In France they know him as Lyon’s captain and talisman, dragging a maladjusted club to their first Champions League quarter-final in a decade. In the Netherlands they know him as the brazen tearaway whose talent may finally be catching up with his prodigious ego. This is the enigma of Depay, a man who through his many complexities and contradictions, his heartfelt no-filter delivery, almost dares you to misunderstand him. He’d come to apologise.” The reader is left to speculate whether their rapprochement was sealed with a handshake. “Although I wasn’t actually finished, I quickly wiped my bum, ran out of the bathroom, opened the door, and sure enough: Robin. “I was sitting on the loo,” Depay remembers in his autobiography, Heart of a Lion (yes: he’s written a book, and a compulsively honest one at that, despite its vaguely Partridge-esque tone). Later that day, Depay is sitting in his hotel room, distraught and despondent, when there’s a knock on the door. “Who do you think you are?” a furious van Persie screams at the young winger. There’s a story from one of his early outings with the Dutch national team, when he humiliates Robin van Persie with a flamboyant stepover during a training game. You can see it everywhere: from the flair and risk in his game to the brassy social media persona, from his rhymes (sample lyric: “Catch a vibe in Paris, young king living lavish, back in Lyon going savage, they be waiting for hat-tricks”) to his deadly finishing. But this is a distinction that is harder to make for Depay, a man whose feats and foibles seem to spring from the same howling instinct: an urge to express himself. Often we like to compartmentalise the actions of footballers into the “on-field” and the “off-field”: the essential and the extraneous, the part that matters, and the part that doesn’t.
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