He said Dutch teams always require their goalkeepers, as is customary in the country, to have the technical ability to engage in formative play, but that comes at the cost of neglecting the more rudimentary skills of saving shots and catching crosses.
“The best goalkeeper in the Eredivisie is Lars Unnerstal,” Ludwijks said last season. “Giant, great athlete, great reflexes. But he was second choice at PSV, because he couldn’t play football well.”
Meanwhile, the financial reality of Dutch football discourages clubs from investing much time in goalkeepers. All Dutch teams rely on generating income from transfer fees – even Ajax, the richest and most powerful team in the Eredivisie, made just as much money from selling players to Manchester United in the space of a few weeks last summer as from all other sources of revenue. For a year – and goalkeepers receive much lower fees than, for example, attacking midfielders. The goalkeeper business is not profitable.
Lodewix suggests that the solution is an overhaul of how Dutch clubs think about the position: spend more time on dedicated training sessions, rather than focusing on how goalkeepers participate in general play; Top teams send promising prospects out on loan to smaller teams, where they may have more to do than passively watch “as the youth teams win big”.
Until then, the Dutch goalkeeper’s position will remain an extraordinarily fertile breeding ground for feel-good stories like Nobert’s: a place of late champions, wayward talents and would-be law enforcement personnel.
It does, at least, seem quite adequate for such a quick upgrade. “He’s a real Frisian,” defender Virgil van Dijk said last week, referring to the part of Holland where Nobert grew up, a place famous for his stoicism and straight talk. (It is unclear how this differs from the rest of the country.) “He is sober, yet very direct. He was born after my heart.”
Van Gaal was also impressed by how unimpressed Nobert was at the prospect of making his country’s debut at the World Cup finals. “He has the kind of personality that means he won’t be affected too much by this tournament,” he said. It will be more difficult, after all, to be a cop.
