Abdelhak ‘Appie’ Nouri: ‘We are with him 24/7, talking to him, praying for him’
By Stuart James, The Guardian.On the first floor of a modern office block in Amsterdam, and in the shadows of the stadium where Abdelhak Nouri lived his dreams, the eldest of the Ajax midfielder’s six siblings delivers a brave and moving message. “Being angry doesn’t help,” Abderrahim Nouri says. “Being sad doesn’t help. Crying all day doesn’t help. Being positive helps. Praying for him helps. When I’m next to his bed, talking with him, saying good things to him, those things help.”
Speaking eloquently and emotively for more than an hour, Abderrahim has been reflecting on
the tragic chain of events last summer that left his 20-year-old brother, who was one of the most talented young footballers in the Netherlands, with severe and permanent brain damage.
Nouri, or “Appie” as he is commonly known, collapsed on the pitch during a pre-season friendly against Werder Bremen in July and remains in a low level of consciousness in a hospital in Amsterdam, in the hearts and minds of everyone in the city and permanently surrounded by the people that love him most. Every day and every second of the last five months, a member of his family has been at his bedside. “We’re with my brother 24-7,” Abderrahim says.
As light turns to dusk at the end of a bitterly cold afternoon, Abderrahim talks at length about the inner strength that the family draw from being devout Muslims and how their faith has helped them to find comfort and relief throughout such a traumatic experience, yet their pain is never far from the surface.
“Yesterday someone brought an enlarged photo in here of my brother in his playing kit, in a game against Feyenoord, and even the photo was difficult to see,” Abderrahim says. “If I watch videos of Abdelhak playing, it’s only the first 10-15 seconds and then I can’t watch any more, it’s too difficult.”
Abderrahim prefers reliving memories in his mind. He can still picture his youngest brother running rings around children almost twice his age, despite being “so short that the ball was up to his knees”, and performing the “unbelievable skills” that were practised for so long that his parents had to “beg him to come home”. Even then “Appie” wanted to take the game to bed with him. “He’d sleep with his football shoes on,” Abderrahim says, smiling.
Precociously talented, Nouri signed for Ajax at the age of seven and more than a decade later was still playing with the same joy and freedom that characterised those early years.
A wonderfully gifted playmaker of Moroccan descent, Nouri made football fun to watch – partly because he looked as if he was having so much fun himself. Technically superb, only 5ft 6in, and capable of exquisite eye-of-the-needle passes, Nouri had
an astonishing repertoire of flicks and tricks that bamboozled opponents and left even the Ajax coaches open-mouthed.
“An incredible player,” says Wim Jonk, the former Holland international, who coached Nouri at Ajax’s academy. “If you ever saw an Ajax game, everybody was talking about Appie because his skills were so different to all the others. He was so creative but also entertaining the fans and that was what people liked. For him, it was second nature to act like that, because he was just playing like he was playing on the street.”
Nouri’s reputation preceded him within Ajax and beyond. All the top clubs in Europe courted him as a youth player and the Ajax supporters were singing his name before he made his debut. When Nouri did finally get his chance, from the substitutes’ bench against Willem II in the KNVB Beker (Dutch FA Cup) in September last year, he jinked his way past a few players, won a free-kick on the edge of the area, politely asked Lasse Schone, the set-piece specialist and a Danish international in his thirties, if he could take it, and dispatched the ball into the bottom corner.
Yet what Nouri could do on the pitch is only part of his story. His warm, infectious personality shone through in social media clips that attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers, and behind the boyish smile there was a layer of humility and modesty that Abderrahim still marvels at. “He could play amazing for Jong Ajax [Ajax reserves, who play in the Dutch Championship], the crowd went crazy and so did I. It seemed impossible the things he was doing on the field, and afterwards I was like: ‘How can you do that?’ But he’d just say, shyly: ‘I can play better.’”
The Ajax fans adored him and Nouri loved them. After beating Lyon 4-1 in the first leg of their Europa League semi-final last season, a huge crowd gathered outside the stadium and serenaded all the players, including Nouri, despite the fact that the teenager had been an unused substitute. Stepping forward to acknowledge the Ajax supporters, Nouri looked like a picture of happiness as he smiled and applauded before making a heart shape with his hands.
