a lot. But I liked goalkeeping more. You can’t help it, indeed. I always saw my dad play goalie and you want to be like him. He gave me good criticism after a game, because he was always there to watch”, says Gentenaar with a smile. Goaltending is in the genes, as father Dennis was under the bar at NEC Nijmegen, Borussia Dortmund, Ajax, VVV-Venlo and Almere City .

“Well, you sometimes hear that you’re the son of. But my father is not the most famous, I was on the team with Ruben Kluivert and Maxim Gullit. They had that a bit more”, he notes dryly. At AFC, Gentenaar always played at the highest level of youth football, but an opportunity in Dutch professional football was lacking. “I did go on an internship a couple of times. But I’m not very tall, I’m 1.80 now. They now look more to length in Europe, so I was often told that I was too small. You can’t deal with that. I’m as tall as my father, but in his time they looked less at height and more at what you could do.”

The fact that his father had the opportunity a year ago to join Maurice Steijn as goalkeeper at Al-Wahda was a gift from heaven for the profaspirations of Gentenaar. He had just received his havo-diploma and was eager to go to Abu Dhabi with his parents and older brother. However, when Gentenaar came to the United Arab Emirates, he was told that playing matches was not in the Under-21 of Al-Wahda for him. “At first, there was talk about me being allowed to play, but they didn’t know I was a goalkeeper”, Gentenaar laughs, as he shakes his head. The rules state that clubs from the United Arab Emirates are not allowed to register foreign goalkeepers, not even for the Under-21.

Gentenaar poses with his goalkeeper of the Under-21 of Al-Wahda.

“Otherwise, clubs would only bring in foreign goalkeepers, those local guys wouldn’t get a chance. Al-Wahda does have a good goalkeeper, he is first goalkeeper in the national squad and wouldn’t be out of place in Europe. They only earn so much here that it is not interesting for them to play at the bottom of the Eredivisie. By the way, the rules are about to change. A foreign goalkeeper who is younger than 21 and has been living in the Emirates for a year may be allowed to play in the future”, Gentenaar explains. Because of these rules he only has to make do with training at Al-Wahda, but also in that respect he looked out of his eyes in the first weeks. “The culture is just completely different, goalkeeper training is a matter of flying. Diving, jumping, leading, everything. In the warm-up sometimes a bit of football is played, but that’s it. They’re very busy here, that’s nice to see. Those other guys can dive very well, they just fly. I’ve become a very complete goalkeeper.”

Where Gentenaar at AFC still had to go to the club by bike, there was a driver in Abu Dhabi ready to transport him. “Now I have to call the manager and a driver will be arranged. My mother doesn’t even allow me to drive myself here, you get shot at everywhere. They overtake everywhere, everyone drives the same speed on four different lanes. It’s chaos, everyone drives right past each other”, he chuckles. By the way, not all players use the driver. “Those guys at the Under-21 get paid, too. They just come to the club with big BMW’s or Jeeps, wear nice watches. They all drive big cars. You don’t have to drive a small car to get there. I don’t think they need the football for the money either. They certainly don’t have to complain.”

“Well, and then the weather. That wasn’t normal”, Gentenaar continues with a smile. “The first workout was 47 degrees, feeling 57 degrees. I broke down completely. At the end the goalkeeper took me aside for an individual training, I couldn’t do it anymore. But I didn’t want to stop either. “If you’re tired, it’s okay‘, he said. “No, no, no,” I replied. But I was devastated. I think I can do better now than I did in the beginning. If it was hot in Holland, it wouldn’t bother me. During the heat wave I trained outside, that wasn’t a problem. Just nice. In the first weeks you have to get used to that heat. When you’re in the mall …it was within seventeen degrees there. Outside it was over 40 degrees, it just gave you a headache. Now it’s a little less painful, but then it really felt like a slap in the face.”

