One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Without Memphis or Xavi Simons, who is the Netherlands’ star?

Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group F preview. You can also read previews of Sweden, Tunisia, and Japan.

Without Memphis or Xavi Simons, who is the star for the Netherlands?

This was supposed to be the World Cup of Xavi Simons for the Netherlands. 

The 23-year-old has been a star-in waiting for what feels like an eternity. He was one of the first global soccer talents to enter the internet mega-hype cycle, with a highlight tape from his games as a Barcelona youth player going viral when he was still just 14 years old. He was in many ways European soccer’s answer to Seventh Woods.¹Is the comparison between Simons and Woods entirely accurate? No. Will I take any excuse to link to the Seventh Woods mixtape? Yeah, obviously.

For a player who was that hyped that young, things could have gone wrong at so many turns for Xavi, but by 2023 he had more or less put himself on a solid footing and on a trajectory to being a legitimate top player. After leaving Barcelona for PSG, he went through a very traditional Dutch star journey, first dominating the Netherlands with PSV, then playing two seasons in the Bundesliga with Leipzig before moving to Tottenham in a major transfer last summer. 

For the national team, he had also slowly been growing into a starring role: Subbing into the round of 16 to help close out a victory against the United States at the 2022 World Cup and then taking on a major starting role at Euro 2024. His lighting bolt strike from distance in the semifinal against England at the start of that tournament seemed to confirm that he had arrived as the Dutch star of the moment.

There was also the symbolism of that tournament: Memphis Depay, who has been the absolute mainstay for the Dutch over the past ten years, was stepping back as the focal point of the team and passing the baton to Xavi. The World Cup would be the next step in the process, with a more elder statement Depay supporting an ascendant Simons as the Netherlands moved into a new era.

But then Simons blew out his ACL playing for Tottenham this spring, and after a string of injuries this spring it remains unclear if Memphis will be able to get healthy in time for the tournament. So if the Memphis era is over prematurely, and the Xavi Simons era can’t start yet, who is going to be the star for the Netherlands this summer?

The most obvious answer is Cody Gakpo. The Liverpool winger-slash-striker scored in each of the Oranje’s group stage matches in Qatar. Gakpo can do two things really well: Drive toward the box for a shot on goal from the left wing, or arrive in the box from the left wing for clean up duty on a scrappy goal. 

The issue with Gakpo, however, is that he doesn’t exactly do enough other stuff to be a true focal point. If he has the ability to create for others at volume, Liverpool haven’t really asked him to do it.

The most intriguing potential star is Donyel Malen. After playing most of his career as a winger or a second striker, Malen basically singlehandedly transformed himself into a center forward this winter. He forced a transfer from Aston Villa in the Premier League to Roma, explicitly because he wanted to play more as a number nine. It was a wild act of betting on yourself, and it worked: Malen tallied 13 goals and two assists in just 17 Serie A matches. 

Undersized and quick, Malen provides a non-traditional option at center forward and his movement might be a great compliment for Gakpo.

On the more traditional end of the spectrum, there’s Brian Brobbey, a broad-shouldered, brooding center forward who has broken back into the Dutch squad on the back of solid season of goalscoring and brick wall holdup play for Sunderland. 

The other answer is the most stereotypically Dutch one: This team will be star by committee. Head coach Ronald Koeman is very much a disciple of the Ajax school of Total Football, soccer played by constant interweaving of players with an emphasis on passing, movement, and teamwork. It’s possible that he looks at a squad without an obvious star and decides that it will make the most sense to spread the responsibility for scoring and creation around a still very talented squad. 

The concept of Total Football is something like a national moral imperative for some in the Netherlands, with the idea of playing passing, attacking soccer tied up in public discourse with the country’s sense of selfhood.²I urge anyone who was even vaguely interested in that sentence to  read David Winner’s book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, which is an at-times unhinged examination of the development of Total Football and the role that it plays in the Dutch national psyche.

All this to say, a team that has a huge number of very talented players but no clear superstars might be something more than welcome to Koeman and the wider Dutch fanbase.

Without Memphis and Simons, the Netherlands won’t have an obvious star to build around. Maybe that will be just what they needed.