The Neeskens, Barça and Catalonia: from father to son

terrace“I’ve always been very excited to follow his legacy and continue the path he started,” says John Andrew Neeskens, son of Johan Neeskens, also a footballer. It was inevitable that it would be. “As a child, we went to take shots at the goals of the Real Club de Polo de Barcelona. He would play goalie and if the ball hit the post, he would beat his chest and start celebrating. “The stick is my friend“, he said. And I was angry, because you always want to score a goal for your father. He forged my competitiveness. He never let himself be beaten by anything. My mother sometimes told him to let me win, but he refused. “No, no, he has to win on his own”, remembers the current defender of Terrassa, undisputed starter in a team that competes in the Second Federation and that aims to return the city to professional football.

Neeskens was born in 1993 in Tulsa (Oklahoma), but grew up in Barcelona. He has three passports: Spanish, Dutch and American. “If the three national teams called me at the same time, I would opt for the Dutch one, to follow in my father’s footsteps,” he admits, smiling. Johan Neeskens played in two World Cup finals, against West Germany in 1974 and Argentina in 1978, but lost both. Against Germany, he opened the scoring in the 2nd minute, but the breakthrough mechanical orange by Rinus Michels ended up falling thanks to the goals of Paul Breitner and Gerd Müller. The son has seen those two finals a lot.

I was trying not to be funny, but I remember him wondering if the Barça dressing room was a nursery school”

John Neeskens Terrassa player

He was 12 years old when his father took over from Henk ten Cate as Frank Rijkaard’s second coach at Barça. “He would take me or come pick me up from high school and if in the evening there was a Barça-Madrid game, for example, he already knew the line-up from 10 in the morning, in exchange for not saying anything,” he says. As a child he had set foot in the Barça dressing room more than once. “I was trying not to be funny, but I remember some comment from some player asking if that was a daycare,” he adds. “I looked at Deco, Ronaldinho, Valdés, Henry, Messi, Eto’o and company as if they were gods. They are very beautiful moments that I remember with great joy. What gives a child the most excitement is to greet their idols ; have them touch”. The dinners, at home, were interrogations about life at Barça: “My father told me that the best was Andrés Iniesta, that in training it was impossible to take the ball away from him”. Very often, the father gave him T-shirts of players from Barça or Holland or rivals. He also remembers handing more than one ball to Ronaldinho, as a ball collector. He often looked to his right, towards the bench, to see his father.

He played and grew up in the Damm academy, while the stands debated whether he should be Neeskens’ son or not and while he watched videos to enjoy the talent of his father, winner of three Champions Leagues in a row with Ajax and a Cup Winners’ Cup with Barça and called Johan II in his five years at Camp Nou (1974-1979). At the end of his games, he commented on the play with his father. In 2010 he was one step away from Madrid, to the point that the newspaper Brand published “Real Madrid signs the son of Neeskens”: “It was already done, signed, but there was a bit of confusion because it was said that the son of Neeskens could not go to Madrid”. He ended up at Villarreal and that same year, aged just 16, he trained with the first team. After playing in Segona B, with Sant Andreu and Badalona, ​​he emigrated to the United States to play for Colorado Rapids, New York Cosmos and Los Angeles Galaxy, where he played with Steven Gerrard, Robbie Keane, Ashley Cole, Nigel de Jong or the former Giovani dos Santos.

The Cosmos of the Neeskens

When the Cosmos option came up he didn’t hesitate: his father had played there and he wanted history to repeat itself. “Toronto had also called me and I was undecided, but I went for it. To have both played in the same team is a very nice thing. And it was also very special because of the experience of playing in a big club that has seen passing legends and historic players like Pelé, Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto or my father,” he says. At the Cosmos, he also shared a dressing room with Raúl González and Marcos Senna and they were proclaimed champions together of the North American Soccer League (2015), the second most important league in the country behind Major League Soccer. He keeps the championship ring and claims that no one has ever given him anything throughout his career. Sometimes, at the end of training, Raúl and Senna would ask him for their father.

He also treasures, in addition to dozens of shirts, some Adidas boots from his father. He has even worn them once, to test them. With his father’s boots or his own, he has followed in his footsteps, with the Neeskens surname on his shirt, and now he is counting the days until he can come to see him play at Terrassa. “He has it pending,” he explains. The father is already 71 years old and lives between Holland and Switzerland, chatting from time to time. “It’s been a long time, but there are many people who still remember him,” concludes the son.