The extreme heat is one of the reasons that there are relatively few people in the stands in the United Arab Emirates during the matches. “I don’t really notice that football is very much alive here, but Al-Wahda does have fans all over the country. You can see that there is a lot of talk about it on social media. But nowhere do you see anyone wearing a shirt, for example. People usually look at home, which makes a lot of sense given the temperatures. I do go to the stadium, but then I’m usually in the air-conditioned area.”

“Football looks a little better at first than under-21. In matches it can just be the case that in the last minute you’re 2-1 in front and your right back is on the left outside. Such things, then I think: what’s going on here? They all move forward as fast as possible, it’s not really building up”, assures Gentenaar. The few times he did get to play last season, was during practice matches and so called company games. “Then you play against teams of cops and firefighters, for example. It’s kind of fun, they can play soccer. Players who have been pros and don’t feel like it anymore at the age of 27 will play their games there. Those teams also just hire players. Last year we faced a striker who had played as a pro in Qatar, who could play soccer”.

On two occasions the adventure of the Gentenaar family in Abu Dhabi threatened to come to an end. The first uncertainty arose when Steijn and his assistant Jay Driessen were put out on the streets last season, while the other assistants Luc Nijholt and Laurens Ebben followed a few days later. “It was very insecure, you heard almost nothing from the club. Until a new trainer (Manolo Jiménez, ed.) came along, my father wanted to keep up with it”. With the coronavirus outbreak in March, a new period of uncertainty broke out, as Al-Wahda decided not to extend all expiring contracts. “Then Mark Wotte was appointed trainer and he took my father back. There was quite a lot of time in between, we only came back here two weeks ago.”

It was quite a relief for the young goalkeeper, as he had already prepared himself for a life outside professional football in the Netherlands. Gentenaar had signed up for the Amsterdam second division football club De Meer and wanted to combine amateur football with a college education in sports. “Well, that would have been a step backwards, of course. The intensity is lower and somewhere for myself I had also thought that it would be difficult to get into professional football. The second division isn’t exactly the highest level”, he says with a feeling for understatement. Instead of the Sportpark Drieburg in Amsterdam-East, Gentenaar is now back in Abu Dhabi, although once again there is uncertainty now that Wotte has been fired after not having played a match yet and has been replaced by Serbian trainer Vuk Rasovic. “It’s nice to be back. The weather is good, we can go to the beach. At this time of the year it is warm: about forty degrees, although the wind chill temperature is even higher. The swimming pools at the beach clubs are cooled, so that’s nice. Life is great, very different from in the Netherlands. Normally I train five times a week and I want to follow a course. Often I still train for myself in the morning and in the afternoon I play FIFA with my teammates or we go to the beach”.

Gentenaar is still hoping for a future in professional football. Before the corona crisis an Indonesian club had a chance, but there was a line when the Asian country was locked up. The fact that Gentenaar’s name sings in Indonesia has to do with his grandfather’s roots. In an interview with an Indonesian YouTube channel Gentenaar recently got the question if he would like to play for Indonesia Under-20, which will play the World Cup in its own country next year. “After I said ‘yes’, it went off. After that, I immediately got a thousand followers. Messages came in all day long with Come to Indonesia! I just thought, what is this? I used to get a message before, but that was more because they knew my father a bit. It just exploded and my name was posted on very large accounts, although now it’s a bit quieter.”

“I hope to get there as soon as possible in view of the World Cup, so that that coach can see me. They asked for films, but I don’t really have any. The last matches that were filmed were in the Under-15. There’s a club I talked to, but the coronavirus made it all uncertain. That’s why I train here to stay fit and then I see it all. It would be a great opportunity to get started in Indonesia. The experience of the fans there is really very different, it’s not normal how football lives there”, he continues. In any case, it is not his intention to return to the Netherlands soon, because he hopes to sign a professional contract somewhere abroad in the near future. It’s a matter of patience, just as he now has to wait until he can finally get back on the training pitch. Gentenaar sighs, shrugs his shoulders and decides: “Ah, it means that I will be working for myself in the coming weeks”.