Monday, November 7, 2022 at 7:09 PM• Wessel Antes

Valentijn Driessen claims that Ajax should have gone for Luuk de Jong last summer. The chief of football of The Telegraph saw the 32-year-old striker make the opening goal for PSV on Sunday in the Johan Cruijff ArenA (1-2 win), but thinks he should have played in the shirt of the Amsterdam club. In the football podcast Kick off Driessen even calls it a miss for Ajax on Monday.

PSV took over De Jong from Sevilla this summer for approximately three million euros. With the buy back of Brian Brobbey from RB Leipzig, Ajax went for a more expensive option. The twenty-year-old striker was brought back to Amsterdam for about sixteen million euros. “Luuk de Jong is an excellent player and of course he should have been on the other side. I think that’s a miss on Ajax, that they didn’t even look at it. That would of course have been a great player for Ajax.”

Driessen is very charmed by De Jong. “He helps his team and he is a player who attracts everyone. Of course you can win the war with him, it turns out.” The journalist does think that Calvin Bassey could have done more with De Jong’s goal. “Bassey gets a lot of feathers stuck in his behind from some people. It would be a very good defender. But then he plays against Luuk de Jong and he still makes a mistake when conceding such a goal. At moments like that, I expect the defender Bassey. It should be there, but it doesn’t.”

It remains to be seen whether De Jong would have wanted to make the step to Ajax at all. In Eindhoven he is known as one of the greatest club heroes of this century. In 217 official games for PSV, the 38-time international of the Dutch was good for 117 goals and 61 assists. With the Brabant club he won the national title three times and the Johan Cruijff Scale three times. Siem de Jong, Luuk’s older brother, did play for both clubs. He was particularly popular in Amsterdam thanks to his two goals in Ajax’s 2011 championship match against FC Twente (3-1). Thanks to that victory, the team from Amsterdam was allowed to play with three stars for the first time a season later.