Running each day until the new season begins, The Premier League 60 is designed to reflect and honour the greatest players to have graced and illuminated the English top flight in the modern era, as voted for by our writers.
You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order (they didn’t), but we hope you’ll enjoy their stories. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to the series here.
This is the story of two Southampton games and one gliding Dutchman.
The first of those games takes us to February 26, 2005, when Arsenal are playing Southampton at St Mary’s. The game is drifting towards half-time when David Prutton jumps into a tackle on Robert Pires and finds himself heading to the dressing room early after receiving his second booking of the game from referee Alan Wiley. By the time his team-mates join him, Southampton are 1-0 down, Freddie Ljungberg tapping in during first-half stoppage time to give Arsenal the lead.
Advertisement
During the half-time break, Arsene Wenger delivered a very specific message to one member of his first-team squad: 21-year-old Robin van Persie. The Arsenal manager was wary of the pressure on Wiley to “level things up” after Prutton’s sending-off and made a beeline for the young Dutchman, who was already on a yellow card after a forearm smash on Rory Delap in the first half.
“Robin, be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t make tackles.”
More than 15 years on, Van Persie can recall the conversation vividly. In even sharper focus is what came next. “Well, what did I do?” he asks with a wry smile, remembering the pivotal moment that occurred just six minutes into the second half. “The first thing I did was to try a trick on the halfway line, which didn’t work out. I lost the ball and then I went in two-footed from behind (on Graeme Le Saux).”
As Van Persie trudged off the pitch with Wenger’s warning ringing loudly in his ears, the Arsenal manager opened his long arms out wide and wore the expression of a disappointed parent: What did I say to you JUST FIVE MINUTES AGO?
Now 37 years old and in the process of transitioning from football player to pundit in his role with BT Sport, Van Persie can look back on moments such as these and take a philosophical view on how they shaped the rest of his career — one that included winning the Premier League’s Golden Boot in consecutive seasons with two different teams and taking eighth spot among Arsenal’s all-time top scorers.
“Against Southampton, I made the worst choice at that moment,” says Van Persie. “But in the end, it was something that really helped me — a really important lesson for me to learn because in the following four or five weeks, I didn’t play a key role for the team; Arsene didn’t really pick me. It was only after a couple of weeks that he started to talk to me again.
Advertisement
“He said, ‘Listen, you want to be a top player, yes?’
“’Yeah, I would love to’.
“‘So ask yourself the right questions. Why are you not a top player and most of the other guys who are playing are top players?’”
It was the beginning of a long process for a player who arrived at Arsenal from Feyenoord as a 20-year-old with plenty to learn and a whole lot more to prove. Even so, he’d been on the radar of Premier League clubs for years by then. In Sir Alex Ferguson’s book Leading, he reveals that Van Persie was “about 16 and playing for Feyenoord’s reserves” when Manchester United first sent chief scout Jim Ryan to look at him. “Even then, the price on his head was about £6 million,” writes Ferguson.
Around that time, Rene Meulensteen, who would go on to coach Van Persie at United, was keeping a close eye on the development of a young player who was attracting so much attention in his home country. “He was this young emerging talent with what I would say was a very strong personality,” says Meulensteen. “I remember he was in the same team as Pierre van Hooijdonk, who was a striker with a strong personality himself and a good free-kick taker.
“But in one of the games when Robin was just maybe 18 or 19, I remember he picked up the ball and said, ‘No, you step aside, I take this!’ That was the introduction for everybody — this is Robin van Persie and I’m here to make my mark.”
In the end, money wasn’t a problem. It was the youngster’s temperament that put United off. During the game Ryan attended, Van Persie was sent off but before he reached the dressing room, he got caught in a heated exchange with supporters. Seeing the teenager swapping verbal insults with the crowd left not only Ryan unimpressed but Van Persie’s club too, who suspended him.
Arsenal were aware of the concerns over his character but Wenger was willing to take the risk for a player who he believed would “strengthen his squad considerably” and who he saw making the transition from winger to striker that Thierry Henry had done so successfully under his guidance.
