Jeremy Doku: The making of Belgium and Manchester City forward

This article has been updated as part of The Athletic’s coverage of Euro 2024 and the Copa America, having originally been published in 2023.

---

“When you play with guys who have had the same formation, you don’t need to talk,” Romelu Lukaku said about his connection with Belgium’s latest star.

Jeremy Doku had set up the first of Lukaku’s four goals against Azerbaijan in November, and had a big hand in creating the second, too, but their story runs deeper than having come through the ranks at Anderlecht’s Neerpede academy a decade apart.

And it becomes particularly relevant when it comes to Manchester City, the club who benefitted from Doku’s talents since signing him from French side Rennes for £55million ($69m) last summer: were it not for Lukaku, Doku’s career could have taken a very different path — to Anfield.

Doku was 15 at the time and he and his family have described a fairly easy decision to snub a massive sales pitch from Liverpool, which involved a tour of the stadium, the training ground and school, chats with Jurgen Klopp, Steven Gerrard, Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane (among others), as well as a car and a house for the family and even a job for his father, David. One coach at Anderlecht believes the financial offer was worth around €3million (£2.6m, $3.3m).

“I know what route I needed to take and I knew at that moment I needed to stay at Anderlecht,” Doku said in 2021.

“Jeremy wasn’t interested in it at all,” his father told Het Laatste Nieuws a year earlier. “He didn’t want to move to Liverpool or England. He only brightened up when we said we were going home.”

Those at home with Brussels-based Anderlecht were not quite so relaxed: Doku could not sign a professional deal in Belgium until he was 16 and the preparations for that had been going on for months.

“I wasn’t aware at the time,” Jean Kindermans, the club’s former youth co-ordinator, tells The Athletic. “His management, Stellar, told me there was a lot of interest from English clubs but they didn’t tell me he had already gone, otherwise I would maybe have said, ‘OK, it (the chances of keeping him) is finished’.”

Mo Ouahbi, one of Doku’s academy coaches at the time, adds: “I remember that the whole club worked to keep him, everybody made a huge effort, Jean Kindermans and the schooling side. I knew we had to push him, that if we let him rest he would go to Liverpool, because he wasn’t going to progress here.”

“It was a struggle,” Jan Verlinden, the man in charge of Doku’s schooling and social development says of that period. “We managed to persuade him and to convince the parents with a project, not only on the sports side, but also on the school side, to guide him to a diploma.

“Don’t underestimate the role of parental involvement in that situation.”

So where does Lukaku fit into this story? The Chelsea striker, on loan at Italy’s Roma last season, is often at the Anderlecht training ground. He has a son in their academy, but he also takes a keen interest in the next generations of players coming through at his former club.

“I remember two big moments,” Kindermans says. “One was the father was in my office, he told me, ‘Mr Kindermans, I have to wake up every morning very early, I need to go to work and I need to help my family financially, and when you receive such an offer (as Liverpool were making) it is difficult to resist’.

“It was a difficult moment for Anderlecht financially, waiting for a takeover, but then Romelu Lukaku is at Neerpede, he entered my office and we started talking.

“It was not especially about Jeremy but at a certain moment in the conversation he asked about the big upcoming talents and I said one of them is Doku, but I said it was the first time in history I had difficulty convincing young players to stay at Anderlecht — they want to go too early, they don’t know what a bad decision they take by leaving too early, they have to stay.

“And he said to me, ‘Give me his phone number, I will call him’. I said, ‘No, I will film you in my office and you should tell him why he should stay in Anderlecht’. He spoke for one and a half minutes, very straight, explaining why he should stay.

“He left my office a few minutes later and I sent it to the father with the simple text: ‘I’m not the only one with this kind of advice’.

“It’s now easy to say that was the moment but I’m sure it boosted his father. If Romelu had come a week or two later then maybe the decision is already made.”

---

How to follow Euro 2024 on The Athletic…

---

“Borgerhout is an area where a lot of people are… I will not say poor but not the highest class of Antwerp,” its vice mayor, Karim Bachar, tells The Athletic. “We don’t have people who live in a house with a large space where you can play and with a garden where you can put up goals to play with your children.”

It was to that part of the port city that Doku’s parents, David and Belinda, moved from Ghana in 1993 to start a family. As well as Jeremy, there is his older brother, Jefferson, and two younger sisters, Precious and Chelsea.

