“Do not kill him with a strategy” was the golden rule that ensured Crysencio Summerville would provide the game-changing, maverick displays he did for Leeds United last season.
Summerville has the ball at his feet and is an unscripted genius. The Championship Player of the Season, who cost over £25 million to sign with West Ham United, dribbled, dummied, and put on displays that justified his position as Daniel Farke’s team’s star during the previous campaign. What scares opponents the most? He still has a lot to discover.
The 22-year-old Dutchman has the ability to be a world-class player and is unaffected by defensive blocks or cynical fouls. Summerville’s journey from the south of Rotterdam to east London is one of belief, one that began in the young teams of RVV Noorderkwartier.
A player such as Summerville can only be created under specific circumstances. A lack of pressure, an emphasis on enjoying the sport, and coaches who are astute enough to recognize each player’s unique demands. For a young Summerville, all of those elements combined to shape his schooling at Feyenoord’s academy, where he entered as an under-seven in 2008.
“I first coached him when he was 12 in the under-13s but I knew him from when he was eight or nine,” says Gaston Taument, one of Summerville’s academy coaches at Feyenoord. “He was a typical, classical wide winger. He has a very good family. They’re very close. Every game, every training session, tournament, away game; they were everywhere. If we play in other countries, in Italy with the youth, they would be there.
“One of the good things is this: I’ve trained for 20 years with youth teams and one of the problems is the parents who shout at their kids, who make their kids like a king. It’s a dream of the parents — mostly the father — to have a kid who becomes a professional player. Crysencio’s father was always quiet. When Crysencio was the best player in a tournament, won prizes or played very well, his father was the same. He was calm and he had a distance. No pressure — no pressure from the family at all.”
Summerville was raised in a rough neighborhood in the southern part of Rotterdam, according to people who know him well. Summerville’s progression through youth football in the Netherlands, where academies are less concerned with a player’s size if they demonstrate talent, seems rather coincidental given his diminutive build but technical skill. Summerville trained alongside former Netherlands and Liverpool great Dirk Kuyt in the under-19s at Feyenoord’s Varkenoord training complex. Although he never played for the senior team, Summerville made good development there.
“Through the whole academy, he played wide so I was very surprised he made a good development in the last year (with Leeds) a little bit more behind the striker, like a No 10, and also playing on the left,” Taument says. “Here, he was always on the right side, in a 4-3-3 — always very wide, one against one, very dominant in those situations.
“He’s been a very good player from the start but he was also little. Everybody was a big fan because he was very technical but he wasn’t so strong. But in Holland, it doesn’t matter so much. The first thought is about technique: how good is it? And Crysensio had a lot of it, very technical.
“I worked with him a lot. When we were training — and this is how it is sometimes because kids are kids — he could be a bit lazy. He knows I would say that about him. The guys trained four times a week, we wanted focus and effort 100 per cent. Sometimes, he would train on 70 per cent. You could see it, you knew it was happening.”
On matchdays, Summerville did not apply if there were any concerns over their application in training. At that point, he was operating in one gear—all out, maximum effort. According to Taument, “you have to approach them a bit differently” when they have significant talents. While they focused on other areas of his game, Feyenoord’s young coaches found that to be sufficient, but they knew that would be put to the test the moment he joined the first team.
In senior football, as he discovered during his 17-year loan stint with Dordrecht, there is nowhere to run.
Claudio Braga, who coached Summerville while he was on loan at second-tier Dordrecht, claims he was not sluggish. Perhaps this was the precise reason he moved away from Feyenoord. He was not with me there; he was with his teammates who were my age. He was training alongside me and colleagues who were 27 years old. There is a different vibe in the changing room. There is a different vibe in video meetings. It was an excellent stimulant.
“With us, every Friday or Saturday, he was playing in front of 12,000, 15,000, 22,000 people in the stadium. So it is very different. Dordrecht is not the same club as Feyenoord but, in the end, the games were at a higher level and speed than the youth games. There are more people there, television is there. For him, it was a good decision.”
Summerville scored his first goal for Dordrecht against Jong PSV in just six minutes after receiving his first start. His eighteen appearances during the loan term prepared him well for the next phase of his career, which came the following season when he was loaned to ADO Den Haag of the Eredivisie. The promotion to the Netherlands’ top level confirmed for Summerville what he had discovered all along: as a technical player who lacked physicality, he was more likely to get booted when opponents were unable to stop him.