As a player, his potential was huge. Within Ajax there was a long-held view that he would go right to the top and Jonk tells an interesting story about the day he made that point to Nouri. The conversation came about after the one and only occasion that Jonk can remember Nouri being reluctant to play in a match. Looking back, Jonk suspects it had something to do with the fact that the youth fixture was straight after a Champions League under-19 game and that the midfielder would rather have been turning out for Jong Ajax at a higher level.
Either way, it was totally out of character for Nouri, who went on to play in the match and scored “an incredible goal” as well as setting up two others. A couple of days later, in the canteen at Ajax’s training ground, Nouri asked to speak to Jonk and apologised. The two embraced and Jonk, who left Ajax a couple of years ago, felt compelled to tell Nouri just how highly he rated him. “He hugged me,” Jonk recalls. “And I said: ‘Appie, just open your eyes. For me, with your skill and your ability, you are the new Iniesta.’”
It is quite a compliment and the comparison might not have been dismissed out of hand at the Camp Nou. “They were always saying that he has their DNA,” Abderrahim says. “He was really loved by Barcelona. Sometimes my father went to a game at Barcelona and everyone knew him. ‘Here’s the father of Nouri,’ they would say.”
Nouri, however, only ever had eyes for Ajax. It is the club he grew up supporting, the club where he spent 13 years of his life, and the club where his shirt is still hanging up in the first-team changing room with his boots underneath. “Like he can join us any time,” Hakim Ziyech, Nouri’s team-mate and close friend, said recently.
That poignant image is one of so many in a city that Nouri has come to symbolise. Outside the stadium, in the window display of Ajax’s club shop, three mannequins stand side by side, carrying a single word on the back of each replica shirt: “Stay”, “Strong”, “Appie”.
In Geuzenveld, a working-class neighbourhood in the north-west of Amsterdam, banners are draped across the fence surrounding the five-a-side court that has since been renamed “A. Nouri square” and is only a few hundred yards from the family home. One of the messages says “APPIE 4-EVER” and sits alongside a photograph of Nouri celebrating his debut goal.
Yet probably one of the most emotive and iconic pictures is found on the first floor of Amsterdam Museum, accompanied by the words “Sadness, hope and comfort”. It is a photograph taken by Stanley Gontha, in Geuzenveld, on 14 July this year, 24 hours after Ajax released a statement confirming what Edwin van der Sar, their CEO at the time, described as “the worst possible news”.
The photo, which the museum has said will remain on display for generations, captures the moment when Nouri’s father, Mohamed, lifted himself through the sunroof of his car to acknowledge the huge crowds that had lined the streets around their house to show support and sympathy. With his eyes closed, his back arched and his right hand resting on his heart, Nouri’s father’s pain and despair is devastatingly raw as he expresses his gratitude to the public.
It is an extraordinary scene – “all the visible and invisible divisions separating people in the city suddenly melted away,” says the text next to the photo in the museum – and heralded the start of an outpouring of emotion that united people from all walks of life as Nouri’s home was turned into a shrine.
“Thousands and thousands came to the house,” Abderrahim says. “People came from China, from Singapore, from Morocco, from all over the world. People would catch a plane to come for only 10-15 minutes and then they went off to their country again. It was amazing. And that’s what our religion teaches us: when God loves a person, you will see it in the people on earth, not only Muslims but black and white … you saw the Feyenoord fans, the club who hates Ajax normally, but even they were at our house, wearing a Feyenoord shirt with his name on the back. That’s the thing what makes me happy – he’s loved by God.”
The last time Abderrahim played football with his brother was a couple of weeks before the fateful pre-season training camp in Austria, and the story that he tells about their kickabout in Geuzenveld on that June afternoon goes some way to explaining why there is so much affection for Nouri.
On the way to a match involving around 20 others, Nouri insisted on picking up two people whom Abderrahim had never met – one was suffering from hydrocephalus (excessive fluid on the brain) and the other had a prosthetic leg. Not only that but Nouri wanted them on his team when it came to picking the sides. “He knew that it meant a lot for disabled people that a player from Ajax was giving them time to play with him, but also for the other players, too,” Abderrahim says.