Borgerhout has earned itself a bad reputation in recent years — a hand grenade exploded there in 2019, thought to be the result of a feud between rival drug gangs — but it was not that way during the Doku kids’ childhood — and in any case, the neighbourhood seems perfectly pleasant, with children streaming out onto the streets after school.

But outdoor space is certainly limited there, so Jeremy and Jefferson spent hours playing football on one of the few concrete pitches, dubbed Borgerplein, at Luitenant Naeyaertplein whenever they could.

“We played football on the street there every day in the summer,” Jefferson, who now has to reject a bombardment of requests from journalists, said earlier this season. “From early morning to late evening. Only when the lights on the square went out did we have to come home.

“He learned the dribble with which he rushes past an opponent on the right here, on Borgerplein.”

A mural on the side of the adjacent sports centre building advises, “Keep it quiet and clean because Luitenant Naeyaertplein is more than a pitch” and there is another mural of Dutch-Moroccan kickboxer Badr Hari and the just about unmistakable Zinedine Zidane.

Inevitably for somebody who has gone on to represent his country and now City, Doku stood out very early.

“He was the very best, you saw it immediately,” says Tom Janssens, who scouted a seven-year-old Doku for Antwerp-based then first-division club Germinal Beerschot. “Normally we ask players to train twice and then twice with the team but for him it was one training session and a game.”

That game almost went wrong, however.

“It was a Wednesday evening and he had to be there for 5pm, with kick-off at 6pm,” Janssens continues. “At 5, he wasn’t there; 5:15, he wasn’t there. I was afraid he wasn’t coming but at 5:30 he arrived with a big bag. He ran to the dressing room, opened his bag and he didn’t have any boots, only his brother’s boots. They were five sizes too big.

“We asked everybody if they had any but they didn’t, so he had to play with his brother’s shoes. He still scored a lot of goals, I don’t remember how many.”

Janssens’ wife, Katrien, who joined our interview in a scouting room at another Belgian top-flight club, KV Mechelen, to assist with translation, adds to the story. “I still remember the moment that Tom came home and told me, ‘I have seen something special’.”

Doku is far from the only professional to have emerged from the area: from his age group at Beerschot alone, there are also Ignace Van der Brempt, the Red Bull Salzburg defender, and Bas Van den Eynden at Mechelen. Former Tottenham Hotspur defenders Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen began their professional careers there.

But Doku’s under-10s coach, Eric Meirsman, says he stood out: “With Jeremy, you could already see he could do a little more than the others. His dribbling was fantastic and his biggest weapon was to make a one-on-one action and then accelerate.”

And that invention was not confined to the pitch. “Our players were required to shower in slippers (flip-flops) but Jeremy sometimes forgot things,” Meirsman adds. “But Jeremy wouldn’t be Jeremy if he hadn’t found a solution: he would tie his shin guards under his feet and shuffle to the shower.”

Those who knew Doku in Antwerp all recall, without fail, a “shy”, “modest” and “timid” kid.

“When he played at Beerschot, he was really shy and modest,” coach Dries Dierckx tells The Athletic. “We had other players at that age who were maybe more like, ‘I’m going to be a professional football player’, but Jeremy wasn’t that.”

It turns out Bachar, the vice mayor we met earlier, is something of a futsal legend, for many years the captain of the Belgium national team and now their coach, as he is at first-division side Futsal Topsport Antwerp. It was there he saw Doku play between the ages of eight and 11 as he got his football fix alongside his commitments at Beerschot and Borgerplein.

“He was so fast and he had the first dribble, the first metres were so good,” says Bachar. “You saw immediately that he had some exceptional talents.

“But at that moment you saw also he had to do a lot of work, a lot of work in the finish, scoring goals, giving the last pass. He needed to work at that because the last pass and scoring was not good enough. In the last few years, he’s made a lot of progress with that.”

He was, nevertheless, unstoppable. Bachar’s son, Ilias, played with him.

“I believe we won everything,” Ilias says. Their coach, Farid Achalhi, estimates they won eight or nine trophies each year, including the national title.

