Van Hecke Went From £1.8m Brighton Signing to Spurs’ £54m Rock

• Jan Paul van Hecke, 26, has played every minute of Tottenham’s Premier League season and leads the division’s outfield players for forward passes, per Daily Mail Sport.
• Brighton signed him for £1.8m in 2020 and sold him to Spurs this summer for £54m.
• Blackburn boss Tony Mowbray compared him to Bobby Moore in 2021, and NAC Breda’s Peter Maas likens him to Stuart Pearce.

The Substitute Who Became Spurs’ Anchor

Jan Paul van Hecke comes from Arnemuiden, an isolated town of 5,000 in the Dutch province of Zeeland, with a deep-rooted fishing history and a reputation for resilience through times of hardship. At 26, he is the anchorman of a Tottenham side that sank to the bottom of the Premier League, winless in its first five games, and then took 10 points from the next four. The route there began on the fringes of the team at NAC Breda.

Peter Maas, who knew him at NAC Breda, has a blunt verdict on the man Spurs now rely on.

“JP is a real force,” says Peter Maas, technical director of NAC Breda. “He is a rock. He will never back off. He will never let his team down. Never, never. He is truly one of a kind. A good lad with a good heart.”

Moore, Pearce and a Beast Let Out

Two England legends have been used to describe him. The first is Bobby Moore, courtesy of Tony Mowbray, a fearless centre-half as a player, who took Van Hecke on loan from Brighton to Blackburn for the 2021-22 season.

“I’ve got to be careful I don’t overbuild him as he’s not our player,” said Mowbray at the time. “But he looks like Bobby Moore out there sometimes. It’s amazing to watch how composed, how calm he can be, yet he has the fire of a warrior in his belly.”

The second is Stuart Pearce, and it comes from Maas, who sees the same edge.

“I’ve always compared his presence and commitment to Stuart Pearce, “Psycho” back in the ’80s and ’90s. He was crazy, eh? Every now and then, JP will release the beast and let everything out.”

Maas adds a second side to him.

“But he can play football, too. He can defend in an old-school way, but he can also build play in the modern way and is certainly more composed now.”

From the Bench at NAC to the Top of the Passing Charts

Van Hecke joined NAC from the amateur side VV Goes at 18. “He excelled in one-on-one defending but above all in his mentality,” Maas says. That mentality was tested early.

“Until the winter of 2019, JP was mainly a substitute and clearly struggling with that,” recalls Maas.

“He felt it was unfair that he wasn’t playing and went through a rough patch and was showing it. He actually lost the will to play, and I held a mirror to him once during a chat in the players’ lounge and told him he had to prove himself.”

A change of head coach helped him into the first team, and he became integral to NAC’s run to the Dutch Cup semi-finals, beating PSV Eindhoven and AZ Alkmaar before losing to Feyenoord. Maas describes how he handled setbacks.

“What struck me was that when faced with setbacks, or a kick or a blow to the head on the pitch, he always got back up with even greater determination. It was as if the adrenaline helped him become unbeatable.”

“That’s where he channelled his energy. First at NAC in the second tier, then at Heerenveen in the Eredivisie. At Brighton, too. Step by step, he gets 10 per cent better every time because he adapts easily to his surroundings.”

“It was impossible to predict he would make the upper echelons of the Premier League and the Dutch national team,” says Maas. “But you could certainly see he had great potential and he will continue to improve because his immense drive will take him further.”

What the Numbers Say

The data backs the praise. Van Hecke has played every minute of the Premier League campaign, starting at Manchester United last month after returning from international duty with stitches in a wound on top of his foot.

He has completed more forward passes (258) and more line-breaking passes (150) than any outfielder in the league. Only Manchester City’s Ruben Dias (819) has played more passes than his 809. He leads Spurs for clearances and duels won, and he is the club’s top scorer in the Premier League with two goals.

That forward passing carries risk. Van Hecke takes the ball in difficult areas and looks for passes through the lines, and some mistakes irritated Spurs fans in the winless start. Roberto De Zerbi, who worked with him for two years at Brighton, demands that high-risk style. Van Hecke resisted the temptation to play safer, which would have spared him some criticism.

The Zeeland Army and a Family Name

Arnemuiden now has a travelling support. An army of devoted Van Hecke fans crosses the North Sea to watch him whenever they can, and one hundred made the trip to see him score against Crystal Palace last Saturday.

Football runs in the family. His uncle Jan Poortvliet was a defender in the Netherlands team that lost the 1978 World Cup final to Argentina, and 30 years later had a brief spell as Southampton manager in the Championship. Van Hecke needs one more cap to match Poortvliet’s tally of 19 for his country.

His desire to shoulder responsibility in difficult times is the leadership by example Spurs have lacked in recent years.

Van Hecke’s £54m fee was part of a summer in which the club spent close to £300m rebuilding the squad.

De Zerbi revealed an honest team meeting behind the revival, and the man doing it on the pitch is a defender Brighton once signed for £1.8m.