It would have been seen as a nice PR opportunity for some players, except Nouri is far too genuine for that kind of thing. He was more interested in building a community than a brand and wanted to do everything he could to make a difference in the area where he grew up. Generous with his time and his money, Nouri tried to steer young Moroccans away from crime, stepped in to solve feuds, bought groceries for people, paid for operations and visited bereaved families. At the age of 20, he was effectively the go-to man in Geuzenveld or, to borrow Abderrahim’s expression, “the leader of the pack”.
For a terrific insight into Nouri and the way he approached life,
the nine-minute video blog of his debut takes some beating and is the first thing that springs to the mind of Heini Otto, who has worked for Ajax for 24 years in a variety of roles, when he is asked for his favourite memory of “Appie”.
“As a football player, you saw a lot of incredible goals and passes, taking people on, but the thing that stayed with me most is that vlog, because that is the person who is Appie,” Otto says. “You see when he comes home after the match, a lot of his friends are celebrating what he did [outside the family home], and he puts his case down by the front door, turns around to the boys and says: ‘Shhhhh. Be quiet because of the neighbours.’ That’s Appie, always thinking of everyone else.”
Otto, as with anyone who knows Nouri, can remember exactly what he was doing when he found out what had happened in Austria on Saturday 8 July, and it still sends a shudder down his spine as he recalls the moment he got off his bicycle and looked at his phone. “I didn’t see the pictures of it and I never want to,” he says.
A week or so earlier Nouri had reported back for pre-season with a growing sense of excitement this was going to be the campaign when he really broke through at Ajax. As well as making 15 appearances for the first team in 2016-17, he won the Eerste Divisie’s best player award after excelling for a Jong Ajax side who scored 93 goals in 38 matches. Marcel Keizer, who was in charge of that team, had just been promoted to take over from Peter Bosz as Ajax’s head coach, in what felt like another sign that everything was coming together for Nouri.
The friendly against Werder Bremen was part of a week-long training camp in Austria and designed to give the players their first taste of match practice in pre-season. It was played at the home of SK Hippach, a small club based about 70km from Innsbruck, kicked off at 4pm and was broadcast live on television in the Netherlands. Nouri started on the bench and came on for Ziyech at the beginning of the second half in what had all the makings of a fairly nondescript friendly until the 72nd minute.
Then, with Ajax in possession on the opposite side of the pitch, Nouri walked away from the action and almost placed himself on the floor, resting the back of his head on the turf. The game carried on for five seconds or so before the referee blew his whistle and the Ajax physiotherapist ran on to the pitch. Within 60 seconds, the gravity of the situation started to become clear as panic set in among Ajax and Werder Bremen players, who frantically waved for more help as Nouri was put in the recovery position.
Nouri then lost consciousness, suffered a cardiac arrest and, in the blink of an eye, was fighting for his life. Medics were on the scene, along with doctors from both clubs, as screens were put up around Nouri. The minutes ticked by and eventually, with staff and team-mates saying prayers on the sidelines, Nouri was breathing again and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck by helicopter.
That footage is deeply distressing to watch and Abderrahim’s account of what happened that afternoon is harrowing. He starts by explaining the Werder Bremen friendly is the only occasion he can remember where his brother played in a match without a member of the family present. Nouri’s father had returned to Morocco for a few days, his other brother, Mohammed, had gone on holiday to Turkey, his mother was at home with his four sisters, and his uncle, who barely missed a game, remained in Amsterdam. As for Abderrahim, he was at home, watching everything unfold live on his television.
“At first I thought: ‘OK, maybe he’s dizzy or it’s his ankle,’ because he had a small injury there before. But then it went worse and worse, then I saw the players of Ajax holding their head in their hands, and my heart was pounding. Then when I saw the doctors [trying to save Nouri], the ground beneath my feet was gone. I saw black and I didn’t know what to do.”
He telephoned his mother, relieved to discover that she was not watching the match, but the concern in his voice was a giveaway that something serious was wrong. By the time Abderrahim arrived at the family home five minutes later, the television was on, the neighbours were in the house and everyone was crying.
Four of the family – Abderrahim, Mohammed, his mother and his uncle – boarded the first flight to Innsbruck the next morning and were later joined by Nouri’s father. Initial reports in the wake of a CT scan offered some hope but on the Wednesday, four days after Nouri had collapsed, Professor Barbara Friesenecker called the family together.