“With him, I don’t think we ever lost — maybe one of the games,” Achalhi laughs as he oversees a lunchtime session at a sports hall in Berchem, somewhere former Belgium internationals Mousa Dembele and Radja Nainggolan have also passed through. “We had a good team and with him, you can’t lose.

“He was the best player here. He’s too fast for everyone. He has a big engine, he was everywhere on the pitch — here, there and everywhere.”

Mohammed Ennaassi, one of the young coaches helping Achalhi with the session, played in the same teams.

“You cannot describe how good he was,” says Ennaassi.” You see it. You feel it. I always knew he was going to become a professional. I knew it. You see it on the pitch. He had all the mentality to work hard. If friends said to me that Jeremy would come with us to play, I was happy — I knew we were going to win.

“He was always the fastest on the team. One time, two players from the other team stood to take kick-off, the referee whistles, one guy kicks off but Jeremy was so fast that he ran in and won the ball before the second guy could touch it. It was crazy, nobody could believe it. The referee thought it was a foul and blew his whistle, but it wasn’t a foul!”

Ennaassi can do nothing but smile as he recalls their time together. He says he knew his place in the pecking order back then: “I passed to him but I didn’t get it back!”

Alongside the speed and the incredible dribbling ability, that is the one element of Doku’s game which was mentioned by every single person who spoke to The Athletic about his football development in Belgium. It all goes hand in hand.

“Jeremy was someone who you occasionally had to put in his place,” Meirsman says. “If you explained to him that he sometimes had to pass the ball, he was guaranteed to forget it after a few minutes.

“Then he put the ball between his opponent’s legs again and charged towards the goal. He liked to challenge opponents and always did something that made us think, ‘Don’t do that now, Jeremy!’.

“But then he turned around and you saw his divine smile: ‘Look what I can do!’.”

Those abilities took him south from Antwerp to Anderlecht in the capital.

“Jeremy was a special case,” says Kevin Vermeulen, Anderlecht’s youth recruitment coordinator. “You see so many names but in his case, the scouts were really convinced about his qualities, every meeting dropping his name as the No 1 on the list to recruit.”

Vermeulen and Kindermans sit together at Brasserie Bijgaarden, a Michelin-guide restaurant seven minutes from the Neerpede training centre. It is the exact table where Eddy Merckx, the world’s most decorated cyclist, and Belgian football legend Paul Van Himst usually sit, and Kindermans jokes (presumably) that if they were to arrive, we would have to move.

“He was a little boy, only 10 years old, it’s difficult to predict if he will reach international level but the scouts were very, very enthusiastic about him,” Vermeulen says of Doku. “They described him in the way that you know him today: explosive, very, very agile, really confident, always wants to dribble…”

Kindermans jumps in. “Audacious,” he says. Vermeulen nods. “Challenging.”

In the ‘Lukaku’ meeting room at Neerpede, Benoit Haegeman and Stephane Stassin, two of Doku’s former coaches, make a fine double act. They paint a picture of a wonderfully talented footballer who constantly had them tearing their hair out.

“In French we say, ‘avoir des cheveux gris’!” Haegeman says: he turns your hair grey.

He tells the story of how the youth team had been knocked out of a tournament in Italy at the group stage, but had to stay until the final due to pre-booked flights. He arranged training sessions to keep the youngsters entertained, but there was no bus to take them to the pitch where they took place.

“It was a six kilometre (almost four miles) run to the pitch, train, and then 6km back,” he says. “For Jeremy, it was very difficult. We started from the hotel and we ran together — the coach, the team, the staff — and Jeremy was with Eliot Matazo, who is at Monaco (in France’s top flight) now, very far behind the group, a lot of kilometres.

“At that point, I decided to let the rest of the players continue running together and we arrived at the stadium to train and Jeremy was there. He spoke only Dutch, nothing in English, nothing in French, but he asked somebody in Italy to take him by car.

“Everybody in the world would be almost embarrassed, ‘Sorry, coach, I have an injury’, but he was like this with his chest puffed out, ‘Coach, let’s go to train’, and two days later, he got the trophy for the best forward at the tournament. This is a tournament with Inter, Roma, AC Milan, a team from Greece, (one) from France, and everybody agreed Jeremy was the best forward.”

