Sparta Rotterdam

Odogu, as mentioned, hasn't played yet.

And then you've got Kostic, who, OK, he hasn't scored yet, but he's played three times in the Eredivisie for Sparta Rotterdam, which I guess is a useful experience.

And you hope that he doesn't go the Lazatic route and that he can start firing and then come back and fight for the spot.

But,

AZ Alkmaar are top, 19 points.

Feyenoord on 17, Eindhoven on 16, Twente also 16, Ajax 14, Fortuna Sittard 13, Excelsior 11, Groningen also 11, Go Ahead Eagles on 10, Heerenveen on nine, NEC on eight, Sparta Rotterdam, Telstar, Cambuur, and Utrecht on five apiece, PEC Zwolle on four, ADO Den Haag on two, and Willem II on two.

Uh, top goal scorers, Zivkovic at Feyenoord, Tangie at Go Ahead, Anis Hadji Moussa at Feyenoord, and Artem Stepanov at Utrecht all have five apiece.

Uh, Nacho Ferry and Sven Mignard have the hat-tricks so far in the league this season.

26 caps and no goals for him and he's 27 years old.

Born in the Netherlands, played for underage teams, uh netherlands underage teams and uh currently playing for zwole in uh netherlands since 2024 uh he has played outside the netherlands with uh um antalya spore in turkey from 2021 to 23 but otherwise it is uh netherlands team he came up through the sparta rotterdam youth system there and um Just on the preliminary squad for the 2021 Gold Cup, he hadn't earned a cap for Curacao by that point.

But by the time the Gold Cup came around in 2025, he was a starter.

He started, finished all games and lined up as a left back in that tournament there.

And I think to a certain extent he'd, uh, yeah, t- did his job and, and can't be blamed for what happened with the penalty shootout.

I mean, the strange thing after that is he goes to Sparta Rotterdam-

Right

... uh, who are in relative terms a pretty small, or a historic club in Dutch football-

He didn't really make a big distinction between all that.

I think he thought that was an interesting experience to work with not very good players at a small club, and yeah, it didn't work out brilliantly, and they were relegated.

Right, which is a, uh, coming off a tremendously successful period with the Netherlands side, was there any partic- Was, was he seemingly to, to blame for that? It's curious that following that, I think it was the first relegation they'd ever had, Sparta Rotterdam.

He then gets fairly swiftly afterwards, as Duncan was mentioning, the job at Barcelona.

Well, in Croatia, I had the blessing to win the cup.

It went good and later came Sparta Rotterdam and they bought me.

I was there for A year, things kind of went sideways.

I went over to Hawaii.

Very last one real quick.

Ricardo Pepe was on the bench for PSV's match against Sparta Rotterdam.

And...

the striker who replaced him scored a hat-trick.

So I've been lucky along the way to have some amazing coaches for sure.

So that would have been across Arsene Alkmaar's underage setup and then into Sparta Rotterdam? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

How was that as a young man traversing around the Netherlands? They're nice cities.

Yes.

Uh, I think this is the first match maybe, or the second match after the match against Sparta where, where they have a clean sheet.

Uh, I was, I have been complaining about their defense but, uh, today they did not really give anything away and they completely dominated the match.

They even scored an early goal in the 10th minute, but it was canceled by VAR.

Yeah.

And onto the league game.

It was a 4-1 win over Sparta.

[laughs] And again, you can make that argument, is it because it's back in the Eredivisie? Sparta wrote it down but not at the level of Shakhtar done yet, for sure.