It’s been an interesting career progression for Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, but he showed he belongs at the top in Tottenham’s 2-0 victory over Manchester City.
Having established a reputation as one of the brightest young talents in Danish football, he left his home country and signed for Bayern Munich as a teenager back in 2012.
After signing for the perennial Bundesliga champions at the age of 16, he’d made it to the very elite of European football before he even kicked a ball in senior football.
His first-team debut eventually came just a few weeks before the club won a historic treble under Jupp Heynckes and shortly after Pep Guardiola would arrive to help fortify their place at the top table of European clubs.
Hojbjerg would go on to develop his talents after the arrival of Guardiola, and showed plenty of promise, but he could never quite break through to the first team.
It’s been a long way back to the top, via loans at Augsburg and Schalke before four solid seasons with Southampton, but a sensational individual performance as Spurs moved to the top of the Premier League table with a win over his old mentor’s side will have had sweet symbolic value for Hojbjerg.
“It has taken him just a couple of training sessions to fall in love with the player, who, having started in April under Heynckes, clearly has a dazzling future ahead of him,” wrote Spanish journalist Marti Perarnau in Pep Confidential, a book detailing Guardiola’s first season at Bayern.
“Hojbjerg reads the game brilliantly and has an astonishing ability to break through five players with a single pass.
“Pep thinks he may have found the Busquets of Bayern, although at 17 the young player has a bit of maturing to do.”
Now in Jose Mourinho, the Denmark international now has a coach with an altogether different approach to his old master. Seldom, if ever, has Sergio Busquets ever played in a side that saw as little possession and territory as Tottenham did against Guardiola’s side on this occasion.
Spurs registered just 33.6% possession at home to City, completing fewer than half as many passes (229 to 532).
Hojbjerg registered the most passes of any Spurs player, 30, but each City starter except Gabriel Jesus and Ederson completed more, while opposite number Rodri completed 73 according to WhoScored.
But that was all by design. Tottenham looked perfectly comfortable, brutally effective even, as they allowed the visitors sterile possession while protecting Son Heung-min’s early opener before eventually doubling the advantage midway through the second-half.
Hojbjerg looked nothing like the Busquets-type player that Guardiola might have envisaged him becoming. There was no playmaking or setting the tempo from deep, and “dazzling” certainly wouldn’t be the first adjective with which anyone would describe his display, but we certainly saw a bright future fully realised.
That’s not to say he wasn’t comfortable with the ball at his feet: he completed all 14 of the passes he attempted in the first half, with a 94% passing accuracy by full-time, but his outstanding qualities were most evident when City had the ball.
He cut off their passing lanes and showed outstanding positional awareness to stop a wealth of attacking talent from receiving the ball in dangerous areas.
The 25-year-old looks like a vital presence for Spurs’ keeping their shape and denying the opposition any kind of momentum, so rarely did Guardiola’s side look like they were cranking up the pressure, for as much of the ball as they had.
This wasn’t Busquets, but rather an approximation of the midfield anchors around which Mourinho’s best sides have been built around: Claude Makelele and later Nemanja Matic at Chelsea, Xabi Alonso at Real Madrid and Javier Zanetti at Inter Milan.
Hojbjerg made five tackles, the most of any player on the pitch, wasn’t dispossessed once, and had the intelligence to know when and where to make fouls. He registered four, again the most of any player on the pitch, but avoided a booking.
This is a player that began his senior career at the very top of the game. It’s taken eight years to get back there, but on evidence it looks as though he belongs.
