For Ryan Gravenberch’s big farewell video last summer, Ajax clipped up an old interview with him as a teenager.
“Sometimes I forget that I’m 16,” the midfielder said with much pride and just the smallest hint of regret that you sometimes detect in prodigies who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of excellence.
But it was an easy mistake to make at the time. Gravenberch had almost fully grown into his 6ft 2in (188cm) body already, and he had just had his first game with Ajax’s seniors, their youngest debutant ever, having surpassed Clarence Seedorf in September 2018. Three days later, he became the club’s youngest goalscorer, hitting the target in the Dutch Cup.
Gravenberch “wanted more” but was sent back to the youngsters and didn’t feature again for the first team that season. It was a big reality check for a player to whom “everything had come easily” in his career up until then, as he admitted. “Looking back, it’s clear that I needed more time with (the club’s second team) Jong Ajax,” he said.
Perhaps Liverpool’s incoming midfielder will one day feel the same way about his move to Bayern Munich just over a year ago.
That summer there was strong interest in him from Liverpool and also Manchester United, driven by his former Ajax coach and their new manager, Erik ten Hag, but Gravenberch had agreed to join the serial Bundesliga champions a few months earlier and kept his word. “It’ll be hard work for him, the competition is fierce,” Ten Hag predicted in an interview with German TV channel Sport1. “But he’s the type who needs a challenge. He can certainly adjust to the high quality at Bayern.”
It didn’t happen for him, though.
Gravenberch started only six games all last season and has only featured for nine minutes in the first three matches of this one. Team-mates raved about his quality in training but he wasn’t able — or allowed — to show his worth consistently in matches under Julian Nagelsmann nor his March successor Thomas Tuchel. Even in a collectively poor season for Bayern that saw many stalwarts play well below their second-best, the Dutchman couldn’t break up the Joshua Kimmich/Leon Goretzka double-pivot partnership at the heart of Bayern’s team.
Extenuating circumstances? Quite a few.
Bayern’s chaotic season, featuring a managerial change and an executive board purge, wasn’t conducive to anyone performing well, let alone new recruits finding their feet in an unfamiliar league. Gravenberch, a natural No 8 who comes into his own in the opposition half, wasn’t ideally suited to their double-pivot system either.
In addition, leaving out him or Austrian counterpart Marcel Sabitzer was always the easier option for any Bayern manager, considering the power dynamics in the dressing room and the status of Kimmich and Goretzka as Germany internationals.
Bereft of game time and backing, Gravenberch fell into the common trap of trying too hard to make an impression during his short cameos. He never really settled as a result.
But that is not to say he couldn’t have done better. A source close to the Bayern dressing room, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorised to comment publicly, told The Athletic that the club would have liked to see more determination from the player to overcome his difficulties. There was a suspicion that, as someone who hadn’t experienced any significant setbacks in his career thus far, Gravenberch wasn’t ready to face the headwind he encountered in Munich.
His frequent complaints in the Dutch media about not playing enough also didn’t go down too well at Bayern. “I expected to play more minutes than I did. I thought I would get some more chances,” he told ESPN in June. “It’s about just wanting to play, that’s the most important thing at my age. I hope it’ll be at Bayern. Otherwise, we’ll just have to look further.
“I want to play, but the manager is picking other players. I have to accept it, but it’s difficult. I was hoping for more minutes but I have to stay calm. I told everyone that I don’t want another year like that. Of course, you can’t always be in the starting XI, but you can still play regularly — you can get a lot of minutes.”
After giving the 21-year-old a bit more time on the pitch towards the end of last season, Tuchel had markedly cooled on him during the early stages of the current one. The Athletic reported last week that the club felt that Gravenberch’s undoubted talent warranted more patience but the manager internally made no secret of his wish to sell him to make room for the signing of a more specialised defensive midfielder.
Speaking before the 3-1 win over Augsburg last Sunday, Tuchel said Bayern had “three 8s in the team”, with reference to Kimmich, Goretzka and new signing Konrad Laimer. Gravenberch’s name, pointedly, wasn’t mentioned at all.
Gravenberch now understands — just as he did as a 16-year-old on the verge of Ajax’s first team — that he needs to play more games to develop further as a player, and he needs a coach who fully believes in him to do so.
GO DEEPER
Ryan Gravenberch: What would Liverpool’s new target bring to their midfield?
Jurgen Klopp’s 4-3-3 system at Liverpool certainly offers a more natural habitat in which to develop, especially with plenty of games in the Europa League to come. The German manager will not have any qualms about dressing-room politics or media reactions when deciding about his suitability either.
From Bayern’s point of view, it was the right move at the wrong time, a case of what might have been.
Whereas the hiring of former RB Salzburg sporting director Christoph Freund would suggest that there’ll be a tweak to their transfer market strategy, with more emphasis being paid to honing future stars, Gravenberch’s inability to break through illustrates the inherent problems of such an approach.
Fickle, cut-throat Bavaria is rarely a country for young men.
(Top photo: Sebastian Widmann via Getty Images)
