NEC Nijmegen's Left Flank: The Crack Exposed in Turin and the Free-Agent Gamble Called Mitchel Bakker

At the 41st minute in Turin, I drew a horizontal line across my notebook. Three lines above it were still intact: NEC Nijmegen's midfield pushing up without cover, the space behind their back line wide enough that a single straight pass opened the door, and on the left flank, a twenty-year-old trying to run at a pace he had never encountered in any match before. The first half ended 3-0. I closed the notebook, not because there was nothing left to write, but because everything worth seeing had already appeared within forty-five minutes.

I rewatched that footage four times over two days. The habit dates back to the years I sat in the stands at St. Pauli, logging positional metrics for a sixteen-year-old named Jann-Fiete Arp, and being laughed at by colleagues for being "too rational." Twenty years later I still believe one thing: a defeat never has a single cause, and never has a single person who must carry the blame.

Context: a mid-tier club pushed onto a stage that is too large

NEC Nijmegen is not PSV, not Ajax, not Feyenoord. It is a club in the modest-budget bracket of the Eredivisie, forced to build squads out of whatever gaps the market leaves behind: expiring contracts, loans, unvalued youngsters. When a team like that steps into European competition and meets Juventus, the quality gap does not appear as a defeat — it appears as an X-ray.

Head coach Dick Schreuder chose a courageous approach: push high, press the ball, never drop the block. That is a principled choice, not random recklessness. But the price is paid behind the back line — a price a mid-tier club cannot afford if its left corridor is unstable.

And that corridor is breaking. Almugera Kabar, twenty years old, was thrown onto this stage for the first time, in a system he is still learning. Deveron Fonville is injured. Ahmetcan Kaplan is injured. Schreuder said plainly to the press that he had nothing else. At a big club, that sentence is a complaint. At Nijmegen, it is a personnel report.

Media pressure arrived immediately afterwards. Mike Verweij, the club watcher for De Telegraaf, and Valentijn Driessen, the paper's editor-in-chief, sat together on the "Kick-off" programme and named a target: Mitchel Bakker, Dutch left wing-back, twenty-six years old, a free agent since early September after mutually terminating his contract with Atalanta.

Let me be clear from the start: that suggestion is a television opinion. There is no confirmation from NEC, no formal offer, no information on wages or contract length. But the suggestion came after a 5-0 defeat, and in football, timing sometimes matters more than content.

Analysis: why an attacking wing-back does not automatically seal the crack

This is the part I want to spend the most ink on, because it is also where most transfer reports take the wrong turn.

NEC's problem lies in a high-pressing structure operating without insurance on either flank. When a team pushes high, full-backs must do two things at once: join the attacking phase and be back in time for the defensive line. If either task falls out of rhythm, the space does not open at the touchline — it opens in the middle of that corridor, exactly where Juventus drilled in. That is a systemic trade-off, not an isolated error.

If NEC sign Mitchel Bakker, they are acquiring a different profile from the one they lack. His Lille numbers show 4 goals and 3 assists in 35 matches — the output of an attack-leaning wing-back, not of a covering specialist. For a team that presses high and leaves space behind, that profile can widen the crack unless the system is adjusted to compensate: a screening midfielder dropping in, or a back three capable of shifting across.

Based on my own experience of watching matches, an attacking wing-back only delivers value when there is someone sweeping behind him. At Lille, Bakker had that structure. At Nijmegen right now, he would not.

I have followed Bakker's career since his Ajax days, then Leverkusen, Lille, Atalanta. Four systems, four environments, four styles of play. That can be read as adaptability. It can also be read the other way: a player who has never put down roots long enough anywhere to become an anchor for others. For a club in a positional crisis, NEC needs stability, not flexibility.

And here is the most important fact that most favourable reports skip over: last season Bakker played only one match for Atalanta because of injury. At twenty-six — the physical peak of a footballer — a near-empty season is a signal to be read seriously, not one to be skimmed.

