Brian Brobbey’s adventure at RB Leipzig is not yet what he had hoped for, the nineteen-year-old striker of Jong Oranje admits in conversation with The Telegraph. Brobbey is still waiting for his first base place and goal in German service and often thinks back to his time at Ajax, the club he left last summer. “I do miss those times, yes. Certainly”, said the center attacker.
“I had a very nice time at Ajax, a really nice time. Together with my friends, Ryan Gravenberch and Kenneth Taylor,” says Brobbey, for whom his period in the youth academy feels like it was yesterday. “We were taken by van. With the bag to the club, having fun and training. Playing football at the weekend. That was the highlight of the week. You also knew that you always played. That was nice.”
Brobbey and his agent Mino Raiola did not come to an agreement with Ajax about a contract extension last year and so the striker signed a free transfer with Leipzig. At Ajax I had one striker in front of me, in Leipzig two”, says Brobbey. Where he has to tolerate Sébastien Haller in Amsterdam, Brobbey has André Silva and Yusuf Poulsen in front of him in Germany. “Sometimes I think: maybe I just have to go through this, this experience,” he says about the competition. “Actually I don’t want that, but yes, if it has to go that way, then it has to go that way.”
On Friday evening, Brobbey had a base place with the Dutch Juniors in the European Championship qualifier against Young Switzerland. The attacker had to leave the field after half an hour with an injury. A big setback for Brobbey, who was also out for nine weeks last summer. “With a hamstring injury that I had suffered before the European Championship with the Dutch Juniors. Quite a serious one, actually.”
Due to his injury, Brobbey started last summer with a backlog at Leipzig. He rehabilitated in the complex of Red Bull, the group under which the club falls. “If you’re injured, you have to go there to recover. I was on my own, but it was fun there. Lots of good people, I even made friends there. I hoped to see Max Verstappen, but he was I was not there. I was invited to watch the Grand Prix in Zandvoort. But that coincided with the Dutch Juniors, I thought it was a shame.”