Advertisement
The player who walked into Arsenal’s dressing room of Invincibles for the first time in May 2004 was one who made an immediate impression on his new team-mates. “You could see his personality and self-confidence — it was arrogance, but in a positive way,” says former Arsenal full-back Lauren, who had been at the club since 2000. “You could clearly see his talent, too. It was like he had a bow in his leg: when he controlled and kicked the ball, it was as if he shot an arrow at the goalkeeper.”
“You could tell from the beginning he would become the player he ended up being. He had all the conditions. But above all that, I highlight his personality — his character. Under difficult circumstances, like that day at Southampton, another footballer might have collapsed. Arsene Wenger was quite upset but Van Persie… I wouldn’t say he didn’t care but he clearly did not fall apart.”
For some players of Van Persie’s age, simply walking into a dressing room containing the huge talents that Arsenal possessed would have been enough to make them shrink into themselves. “Many times in training, the hierarchy of other players can dampen your growth and in some situations, another young man is scared,” says Lauren. “But he was not. He brought out his personality straight away.”
Confidence was not an issue then but questions remained. Would Van Persie’s “impulsiveness”, as he calls it, stop him from becoming the top player he told Wenger he was so desperate to become? Speaking on the High Performance Podcast earlier this year, Van Persie painted a picture of a young player who turned every game into a monumental struggle, one who was battling against everyone, including himself.
“The opponents found out that if they triggered me, they could get me sent off,” he said. “If the opponent was stepping on my toes and trying to bully me, I was going hard against it. For a long time, I was mentally, physically drained after every match. Then, I realised that I was constantly fighting. In the end, I started to think about that. Then it made sense to me: I shouldn’t have that reaction. I shouldn’t go against it. I should stand above it.
“I talked with Arsene Wenger about this as well and slowly, I started to change that. Once I did that, everything became lighter. It was so heavy for all those years but I was making it heavy. I just needed a few years to realise that.”
The aftermath of his first sending off for the club at St Mary’s gave Van Persie time to start the process examining his emotional response to things that happened on the pitch, and the technical side of his game too. Together, those were aspects that he knew could move him closer to the likes of Dennis Bergkamp, Pires, Henry and Ljungberg.
Advertisement
The brutal honesty for which he became renowned when talking about himself and his team allowed Van Persie to take a forensic look at his game. He spent hours watching clips that Arsenal’s analysts compiled for him and started making notes, writing down his positives and negatives. “When I read them back, I realised that I was lying to myself,” he tells The Athletic. “I was being too positive, making myself feel better!”
He spoke to team-mates, asking questions about what he could do better and how they felt when they trained against him. Did he do enough to compete with them or could he do more? He started writing a new list with the answers he received — bullet point after bullet point of all the things he’d need to become a top player.
It was Sol Campbell’s words that made the deepest impression.
“When I was younger, I loved to have the ball at my feet,” says Van Persie. “But if you really want to hurt opponents, if you really want to test them, you have to make runs in behind. Sol Campbell told me once, ‘When I play against you, it’s easy. Yes, you are good, but you don’t challenge me because you don’t make enough runs in behind’.
“So then I made up this rule: out of three actions, at least one of them had to be in behind. That was a long process as well, working out what the best kind of run is. Is it just a straight run? Is it a run with one or two dummies in it? I was constantly thinking, watching other players and how they made their runs and keeping an open mind — being honest with myself.”
Van Persie believes that it wasn’t until the age of 25 or 26 that he was “coming close to being a top player”. Before then, injuries had threatened to stand in his way — a cracked metatarsal led to six months out in 2006-07 and twisted knee ligaments provided another heavy setback the following season. “I was very unlucky,” he tells The Athletic. “I had two or three really good periods with Arsenal and then I got injured, so then you can’t make that last push of becoming a top player over a longer period. I would do it but only for a couple of months — not for a whole year.
“It’s nice to have top periods for one month or three months but to give you that name of being a top player, you have to prove it over a longer period. And finally, I got that chance towards the later stages at Arsenal.”
Advertisement
It’s interesting that a player whom everyone — including his team-mates — perceived as supremely confident was so willing to be made aware of his shortcomings but perhaps it simply illustrates the side of Van Persie that Arsenal fans eventually became painfully aware of: his all-consuming, desperate desire to win. An impulse strong enough to override any other.
