Highly-rated 17-year-old defender Emmanuel van de Blaak made his professional debut for PSV’s first team last night. He was sidelined for many months with a serious injury but completed a successful fightback when he was introduced as a substitute in the closing stages of the 2-1 win at FK Bodø/Glimt last night, joining an impressive list of young PSV debutants.
Career
Van de Blaak is a Dutch football player who has Nigerian roots. He was born in Lagos in Nigeria and started playing football with amateur club JEKA in Breda before he joined the Willem II Academy. Five seasons later, he made a move to PSV. He made his PSV U21 debut against FC Den Bosch. “I marked their striker Jizz Hoornkamp and realised immediately that I had to raise my game”, he said in July 2020. And two years later he made his senior debut with PSV, at the age of 17 years and nine months, following in the footsteps of, among other players, Jetro Willems and Zakaria Bakkali.