“My father was sitting next to me, my mother was the other side, my brother and uncle were standing,” Abderrahim says. “Then she said: ‘Your brother and your son has too much brain damage, he won’t be able to walk, to talk, to recognise …’ My father almost passed out, my mother didn’t believe it, she was crying and going crazy, and Mohammed, my brother, was lying on the ground.”
Somehow, amid such unbearable pain, Abderrahim managed to remain composed and express his gratitude to the hospital for their efforts. “I told the doctor immediately: ‘Thank you for your help, without that my brother was not in this position that he is in now. But we believe in a higher power, we believe he can be healed.’”
Abderrahim asked Ajax to delay putting out any statement until he had returned to the Netherlands and collected his younger sisters from school to tell them about their brother before it became public knowledge. Ajax also needed to inform players and staff before the press release, and called a meeting at the training ground to make an announcement that shook everyone to the core.
The club statement followed shortly afterwards. It said: “Ajax are deeply saddened by the news that Appie Nouri has been diagnosed with serious and permanent brain damage. Our thoughts and prayers go out to him and his loved ones in this difficult time.”
On social media, the great and good of the world of football responded with heartfelt messages – Luis Suárez, a former Ajax player, posted a lovely photo of himself and Nouri as a young boy – but the emotional fallout from the statement and the catastrophic news transcended the sport.
A fortnight or so afterwards, Eberhard van der Laan, who was Amsterdam’s mayor, appeared on the popular talk show Zomergasten. Van der Laan had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the start of the year but was always remarkably stoical when it came to discussing his illness. However, when the conversation that evening turned to Nouri, who in many ways had come to embody the “kinder” Amsterdam that Van der Laan strove so hard to create, the mayor was fighting back the tears. “We must build the best schools in the worst neighbourhoods, that’s how boys like Nouri have a chance,” said Van der Laan as his voice cracked with emotion.
Van der Laan, who died in October, had officially opened the new and highly impressive building that Nouri’s old school moved to in 2015, and it takes little time at Calvijn College, in the north-west of Amsterdam, to realise just how big an influence “Appie” was, and continues to be, on everyone there. “He’s our real champion,” says Mohamed Esa, one of the pupils, as he stands by a framed photo of Nouri on the ground floor.
Nouri spent three and a half years at Calvijn College as part of Ajax’s educational partnership with the school and he regularly returned there, including only a few weeks before the Werder Bremen match. On that occasion, Nouri found out the parents of a new wave of Ajax players were being shown around the premises and he thought it would be a nice idea to meet them and tell them about his experiences at the school.
“It wasn’t an appointment, but he wanted to do it,” Jolanda Hogewind, Calvijn College’s director, says. “He told them he was here, what they could do and that it was good. He then sat down and I talked about how we give education by iPad, so every student gets one. Then Abdelhak raised his hand and said: ‘As an ambassador, can I get an iPad also?’”
Hogewind smiles as she finishes that story, remembering the laughter that greeted Nouri’s tongue-in-cheek question. She also chuckles as she explains that the “school ambassador” title was unofficial and something that she and Nouri had come up with, although it was clearly fitting in so many respects. As with his local community in Geuzenveld, Nouri knew he could be a force for good at a school that was located in a tough part of Amsterdam and had to confront plenty of challenges on a daily basis. “He was the role model for our students before this accident happened, not just now,” says Hogewind, proudly.
Sitting in her office, Hogewind has some lovely tales about Nouri’s impact on the school and finds it hard to contain her emotions at times as she scrolls through photos and videos on her phone. Her favourite clip shows Nouri next to Ziyech in his Ajax club suit, on their way to a match. “This is so beautiful,” she says as the video starts. “We have a referees course for our pupils and Abdelhak always presented their diploma. One year he was away with the first team of Ajax, so he couldn’t make it and so I asked him in the morning if he could send us a film so that he could congratulate them. He didn’t have to do it but he did – and that is Abdelhak.”
Asked what set Nouri apart from the other Ajax footballers who have attended the school, Hogewind replies: “If you asked Abdelhak something about football, he would tell you of course, but he wanted to talk with you about all subjects. For example, there was a teacher that was his mentor and at break time he wanted to talk to her about religion. Also, I see a lot of players from Ajax and they are [often] near a contract. Sometimes it’s very difficult to connect with them because it’s all football and ‘I’m the big boy’. But Abdelhak was never like that. There was no arrogance – that wasn’t his thing. He was interested in you, in your story.”