By the start of the 2011-12 season, he had blossomed into a player who truly belonged at the top table that he had admired from afar for so long. The only problem was, there were far more empty seats around it than there had been at the time of his arrival.
He was Arsenal’s captain that season, leading from the front with 37 goals in 48 appearances, including 30 in his 38 Premier League outings to win his first Golden Boot. And how Wenger’s side needed those goals — of the rest of the Arsenal squad, only Theo Walcott managed to reach double figures that season.
When the end came, it was painful and there are parts of it that Van Persie now says he regrets, such as the open letter that he wrote to Arsenal fans explaining that he would not be extending his contract after it had become clear that his view on how the club should move forward was not in keeping with that of Wenger or chief executive Ivan Gazidis.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said on the High Performance Podcast. “It’s impossible, in such a delicate difficult situation of making a transfer after spending so much time at Arsenal, to write an open letter to tell my truth — in two pages, it’s impossible. If I look back, I should have done better.”
Van Persie revealed he had compiled a list of seven points where he thought the club could improve and which he felt should be dealt with straight away if they were to compete with the best teams the following season. Gazidis didn’t agree with a single one. Coupled with the fact that Van Persie was not offered a new deal to stay beyond the one year he had left on his contract, the striker took it as “a very clear message” that after eight years, his time at the club had reached a natural conclusion.
For Sir Alex Ferguson, the decision was an easy one despite his age — Van Persie was 29 by the time he signed for Manchester United — and the questions he was asked by the Glazers about the hefty price on the Dutchman’s head (£24 million was the largest amount the club had ever paid for a player of that age). “The questions were entirely reasonable,” Ferguson wrote in Leading, “but when a player of his calibre becomes available, you have to act.”
Advertisement
Before the deal was signed and sealed, Van Persie spoke to compatriot Meulensteen, who was by then United’s first-team coach. Van Persie was concerned about how he might be received in a dressing room of players who had been among his biggest rivals for the previous eight years and asked for reassurance. Meulensteen went away and discussed with Ferguson how they should approach it. They decided to address the players as a group and give them three names of players in the Premier League, asking which one of the three they would pick to join the club.
“Some picked two out of the three,” says Meulensteen. “But when we said, ‘If Robin would come, would you welcome that?’, everybody was unanimously positive. It showed a lot of respect from our players. They knew that if we got that sort of player in our squad, we probably were going to challenge for the Premier League again.”
Meulensteen needed no convincing. Although United had largely got the better of Arsenal in recent seasons (Arsenal had one victory from their previous 12 meetings in all competitions when Van Persie joined), his qualities had stood out for everyone to see. “Certain players have a unique style. If you ask me to mention another Robin van Persie, it’s very hard to say. Robin wasn’t like a sprinter, he was a glider. The timing of his runs was inch-perfect and his left foot was just phenomenal.
“He was good with his right, too — people forget that sometimes — but his left foot was just effortless. He could bend it, he could shoot it very, very hard, and he could hold up the ball when you needed to get away from pressure. He was unique.”
Rio Ferdinand had been at the club for a decade when Van Persie arrived. He thought he knew exactly what United were getting: a player who Ferdinand felt had always struggled when tasked with playing up front alone against him and his defensive partner Nemanja Vidic. The reality proved rather different.
“The best way to explain it is that the impact he had was just so much greater than anticipated because of his focus, his hunger and his desire to win the Premier League,” the BT Sport pundit tells The Athletic. “He was like a little kid coming into a sweet shop thinking, ‘I want to take in everything, sample everything, to try to get the best out of this experience, and try to win’.”
No one felt his impact more keenly than the United manager, says Ferdinand. He recalls a moment in the season when they were top of the league, with goals from Van Persie coming thick and fast. But it wasn’t enough for Sir Alex. He called a meeting during which he played a series of clips showing examples of Van Persie making runs and not receiving the ball.