That boy is not in the spreadsheet. He is in the layer of soil I had forgotten.

Almugera Kabar is the one being publicly dissected. I do not think he is the cause. I think he is the symptom. A twenty-year-old, walking into a Juventus-level fixture for the first time, in a new system, placed in a position where both of his senior specialists are in the treatment room — not many left-backs in Europe survive that situation with their confidence intact. If the club handles it badly, what is lost is not one match, but two years of a talent's development.

A young player is not a polished gemstone. He is a broken piece of pottery with the craftsman's fingerprints still on it.

The contrarian angle: "free" does not mean cheap

Here I want to separate two stories that are being merged into one.

The first story is a transfer suggestion. The second story is a commentary opinion. They differ in nature, and merging them is the shortest road to a wrong decision.

What Verweij and Driessen offered is an opinion on air: if NEC can pick Bakker up for free, that could be interesting. A free agent still costs money: wages, signing-on fees, agent fees, and the settlement Atalanta may have paid Bakker on termination. That settlement means his personal salary expectations may still be anchored at top-club level — a genuine obstacle for a mid-tier Dutch side.

On the balance sheet, a free transfer is an investment with no fee, no amortisation, no sell-on obligation to a former club, and potential resale profit if the player performs. Operationally, it is a wage liability if the player cannot get on the pitch. For someone who featured once last season, that risk is far from small.

There is also a technical legal point anyone tracking Dutch football must verify before drawing conclusions: whether NEC can register a free agent outside the transfer window under KNVB and Eredivisie rules. Many leagues permit it, but it is not the default, and it depends on the club's squad-list status. If that door is closed, this entire debate becomes moot — and I have not yet seen any of the pundits check that step before speaking.

At sixty, I have learned that data stops at the stadium gate. Inside, people play with fear and dreams.

That holds in both directions here. No expected-goals, expected-goals-against or pressing-intensity figures from the Juventus match have been published for me to test my hypothesis that the problem is structural rather than individual. And no metric can measure the psychological damage to a twenty-year-old after a week of public dissection.

In terms of industry transmission, this remains a notable story: a big club terminates a contract by mutual consent, creating a peak-age free agent, and a smaller club can approach him at zero transfer cost. That is the talent redistribution channel from wealthy to modest clubs, a familiar mechanism in the Eredivisie. But when that channel is triggered by pundit pressure rather than by a scouting plan, the outcome usually does not favour the club.

What to watch

I am not concluding whether NEC should or should not sign Bakker. I am concluding that this decision must be made through three questions, not through one reaction.

The first check is the medical. If red flags appear, the contract must be short-term or appearance-linked, shifting the risk to the player rather than leaving it with the club.

Alongside that sits the KNVB registration rule. If registration outside the window is impossible, the story ends there, regardless of how good the player is.

But the heaviest question lies elsewhere: whether the coaching staff are willing to adjust the system to protect the left corridor. An attacking wing-back does not automatically plug the hole in a high defensive line. If NEC buy a player without fixing the system, they have only changed who absorbs the pressure.

And alongside every transfer calculation, Almugera Kabar needs protection: through internal communications, by not leaving him alone in Juventus-level fixtures, and through a clear pathway showing he belongs to the club's future rather than being the scapegoat of one half of football.

What I carry with me

I have spent twenty years excavating seasons that were under-written: players who never appear in spreadsheets, matches recorded incorrectly, talents forgotten because someone needed a name to blame. The match in Turin will enter NEC's history as a heavy defeat. But the sediment beneath it — a mid-tier club pushed onto too large a stage, a left corridor without insurance, a twenty-year-old thrown into the fire — is what deserves to be preserved longer than the scoreline.

The sediment of summer: I dug deep, and found a season that had never been written.

And I still believe that somewhere in the corridor of that stadium, people are playing with fear. Whether or not Mitchel Bakker is in the squad, the only question left is whether NEC have enough courage to fix the structure, or only enough money to buy a name.