They remember how, at the Kevin De Bruyne Cup for under-15s, Dutch side AZ Alkmaar double-marked Doku and made aggressive tackles. “I was a bit afraid for him because it was very dangerous,” Haegeman says. “But Jeremy was very confident and his mentality was, ‘Coach, don’t panic, I will receive the ball and I will succeed again’, and we won 2-0, (with) two actions from Jeremy.”

Stassin adds: “The more you challenge him, the more he likes it. It’s almost like if he has two men on him, he wants three. Many times, I saw him do something which p***ed me off at the time: he would put his foot on the ball, dribble past somebody and put his foot on the ball again to beat him again. It was at the limit of arrogance, not in a negative way, but it shows how confident he is on the pitch.”

Ouahbi also recalls this: “Something he did was that when the ball went in behind on the left, he ran faster than the defender, but when he got close to the ball he put the brakes on a little, let the defender catch up and then, boom!, beat him a second time. He always did this with the youngsters — obviously, he learned that he couldn’t do that with adults because if he did they would break him.”

“Sometimes it was frustrating for his team-mates and friends,” Stassin adds, “because when he had the ball they would make the effort to get into position or make some runs but they knew he would do his skills and they wouldn’t get the ball. It was not easy to play alongside him.”

Haegeman jokes that rather than a pass, his team-mates would have to wait for a second ball, or “if it’s Christmas, maybe a cross”.

“I became crazy!” he laughs. “The relationship with Jeremy was like, ‘I love you, but…’. Sometimes Jeremy had a lot of arrogance or was over-eager to show his abilities, but the week after it would be a difficult game and you will win 1-0 because of a Jeremy goal. You (then) have to thank Jeremy because without him it’s not the same result.”

There is a video that surfaced recently showing Doku recalling a conversation he had at Anderlecht, when he was asked what he dreams about in football. “I told him, ‘What I want is for the defender I’m playing against not to be able to sleep after. I want to kill him, make him cry. After the game, I want him to hate me’. I was 16, now if a coach asked me I would never tell him that, but I didn’t know, and he looked at me like he was shocked and he said, ‘Look, this is not the right mentality, but I will forgive you because I like you’.”

Nobody at Anderlecht seems to recall that happening but it got to the stage where Stassin told Doku he would have to do more than dribble if he wanted to play at a big club.

“Jeremy had these two exceptional qualities of dribbling and speed but he had a lot of faults in everything that was basic technique, like passing, finishing, putting in crosses,” Stassin says now. “We did a lot of work with his left foot. In the beginning, he was not able to repeat the efforts during the 90 minutes because he did not like to work on his physical level.”

Over the years they, as well as Ouahbi and others, also worked on Doku’s positioning, decision-making around the area (shooting with his right foot if cutting in from the left, or shooting with his left if wider), and learning to run in-behind a defender, rather than staying and waiting for a dribbling opportunity.

“If the defender lets him receive to feet, fine,” Ouahbi says, “but if the defender comes out to mark him then he has to run behind. We worked on that a lot.”

At Anderlecht, there are two adjacent youth pitches, with under-15s playing on one pitch and under-16s on the other at the same time. The best players, such as Doku and Aston Villa’s Youri Tielemans, another graduate, are included in both squads.

“Sometimes during the games, we needed players for the other game,” Vermeulen says, “because maybe one was already decided, so the coach shouts to the other pitch, the player runs while changing his shirt, comes into the other game and then in 20 minutes he decides that other game. Imagine you are coming into a game where you don’t even know the score, the circumstances, but you come on and you can decide both games. It’s crazy.

“Tielemans decides the pace of the game, like a metronome, but Jeremy is like, ‘Give me the ball and I will dribble past everybody and score’.”

It is clear that while those in Brussels and Antwerp recall exactly the same traits on the pitch, it is as if they are talking about two different boys when it comes to his personality.

“I saw a video of Jeremy dancing in the changing room at Anderlecht and thought that I don’t remember him doing that at futsal or at Beerschot,” Ilias Bachar says.

At Anderlecht, they believe it was a normal case of growing up and becoming a man, and thanks to his standing as his team’s most eye-catching and trusted player. There was also his school work, the diploma in media and communications which was one of the reasons he rebuffed Liverpool.

