Micky van de Ven’s father, Marcel, is well known in their native Netherlands for being one of the lead detectives on Hunted, the TV series in which the hunters (ie Marcel and his team) track down contestants who have gone on the run. Marcel got the gig for a reason. Previously, he had worked as an undercover agent for a unit based at a secret location that tackled the most notorious criminals in the country.
So when Marcel talks to his son, who has made such strides since his £34.5m transfer from Wolfsburg to Tottenham last summer, about the need to maintain a professional calm at all times, to accept the chaos that often rages around him and embrace it, he does so from a position of some authority.
“Yeah, it’s true, he has helped me,” Van de Ven says, during a break from the preparations for Sunday’s home game against Nottingham Forest. “When you are a young guy and you play in big stadiums, you are nervous for the first couple of times and he always taught me just to accept it.
“The advice really helped me when I left Volendam, my club in Holland, for Wolfsburg [in 2021]. Because although I’d played in big stadiums, I’d never played in huge stadiums like those in the Bundesliga and the Premier League.
“My dad was always saying, like in the warm-up, just enjoy what you see, the people, the vibe of the stadium, everything. Then, after you go in and come back out, just switch on. Accept everything that’s going on around you because you know it’s going to happen and you can’t do anything about it. It’s what I’ve done. I know it’s going to be chaos. But just do your job.”
Van de Ven cannot say too much about his father’s previous employment. The 22-year-old does not know all the details, partly because it was a while back, when Van de Ven was “really young”. But Marcel has written an autobiography and it has surely fleshed out a few memories for his son. “I didn’t know everything that he was doing because it was quite dangerous,” he says. “But when you read it back now in the book he has got written …
“He was an undercover agent and he was working on the highest criminals in Holland. He was doing his work with some other people – I don’t know how many but it was not that many. They were based somewhere in the Netherlands and every day he was there. He came back late and always [in] different cars, you know what I mean?
“Then he started to help out with some TV programmes. I think you have Hunted here in England. There was also one that’s called Kidnapped … children that got kidnapped to another country and he has to take the children back.”
Wait, what?! “It’s like … I don’t know what happens … the dad or the mum take a kid out of nowhere to another country without talking to the other parent and then my dad and his team … they go there and they make sure that the kid is coming back,” Van de Ven says.
Like many players in the Spurs squad, Van de Ven is easy-going company. Ange Postecoglou has clearly placed an emphasis on good personalities. Has anything fazed Van de Ven since his arrival? There was one moment when he attended the World Darts Championship before Christmas and took part in a nine-dart challenge against the legendary MC, Russ Bray, in front of a baying crowd – some of whom were plainly not Spurs fans.
“I was quite nervous, when I was standing there, the board was also further away than I thought,” Van de Ven says. “Imagine you threw three darts out of the board and everybody is like: ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’ But at least I won it against Russ.
“I really enjoyed it as [Raymond] Van Barneveld was playing that night. My Spurs teammate James Maddison also loves darts and I’ve played sometimes with him. We played with Michael Smith and Nathan Aspinall but I lost so I won’t talk about this one!”
Van de Ven was recovering from the hamstring tear he suffered against Chelsea on 6 November when he visited Alexandra Palace, although he told reporters that night he was close to a return. Postecoglou’s face would be a picture when he was informed that his centre-half had given a fitness update at the darts and it was spot on, Van de Ven making his comeback in the 2-2 draw at Manchester United on 14 January.
It was as if he had never been away. Van de Ven found his rhythm immediately at Spurs; his place alongside Cristian Romero, and he was fundamental to the team’s 10-match unbeaten run at the start of the league season. Since his return, there have been people at the club who have come to consider him as the most indispensable player.
Van de Ven’s Premier League record reads: W12 D5 L2. When he limped out of the Chelsea game, the score had been 1-1. Spurs would lose 4-1. It has been easy to see why Van de Ven is the perfect fit for Postecoglou’s style, with his physicality, comfort in possession, stamina and pace on the cover. Especially the pace on the cover.
In the 3-2 home win over Brentford on 31 January, Van de Ven was clocked at 23.23mph; the highest speed by a Premier League player since the data started to be collected, albeit it was only in 2020-21. When Usain Bolt set the 100m world record in 2009, his average speed was 23.35mph.
“It’s genetics,” Van de Ven says. “When I was younger, I was an attacker and I would outsprint everyone. Then there was a period where I had a dip. My height was going up fast and I had problems with my knees. I did some work on it and the speed came back, the control came back. But I think it was mostly genetics.”
It certainly makes a mockery of the time in 2018-19 when Van de Ven, playing a year up for the Volendam Under-19s, was told he might not have a future at the club he had joined aged 12 because he was not quick enough.
“When I was, like, in the Under-16s, they were saying: ‘OK, it’s close for you to go through [to the next year] or we just drop you off and you have to leave,’” Van de Ven says. “They kept playing me and playing me and I went through, through. I came to the Under-19s, I played the whole year but the gaffer of the first team didn’t see the potential of me.
“He said: ‘The guys who are playing right now are way better than you. You are not fast enough.’ That was maybe the most strange thing for me. I was like: ‘Ehhh?!’ He was saying: ‘We don’t really see the potential for you to become a first-team player.’ I was 18 [in April 2019] and I spoke with my dad. I said: ‘Maybe it’s better if I go to some high amateur league level, play there and who knows what’s going to happen.’ He was like: ‘No. Just keep pushing.’”
Everything would change when Volendam appointed Wim Jonk as the manager in the summer of 2019. He gave Van de Ven his first professional contract and promoted him to the Under-21s – as the captain. By early October, he had bumped him up again into the first team, which played in the second tier of Dutch football.
It would be wrong to say that Van de Ven has not looked back since. His departure from Volendam, after a stellar season in 2020-21, was messy. Mino Raiola, who represented him at the time, claimed that the club had put an unrealistic fee on Van de Ven and the agent took them to court, seeking a dissolution of the contract. He lost. Volendam would hold out for €3.5m from Wolfsburg, plus a significant sell-on clause. Nor was Van de Ven’s first season at Wolfsburg a success. Hampered by injury, he made only five appearances.
But if his second season at Wolfsburg was a triumph, he has upped the ante still further with Spurs, winning his first caps for the Netherlands along the way. Now for the next step – a Champions League finish. It continues to be unclear as to whether fifth in the Premier League will bring with it a place in next season’s enlarged Champions League. It will most likely come down to a battle of the coefficients between England and Germany, with plenty on the quarter-finals between Arsenal and Bayern Munich in the Champions League and West Ham and Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League.
Van de Ven has a simple solution. “We know about the coefficients, you look at it but it’s not like I’ll be supporting West Ham,” he says. “We are not focusing on fifth. We want to come fourth or even higher. We want to finish in a position where we make sure.”
