Rising Ballers: Xavi Simons — The Netherlands’ next big thing
He has an icon’s name. He has an icon’s hair. Meet Xavi Simons.
Instagram-savvy fans likely first saw Simons and his epic mane long ago when he was a standout youth academy player for FC Barcelona. The now-20-year-old Dutch attacker broke onto the scene around 2016, at 12 years old, when Bleacher Report was already writing about his transfer rumors. His Instagram account amassed 2 million followers before he ever made his first-team debut.
Players receiving this much online attention at a young age is always worrisome. Viral highlights as a 14 year old do not easily translate into becoming a successful 24-year-old professional; so much can go wrong in so little time. Just look at the careers of Hachim Mastour or America’s own Freddy Adu. Adu filmed a Sierra Mist commercial with Pelé in 2004 as a 14-year-old D.C. United player, but hasn’t made a professional appearance since the second-division Las Vegas Lights FC released him in 2018.
Thankfully, Simons has already been more successful than Mastour or Adu. The Amsterdam-born winger has developed into a genuine first-team player and emerged this season as an offensive threat for PSV Eindhoven, a squad that challenged for the Eredivisie title and won the 2022-23 KNVB Cup.
After Barcelona failed to lock him down on a professional contract, Simons moved to Paris Saint-Germain F.C. on an effectively free transfer, having to pay Barcelona only a small compensatory fee for developing Simons. Then-PSG manager Mauricio Pochettino gave Simons his first taste of top-level soccer, but it ultimately became clear that Simons needed regular appearances to keep developing.
When his PSG contract expired in June 2022, Simons signed a five-year contract with PSV to return to his home country, but PSG negotiated a clause that allows them to buy Simons back for between 10 and 12 million euros this summer.
PSG should trigger that clause immediately.
If the Eredivisie had an American-style MVP award, Simons would be a top candidate. He has started every league match for PSV this season, scoring 17 goals — the second most in the league — and providing eight assists. The only player in the Netherlands with more combined goals and assists is Ajax’s Dušan Tadić, who became a professional when Simons was only two years old. PSV would likely not have won the KNVB Cup without the young Dutchman, who assisted Thorgan Hazard’s equalizing goal that sent the match to penalties.
From an underlying numbers perspective, Simons’ season was not a fluke. When you subtract the two penalties Simons scored in the league, he has 15 goals from 12.5 non-penalty expected goals, meaning the shots he has taken have a cumulative quality — based on their positioning — worth 12.5 goals. The difference between 15 and 12.5 represents a slight overperformance in his finishing, but for a winger to accumulate that tally is nonetheless impressive.
Among his positional peers in the top eight men’s leagues, according to the statkeepers at FBref, his 0.41 non-penalty xG per 90 minutes places him in the 98th percentile for wingers. When you add his expected assists to that equation, he ranks in the 97th percentile with 0.66 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90. For his age, these are ridiculous numbers.
Here is the complete list of players ages 20 and under in Europe’s top six leagues (the Eredivisie is UEFA’s sixth-best European league by country coefficient) with at least 20 combined goals and assists in the 2022-23 season: Xavi Simons, Bayern Munich’s Jamal Musiala (who also earned a column in this series) and Montpellier’s Elye Wahi.
With Lionel Messi’s impending departure from PSG this summer and Neymar’s perpetual unreliability, the club would be wise to bring Simons back immediately and allow him and Kylian Mbappé to develop an attacking partnership that could finally win them a Champions League title. Simons’ return would allow the club to finally break from its galático-chasing transfer policy and re-invest in promising young players, centered around the Parisian-born Mbappé and the semi-homegrown Simons.
Not all of the Eredivisie’s top goalscorers turn into world-beaters. Just ask Tottenham Hotspur F.C. fans how Vincent Janssen did in the Premier League. But Simons’ positional versatility and ability to create goals for others — he had 5.44 shot-creating actions per match this season — in addition to scoring them himself, will help him become a perennial all-star of world football.
Jack Hallinan is a rising junior writing about the top wonderkids in men’s and women’s soccer in his column, “Rising Ballers,” which runs every other Wednesday.