They hadn’t expected him but Villarreal awaited Nicolas Jackson with open arms when he landed back in Spain on board the same plane in which he had left. It was late January and the journey, supposed to be one way, hadn’t gone as planned. He had flown to England to join Bournemouth for €25m, but a failed medical forced a return, his big opportunity gone.
At 21, still on a B team contract six months since he was playing in the third tier, and with just eight first division starts and a hamstring injury that would limit him to a solitary minute until April, he didn’t know if another would come.
The answer, to their surprise, was soon. “We will try to cheer him up, to encourage him because it was a great opportunity,” the Villarreal coach Quique Setién said. “We’ll support him, help him overcome this disappointment and strengthen him so that when the summer comes he is worth twice as much.”
While few imagined it would pan out like that, he wasn’t so far off. Despite what had happened in January, five months later Jackson flew to England again and this time there was no turning back. On Sunday he joined Chelsea for £32m on an eight-year deal.
Those close to the forward say the aborted deal was good for him and not solely because it turned out well, the second call from England even more attractive than the first. Instead, something shifted. Few players can have responded so fast, so decisively to a setback, as if driven by it. When at last Jackson started a game again, his first since Bournemouth had backed out, it began a run of nine goals in nine matches. A man transformed, from April on, a player few regarded as a prolific goalscorer scored more than anyone in Europe’s top five leagues. He also scored more than Chelsea.
At Villarreal, they were surprised too – in nine games he had got as many as in his whole career until then – although there has always been something about Jackson. Not least a stubborn streak, determined to play despite what his parents said. No academy product, it is only four years since he was playing on streets and dirt land. Born in Banjul, the Gambia, he was raised in Ziguinchor, in the rural Casamance region of southern Senegal, and had been in organised football for only a few months, playing for local side Casa Sport, when he joined Villarreal as a 17-year-old in 2019.
Having been turned down after a trial at Benfica, Jackson didn’t tell his mother until everything was signed. Back home they called him the “Senegalese Neymar” and, the story goes, the day he played a practice match with the juvenil (Under 19s), the Villarreal president, Fernando Roig, was there. He had been watching a few minutes when the order came to sign him.
“I remember perfectly the first time I saw him with the juvenil you could immediately see that he was a level above,” says Miguel Álvarez, the coach soon entrusted with Jackson’s development in the B team. “He was superior to the rest, like a man playing against boys.”
That summer, Jackson spent six weeks working with the B team before joining Mirandés on loan in the second division for 2020-21. “He was quiet, a little shy and he didn’t speak much Spanish although some of us spoke to him in English” says Carlos Julio Martínez, a teammate there. “If it helped him, I’m pleased: he’s a good lad. But he was absolutely clear: he was going to play in primera and make a lot of money to help his family.
“He’s very special, different. When he takes off he’s very hard to stop and you can’t knock him off the ball. He had that daring. He didn’t care who was in front of him, he would always take them on. He didn’t have the instinct for scoring goals he has now but he created a lot of chances.”
Only 19, isolated by the pandemic and struggling to shake off injuries, in a city with freezing temperatures a long way from the home he had recently left, Jackson scored a single goal at Mirandés. Limited to 17 games, that year was not always much fun but it helped shape him. What happened next helped too, a more natural role found and, with it, a solution to the muscular problems that had threatened to arrest his development.
“When he returned from Miranda, he was different. The Jackson who left and the Jackson who came back are not the same person. He understood the language better, found it easier to relate,” one staff member says.
“Development is never just football, it’s all sorts of things. Injuries had decimated that season at Mirandés and the emotional side is vital too,” Álvarez says. “But I think the turning point was when we changed his position. He had almost always played on the wing.
“Physically he is a machine but that position requires stamina, constant up and down. Above all, though, it takes him away from the areas where he can do real damage: the last 30 metres. We played him as a second striker and he was superb. We went up and in a few months he was in the first team.”
Jackson combined 10 first-team appearances with playing for Villarreal B in Primera RFEF, Spain’s 40-team, two-grouped third tier. There were no first team goals but there were seven goals and eight assists with the B team, including the two that won them promotion to the second division, before moving on definitively. Unai Emery gave him eight starts in the first nine games of 2022-23, as a central striker. Without the freedom of movement or the space in which he thrives, the room to be able drop and turn or sprint beyond, it wasn’t a simple fit and as winter approached he was not a guaranteed starter, but there were four goals and four assists before the World Cup and interest from abroad.
Fighting for survival, seeking a swift solution, Bournemouth agreed a deal but while Villarreal thought his hamstring injury would keep him out for two or three weeks the English club judged it more likely to last for eight or nine. There was no long-term risk, nor would he have the short-term impact they needed so they pulled out. The conditions required for this opportunity to appear might not be recreated and the collapse of the deal hurt. Setién, though, reassured Jackson that time was on his side – he was now 21 – and promised him that the way they worked would be good for him. It was also, those close to Jackson say, the “wake-up call” he perhaps needed, every little detail taken more seriously now.
The problem was that Bournemouth’s prognosis was correct, the injury meaning he played one league minute, against Real Betis in March, before returning on 2 April, providing an assist and getting sent off in a 28-minute substitute appearance. Suspended, he was forced to wait another week but with fitness doubts over the other forwards offering opportunities and dazzling performances prolonging them then came the explosion: a goal against Espanyol, two against Celta, another against Valencia; two against Athletic, two more against Cádiz, another against Atético; two assists against Girona. In those final nine games, Jackson only failed to score or assist against Rayo.
There was something about the way he played, the electricity, the excitement. Across the whole season, only Vinícius was involved in more goals having run with the ball. There is, though, a note of caution. Jackson is not the finished article and no one expected his run at the end of the season. It would be unwise to see his recent figures as having set a new standard. His heading needs more work, his touch in tight spaces too, and there are some doubts about how well he would fit as a sole No 9, denied the space to run.
Some of the tactical nuances, the concepts academy graduates learn from the start, remain to be grasped. In terms of organised, professionalised football, Jackson is still a newcomer, although Álvarez believes that may not be a bad thing. Besides, that speaks to his potential and while that can go unfulfilled Jackson’s camp like to think he is still only 30% the player he will become, a born footballer whose talent is still raw.
“I like a player who is less ‘refined’,” Álvarez says. “Nicolas played in the street. In academies, we teach them to understand the game, but football is an open sport where of the 10 things a coach talks about one happens. Sometimes I think we make players who are robots. When it’s all mechanised, it limits them and in certain scenarios, they can’t find solutions. Who changes the game when it is tight? The player with something else. He can do that. He is going to fit well in England.”
“You see Jackson’s qualities immediately,” Setién says. “Technically he is good: he can combine, he is strong, he moves into space well, holds the ball. He is a lad with enormous potential, who could be the business.”
“That said, even I was surprised by just how high his level was,. Over the last month or so every chance he got went in.”
It was enough to have English clubs back on the phone, another flight waiting. In those final nine games in Spain when he outscored the whole of Europe, including the team he would end up joining, it seemed Jackson didn’t need a second opportunity, but that is exactly what he is going to get.