“He was quick to get disappointed,” says Taument of his early years at Feyenoord. “If he didn’t get the ball, or if he had a defender always kicking him, it could make him angry. Other teams knew him and knew what kind of player he was. So, yeah, they would kick him. He’d yell at the referee. Some of them helped him, some of them didn’t. Some of them did nothing.”
“He was a very nice lad to work with, very ambitious,” adds Alfons Groenendijk, who coached Summerville at Den Haag. “We spent a lot of time with him, we gave him his debut in Eredivisie, which is a tough league. We had to be careful because he was becoming a man but he came in as a boy. We spoke a lot — sometimes, we would sit down and have a drink but he would be a bit shy.
“He’s a very nice one to work with and he wanted to invest in himself, so we tried to make him stronger. He got kicked in the Dutch league so we had to be careful with him. He didn’t play in every game and sometimes we had to protect him, but he made big steps and everyone could see his talent, his skills. He was very fast and his dribbling was good. He was starting to score goals too. Even then, we could see that he was something special.”
Inside the polarising world of youth football
Summerville’s ability to alter games from a distance and when dribbling in one-on-one scenarios is what makes him “something exceptional.” If there was a criticism of his work at Leeds last season, it was that his teammates too frequently relied on him to make things happen from nothing. However, Summerville is used to that.
“There was one game in front of Twente,” says former Dordrecht coach Braga. “It was in front of 30,000 supporters. It was a show to see him play as he did. It’s not because I worked with him that I’m a fan of him and like him very much. When defenders are compact, in a strong block, you see as a coach that you can have a great plan, you can train well but to find a solution, to break the wall, you need someone like Summerville.
“It was the balance for me as a manager — I need players who follow a plan, who have brains, who are playmakers, leaders. But I also need one or two guys who, when you need to force something, have the courage and the technique to do it. He was that guy.
“It’s true, he has a lot of self-confidence. I like to see the body language and look into the eyes of players, see their confidence. The volume of their voice tells you something, too. Crysencio with me was always in balance. He would say to me, ‘Coach, I’m going to fix this’.”
Summerville’s self-assurance was essential for Leeds in their final push for promotion before they were defeated by Southampton in the Championship play-off final. Manager Farke mentioned that the interplay between Summerville and Georginio Rutter in the dressing room was enjoyable. Former coaches of Summerville, who have been in communication with him since he left Feyenoord for Leeds in 2020, have been impressed by the development of his game from an all-around winger to a player who can thrive in the No 10 position.
“What fascinates me more this year is that I see him playing and finding solutions in the centre of the field,” says Braga. “With us he was more of a winger, always on the line, dribbling vertically. But the speed and his power in the one-against-one, it doesn’t matter if he’s on the side, up front, in behind. It’s what makes him special. We were all looking for consistency for him and, if he can keep it, maybe one day make a jump to the top in the world.
“It’s up to him but any manager who works with him must not kill the talent. Give him space to find solutions and show his quality. He needs to feel the confidence to do his thing in an attacking way. That gives you the power and the strength, everything in his character.”
Summerville began his Leeds career slowly after signing with the squad under Marcelo Bielsa, but his appearances and contributions to the group increased with each passing season. He destroyed his personal high of four goals in 28 games, which he had set during Leeds’ 2022–2023 Premier League struggles, to flourish under Farke with another gifted 22-year-old, Rutter. The two regularly linked up for goals, making the most of their drop to the Championship to further solidify their relationship and prosper.
Summerville is still connected to his roots; all of the former coaches who were interviewed by The Athletic said they keep in touch with the player and keep an eye on his development. He has reached new heights in recent seasons thanks to his application and maturity, and it paid off that he committed to an extensive pre-season schedule before to the start of the previous campaign. Feyenoord will not let Summerville go for as little as the rumored £1.25 million (or $1.6 million at today’s exchange rate) Leeds paid for him four years ago.
Without his efforts, it was difficult to imagine how Farke’s team would have been competing at the top of the Championship table after he scored twice in a vital victory over Middlesbrough to keep Leeds. Summerville’s hallmark goal, which he scored in the 4-3 victory, was a cut-in from the flank and curled shot, or, as one source close to the player put it, “doing the Arjen Robben.”
“The potential is there to achieve big things,” Braga says. “He has the quality and fire inside him. I also believe a lot in his decisions in the future: what kind of manager will work for him, what kind of club is good for him, what will be the environment? I see a lot of boys that are destroyed because they try to make robots of them. They don’t give freedom to this kind of player. Managers only want them to follow plans.
“If he can always have the people around him that fit with his personality and his mind, then he can achieve at the top.”
(Top photo: Ed Sykes/Getty Images)