“He had his schooling, where he needed to be more extroverted,” Verlinden says. “He changed a little bit when he was here. He wasn’t the best student, he was sometimes really late with his deadlines but for doing presentations, that was no problem. He’s quite introverted but once he’s on stage, he’s a good performer, an entertainer.

“His biggest quality is ‘dare and repeat’, which means that maybe five actions will not succeed but he will still do the same thing for the sixth time. Maybe other players, if they make one mistake, they will never do it again or they need five minutes to regain their trust, but that’s not Jeremy.”

Verlinden had to manage several difficult situations during Doku’s years with Anderlecht, at times when there were huge demands between his school work and his football: “There was this one week where he was almost suspended at school. I don’t know why — I can only imagine that as a teacher you go for the leader, like Jeremy, who’s for once in your class, so you will talk to him and not to the others. But he also got his first red card on the pitch in the same week. It’s like his life in school was a mirror of his performance on the pitch.”

Vermeulen adds: “I remember a difficult period for him. At under-13/under-14 level he played like a kid, but between 15 and 16 there was a lot of interest from the whole of Europe, too much pressure on the parents, national youth teams and all this, and I would say that the extrovert, dancer, joking-with-everybody Jeremy changed to a guy who was a little bit more introvert — he pulled his hoodie up.

“For a year and a half, he closed himself up to everybody. I think it was a way to protect him from the outside world.”

During the summer of 2017, at age 15, Doku filled out a self-assessment form, outlining his goals (to start for Anderlecht and to play for Belgium at the World Cup, both of which he accomplished) and also his strengths and weaknesses.

He listed dribbling, one-vs-one and technique as strengths but wanted to improve his technical level, scoring, shooting, heading, his left foot and working back after losing the ball. Regarding his mental skills, he highlighted self-confidence as a strength but coping with criticism and being harsh on himself as weaknesses. When asked about potential barriers to success, he wrote “too much confidence”.

Doku changed over the years, then, but he also changed Anderlecht.

“He’s the player who pushed me to re-evaluate my opinion about the first control,” academy director Kindermans says. “The first touch is the most important of technique, and I said to my coaches that the ball has to be in motion and the player has to receive the ball while running.

“And then our friend Doku arrived and he received the ball, right foot, with his sole on the ball, the ball still, he was still, and he just wanted one thing: for the defender to make contact. He was such a strong boy and inside or outside he could dribble.

“So I said to the coaches that we are going to change the definition of the first touch to the most comfortable situation to give you the comfort to dribble, shoot or pass. It was Doku who changed that.”

By the time he was 15, Doku was playing with the under-17s and was already catching the eye, not just of Liverpool, and he had gained three kilograms (about half a stone) in weight, mostly on his legs, which were already strong from protecting the ball from guys twice his age on Borgerplein.

“I remember one day we played in the Amsterdam Tournament — a prestigious competition,” Ouahbi says. “We beat PSG 4-0, he had a great game and later Romelu Lukaku called me. He was playing for Manchester United and he was watching the game.

“He asked me, ‘Who’s the little guy — No 11?’ I said Doku, and he said, ‘Let me speak with him’,”; so I said, ‘Jeremy, there’s somebody who wants to speak with you’, and the look on his face was like, ‘Wow!’. Romelu told him, ‘You have to keep going, you’re a very good player’, and that gave him a lot of confidence.”

Doku made his first-team debut at 16, coming off the bench, dribbling into the box and winning a penalty.

“Hein Vanhaezebrouck was the coach,” Kindermans explains. “He was not reaching the expected level, struggling a little bit with injured players, and he comes into my office at the start of the week, we sit and chat for a while and on the Sunday we were going to play Sint-Truiden, and they are the only first division team in Belgium allowed to play on an artificial pitch.

“Hein was saying how senior players don’t like to play on those pitches because of joint problems, and he asked if they could train on the youth team’s artificial pitch, and he asked if he could use Yari Verschaeren (then 17) and Jeremy Doku in the sessions.

“I went to Stassin’s office to watch the training session. They were playing a small-sided possession game, the senior players played with less interest but the two (young) guys were, ‘Bam-bam-bam’ — they trained with such big enthusiasm that I said to Stephane after 10 minutes, ‘Steph, I don’t think we are going to see them back in the youth’. And that was it, finished.”

(Top photos: Visionhaus/Getty Images; Bruno Fahy/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images)