Advertisement
“The manager said, ‘Listen, if you lot want to win the league, you pass him the ball. I’m showing you these runs he’s making, now look for them in the game. All the time, he’s making these runs. You’re not playing the right ball and that means he’s not scoring as many goals as he should to win us the league’.
“Those were his words: ‘He will win you the league’. I’d been at the club for that many years and I’d never heard the manager say that about another player… (Cristiano) Ronaldo was probably the only other one.”
Off the pitch, Ferdinand had bonded swiftly with his new team-mate. They lived close to each other and the six-month driving ban Ferdinand had been handed for speeding meant they travelled to Carrington together most days. Those journeys allowed time for the two to discuss football: what it meant to play for United and so much else that Van Persie was curious about.
“Robin was very inquisitive,” says Ferdinand. “He wanted to know everything about the club. He was like a sponge. He was producing on the pitch but off it, he was taking so much consideration into what goes into becoming a United player that he made it almost impossible for himself to fail given the ability he had and the homework he was doing, just through simple conversations with people like myself.”
Van Persie’s first league start for the club came in their second game of the season against Fulham when he met a Patrice Evra cross with his left foot, taking the ball off the bounce and placing it perfectly beyond the reach of the goalkeeper. It was stunning. Elegant. The perfect way to open his United account in a 3-2 victory. But the story really begins in his next game: the second of our two Southampton games.
Van Persie’s second league game as a United player took him back to St Mary’s and the scene of the lesson that had set him on the right path at Arsenal. Only this time, it was different.
After falling behind to an early goal, Van Persie scored a cracking equaliser, controlling Antonio Valencia’s cross on his chest and lashing his volley past the goalkeeper. But 10 minutes into the second half, the hosts took the lead again. The Dutchman was left to rue a series of squandered chances but was soon handed a gilt-edged one: a penalty. Van Persie stepped up to take it with all the confidence of a man who was accustomed to seeing the net bulge on such occasions.
“I didn’t hit it well,” he grimaces as he recalls the disguised chip that floated gently down the middle of the goal to offer keeper Kelvin Davis an easy save. “It was a sort of half-shot, half-chip… it was a very bad penalty.” At that point, the Van Persie of seven years earlier would have struggled to control his surging emotions. “He would have thrown his dummy out of the pram,” laughs Meulensteen.
Advertisement
But this Van Persie was different. This Van Persie, who late in the game was starting to suffer from cramp (the effects of a truncated pre-season), told himself there was no way he was leaving the pitch now. Not after missing a penalty like that. Not when they were 2-1 down.
For the last 20 minutes, he played through the pain, scoring his second goal in the 87th minute (“I got lucky there — Rio headed it in and it came off the post and landed in front of me”) and his hat-trick goal to win United the game in stoppage time. “I believe in ‘never give up mode’,” he says. “You should always carry on. Even if you have cramp, even if it doesn’t go your way, find a way.”
After the game, Meulensteen recalls Van Persie coming into the dressing room with the hat-trick ball and immediately apologising for hitting the worst penalty of his career. “It showed how far he’d moved as a person, not blaming anybody else but just holding his hands up and saying, ‘My fault, boys. It won’t happen again’.”
Seven months later, Van Persie notched his second Premier League hat-trick of the season in United’s 3-0 victory against Aston Villa. This one satisfied his desire to be a winner in three ways: 1) his goals secured United the league title with four games to spare 2) the second of his hat-trick won him the Goal of the Season award and 3) the third of his hat-trick — his 24th league goal of the season — moved him above Luis Suarez as the Premier League’s top scorer, a position he was still in at the end of the season, securing his second consecutive Golden Boot.
“It was quite a process,” says Van Persie, as he reflects on the journey of his career that led to that position. “Along the way, you have to keep your eyes open, ask many questions. Learn, listen and fall a couple of times — make mistakes. The key is to learn from them. This is what I did for years.
“It’s not that I was perfect at 28, 29, but I was more mature. I was handling my emotions much better. I wasn’t disappointed after a miss because I knew there would be another chance. So after some time, those things all came together — you need to be mentally ready, physically ready, and you need to have confidence… but not too much.”
(Top image: Getty Images; Tom Slator for The Athletic)