Hogewind says she has one more thing she would like to show, and gets up to carry over a big box. “All the classes have made these pictures and they each wrote something to Abdelhak and his family on a postcard, because they are asking how he is all the time,” she says, flicking through their messages of support. “There are 500 postcards in here. We want to send them or give them to the family, but perhaps I’ll see if I can go to see Abdelhak myself.”
How easy that will be is unclear. Nouri’s condition remains stable but it is hard to imagine what sort of emotions the family go through when they sit by his bedside, even if Abderrahim says they talk to him as if nothing has happened. The first six weeks after returning from Austria were spent in a rehabilitation centre in the south of the Netherlands, but Nouri has been in hospital in Amsterdam for the past three and a half months.
“He was making good steps in the beginning with the rehabilitation,” Abderrahim explains. “When we asked him to do something, he would do it but very slowly. Sometimes he couldn’t because he was very tired. But then, because he’s an athlete, and because he was lying down too much, all his muscles were [getting weaker] and other problems came up, and that was holding him back. I think it’s normal when something like a heart attack happens that you have good steps and then you fall back. But I think we’re now in a position where we’re going up again.”
Although doctors have said there is no chance of Nouri making a recovery and enjoying any quality of life because of the damage that was done during those critical minutes when the oxygen supply to his brain was cut off, the family refuse to give up hope and are seeking a second opinion from a neurosurgeon in the United States.
As for the critical question of why Nouri collapsed and whether they have any answers on that front, Abderrahim replies: “No. The doctor said he had a heart attack. But the reason for the heart attack, we still don’t know. So I don’t know what happened and why it happened. They are still busy looking and searching.”
Although there had been no indication before the Bremen match that Nouri had any heart issues, there was an incident while he was on holiday in Turkey in June, when he passed out on the beach and an ambulance was called. Nouri phoned Abderrahim on the way to hospital to say he was fine, with the feeling being it was down to no more than a combination of playing football in the heat and the fact it was Ramadan.
His physical condition in the lead up to the Bremen game, however, was not great. As well as the discomfort in his ankle, Nouri suffered with diarrhoea and stomach pains while the players were away in Austria. What effect any of that had, if any, is unknown. But listening to Abderrahim, who is so measured in everything he says, it is clear the family feel as though there are blanks that need to be filled in before they have the full picture, and in their eyes some of that missing information is in relation to the medical care carried out on the pitch.
A fortnight ago the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reported they had spoken to five specialists, who independently of each other expressed doubts, based on the footage, about the way Nouri’s situation was handled in the early stages after he collapsed. Ajax responded by challenging the anonymous criticism and saying their doctor is “a registered medical specialist and he fulfils all the relevant requirements”. The club also explained the management of Nouri on the pitch was carried out according to the Advanced Trauma Life Support criteria and “in collaboration with the attending Austrian emergency doctor, the club doctor of Ajax and the club doctor of Werder Bremen”.
It feels important to stress the Nouri family maintain a good relationship with Ajax – Keizer, the staff and the players are in regular contact, some of them on a daily basis – and Abderrahim says how much they have appreciated the club’s help since July. At the same time, the family would like to have a greater understanding of exactly what happened on the pitch in Austria from the 72nd minute onwards and have asked Ajax to provide that information.
In the meantime, the family recognise and accept – a word Abderrahim uses a lot – that life has to go on in every sense. For Ajax, that means trying to claim what would be an incredibly emotional 34th title – the same number as Nouri’s shirt – while for the family it is about putting their energy into creating something positive from the bleakest of stories by setting up a foundation for the sick and disabled in “Appie’s” name. “They’re the people he had an eye for,” says Abderrahim.
The days at the hospital must be long and emotionally draining, yet Abderrahim and his family continue to cherish every moment with “Appie”, hoping their prayers will be answered and never wasting any energy on wondering why life can be so cruel. “‘Why him? He was still young’; that doesn’t go through our minds,” Abderrahim says. “It’s only that we miss him. And that’s the part that’s still difficult for us.”
