It’s May 2016. The scene is AFAS Stadion, home of AZ Alkmaar, and one of the more prolific nurturers of young talent in Dutch football is observing from the sidelines.
Robin Pronk had spent over a decade in the youth system at Ajax, a club that prided itself on having a production line envied across the football world. He had helped to bring through the Denmark international Christian Eriksen and Daley Blind, a player with more than 100 caps for the Netherlands.
On this day, however, Pronk was part of the setup at FC Utrecht, where an up-and-coming manager by the name of Erik ten Hag was in charge.
Utrecht’s under-21s were playing AZ in the Beloften Eredivisie. It was their biggest match of the season, with the under-21s’ championship on the line, and one player in particular seemed absolutely determined to influence the result.
“That game really stands out,” says Pronk. “We won 2-0. It was for the title and, in matches like this, the big players always stand up and make a difference. He was very important for us that day. His mentality was always to be on the big stage.”
That player’s name was Sofyan Amrabat and he was 19 years old, demonstrating his potential in a career that made him one of the standout stars of last year’s World Cup and has subsequently reunited him with Ten Hag at Manchester United.
Amrabat wore the No 44 shirt for Utrecht’s under-21s. Unlike now, he had a full head of hair. He was clean-shaven rather than sporting his now-familiar beard and he had made his first-team debut, aged 18, two seasons earlier.
“We had two talented midfielders coming through at the same time,” Rob Alflen, then Utrecht’s first-team manager, recalls. “One was Sofyan, who was built on power. The other was Bart Ramselaar, a technical player with different qualities. Amrabat, right, began his career at FC Utrecht (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
“Bart was the first we called up and, from that moment onwards, Sofyan was giving me a hard time. ‘Coach, why don’t I get a chance? Why not me?’. It could be a battle sometimes. Day in, day out, he was knocking on my door.
“In the beginning, I could tell him, ‘Sofyan, you’re not good enough yet to start every game, you were the strongest player for the youth team but you need to get stronger because now you are playing against adults’.
“It was hard, though, to leave him out. You have some players, those natural talents, who train really hard maybe once every two weeks.
“Then you have players who work hard every single day. They work from the moment they arrive and, if the coach says training starts at 10.30am, they are in at 9am and still working until they go home. That was Sofyan.”
When Amrabat pulled up a chair at Fiorentina’s training ground earlier this year to speak to The Athletic, it quickly became apparent that he held Ten Hag in high esteem.
“That was so important for me,” he said of Ten Hag’s appointment at Utrecht. “He made a plan for me. He asked me about my strong points and what I wanted to improve. From the first day, he was busy with me.
“After every game, he would take me through a video and explain everything to me. I was 18 or 19 years old, so sometimes I was thinking, ‘Oof, again?’. But now, when I look back, I know it was so important for my career. I learned such a lot from him.”
Oof, indeed. Ten Hag was so unapologetically repetitive with his mantra — “Good is not good enough, you have to be even better” — the Dutch writer Maarten Meijer used that line on the cover of the biography he has written about United’s manager.
The young Amrabat needed reminding sometimes to push himself even harder. Ten Hag was on his case. Others were, too.
“To be honest, Sofyan was not really hard working in the beginning,” Pronk, then Utrecht’s under-19s manager, recalls. “When he was 15 and 16, he had to understand he needed to work a bit harder for success.
“It was a few years later, supported by his big brother (Nordin) and his coaches, that he opened his eyes. He was open to learning, he had a good family around him and, when he started that transition to a more professional attitude, that’s when he really developed his potential.”
Whatever was said to Amrabat, something clicked in a career that has taken him to clubs in four different countries and brought him, at the age of 27, within one appearance of chalking up a half-century of caps for Morocco’s national team.
“He also had the example of his brother being a professional footballer,” says Alflen. “Sofyan always felt he had to get as far, at least, as his brother. That brought its own pressure. Some people, faced with that pressure, find it too hard and can do nothing about it. Sofyan, on the other hand, has shown he can handle pressure and turn it to his advantage.”
Nordin, the older brother by nine years, is with AEK Athens after a nomadic career that has taken in clubs from six countries, including two years at Watford, as well as 64 caps with Morocco.
Old film footage of the Amrabat brothers shows them in their play area at Huizen, the Dutch town where their father, Mohammed, had made a life for himself as a plasterer, settling into a country with a sizeable Moroccan population.
Nordin has made his career as a fast, direct winger who runs at opponents and, like Sofyan, turned down the chance to represent the Netherlands in order to play for Morocco instead.
Sofyan has different attributes: quick to the ball, strong in the tackle, with a level of competitive courage that Kylian Mbappe would remember well from France’s World Cup semi-final against Morocco last year.
Amrabat’s lung-bursting chase of Mbappe and his heroic, leaping challenge to win the ball from the superstar of French football may have been the most brilliantly executed piece of defending at a World Cup since Bobby Moore’s tackle on Jairzinho for England against Brazil in 1970.
It also earned him a eulogy from Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who went into Morocco’s dressing room after the game and told Amrabat he was the most inspirational player he had seen at the tournament.
Amrabat had run further in the World Cup — 81.4 kilometres (50.6 miles) — than any other player and embodied the spirit of a Morocco team that became the first African nation to reach the semi-finals.
What wasn’t so well-known was that he needed painkilling injections because of a recurring back issue before four of Morocco’s seven games and was up all night, in considerable distress, before the knockout tie that ended with Spain being eliminated on penalties.
Amrabat, in other words, passes what could be termed the Roy Keane Test. Nobody can ever accuse him of not putting in a shift, of not taking responsibility, of lacking substance. He never goes missing.
One story in Italy goes back to his time on loan at Hellas Verona when the player was giving so much to the team – outrunning everyone, rarely substituted, with a schedule featuring 20-hour round trips to Morocco’s games in Africa – that it was put to the coach, Ivan Juric, that he must be due a rest.
“Give him a rest?” exclaimed Juric. “Sofyan would stay on the pitch until he passed out.”
If Todd Boehly had got his way, Amrabat would have been wearing Chelsea’s colours rather than introducing himself to Old Trafford with a ubiquitous home debut in United’s 3-0 Carabao Cup victory over Crystal Palace on Tuesday.
Boehly, operating Chelsea’s scattergun recruitment, put in a call to Fiorentina in the last few hours of the January transfer window, but it was a short conversation because the Italians did not appreciate another club pitching up so late with the intention of taking away one of their most prized assets.
Barcelona had already been in for Amrabat and, for a while, it threatened to get ugly. Amrabat missed a training session, wrote a message on Instagram that seemed intended for Barca’s attention — “Go for it now. The future is…