Marcos Leonardo at Ajax: When a "Penalty-Area Magnet" Has to Relearn How to Breathe

Amsterdam, an October evening. I am standing in the corridor leading to the technical area, where the smell of damp grass blends with the smell of cold coffee from the press room. Marcos Leonardo warms up alone. He runs short laps along the touchline, and after every lap he turns his head to glance at the substitutes' bench, as if to confirm he still has a place there.

A 23-year-old striker, bought for 20 million euros, having to glance sideways to confirm his own existence on the bench. That detail says more than any statistics sheet I carry in my pocket.

I write one heartbeat slower so as not to miss the moment a boot touches grass. And the most memorable moment that night was not a goal, nor a miss. It was when he stopped between two running drills, planted both hands on his knees, and breathed. A long breath, in the literal sense of the word. At a distance of one and a half metres, I heard that breath more clearly than the whistle signalling the start of the second half.

That is the starting point for the story I want to tell: about a player, a club, and a kind of "failure" that transfer-data models can never measure.

A club that buys to sell, and a No.9 bought to play

Ajax is not an ordinary club. At De Toekomst, their famous academy, people do not train players to keep them. They train players to sell them, at the very peak of the value curve, and use that money to feed the next cycle. That is the buy-develop-sell model, a business machine proven over decades, and also the reason a 20-million-euro deal at Ajax is never merely a sporting matter.

When a club of Ajax's kind spends 20 million euros on a player, it is an investment at the high end of their own range. They do not spend carelessly. They calculate. They buy a young asset, expect it to rise in value on the pitch, then sell it on at a margin. But that machine only runs when the player plays, plays well, and scores.

Marcos Leonardo, 23, Brazilian, is such a deal. He arrived at Ajax last summer, at a price recorded as 20 million euros. A centre-forward, a player described — by the very supporters who watched him play elsewhere — as "a magnet in the opposition penalty area".

That description needs to be made clear, because it is the most important piece of this story. He is spoken of in the image of a player who draws the ball inside the box: not the type to smash one in from forty metres, nor the type to dribble past seven opponents and score alone. Leonardo is the one who stands in the right place, at the right time, and puts the ball in the net from close range. That is a very specific profile, and it is only useful to a team that knows how to generate balls into the box.

Ajax's problem this season lies elsewhere. The team has another No.9 starting — the name mentioned in the punditry is Tolu. And when you have a stable starter at centre-forward, the second man, even at 20 million euros, is left with only scraps of minutes.

The Eredivisie context also has to be put on the table. This is a league with modest broadcasting revenue compared with Europe's top five leagues. Ajax are the strongest commercial brand in the Netherlands, with a wage bill said to be the highest in the league, but even a strong brand cannot buy patience. In the Netherlands, people judge very quickly. And 20 million euros is a large enough sum for every minute Leonardo plays to be weighed, measured and questioned.

343 minutes and a closed loop with no exit

Let us start with what can be counted. At the time this story was put on the table, Marcos Leonardo had played 10 matches for Ajax, for a total of 343 minutes. Divided out, that is about 34 minutes per appearance. He had scored 2 goals. Converted per 90 minutes, the figure falls at around 0.52 goals per full match.

I want to pause here for a moment, because this is where most commentary takes the wrong turn. People look at 0.52 goals per 90 and instantly split into two camps. One camp says: "There you go, 20 million euros and that is all he delivers." The other says: "He was never given a chance." Both are right, and both are incomplete. I do not take sides, I only record how the beer falls and how a generation swears — but I also record the numbers, because sometimes numbers are the only thing that does not know how to lie.

The problem lies here: 343 minutes is far too small a sample. For a striker, 343 minutes is not enough to conclude anything about goalscoring ability. A man can score 2 goals in 343 minutes and finish the season with 15, or finish with exactly 2. A small sample tells you nothing except that it is small.

But there is one thing the figure of 34 minutes per appearance says very clearly: Leonardo is being used as an impact substitute, not a cornerstone. And this is where the logic begins to eat its own tail.

What does a centre-forward need in order to score? Balls into the box, and match rhythm in his legs. He needs a feel for timing, for space, for the speed of the ball. Those things cannot be built in scattered 34-minute bursts. They require full, continuous matches, so that body and mind grow used to the rhythm again.

And yet the paradox lies here: Leonardo is not playing enough, partly because people say he is not fit enough. But he cannot be match-fit if he does not play. It is a closed loop that locks itself shut — few minutes lead to low fitness, and low fitness leads back to few minutes.

Throughout the autumn, the name Marcos Leonardo appeared on television not because of goals, but because of one complaint repeated over and over. Hans Kraay junior, a former professional turned pundit for ESPN, was the one who made the harshest remarks. He said Leonardo was "not fit". Then the following month, he said the same thing again. The same criticism, at two different moments, a full month apart.

That is the single most important detail in this entire story, and I want to say clearly why. When a complaint about fitness is repeated twice in two months, it is no longer the impulsive remark of one evening. It becomes a pattern. And a pattern is more trustworthy than a single utterance.

What is striking is how the problem is described. No one says Leonardo does not understand tactics. No one says he runs into the wrong positions, no one says he does not understand how to link with his team-mates. Everything that is said revolves around a single word: fitness. Condition. Physical readiness.

This is a distinction of enormous significance, and I believe it is often overlooked in transfer debates. A fitness problem is entirely different from a role problem. If Leonardo is failing because he does not suit Ajax's style of play, that is a story about tactics, and it is almost impossible to fix. But if he is failing because he is not yet fit enough, that is a story about physical condition, and in principle it can be fixed.

In other words, people are criticising a player for something that time and a proper conditioning programme can remedy — not for something that his very nature can never change. That difference, in the valuation of a football asset, is worth millions of euros.

Heroes and villains do not exist here

I learned something in Moscow, on a June night in 2026, sitting in a bar packed with about fifty Spanish supporters. The match against Iran ended 1-0, but no one in that bar talked about the match. Everyone talked about the manager being sacked on the eve of the tournament. I split the people sitting there into two camps: those defending the replacement, those calling it an insult. I recorded every curse, every drop of beer falling onto the table, then wrote a piece titled "A sadness with no captain's armband".

What I learned that night was this: I cannot stand in either camp. And that applies here, to Ajax, to Leonardo, to Kraay, to Tolu.

Let us try standing in each person's shoes, one at a time.

Stand in the shoes of Hans Kraay junior. He is a former player, he knows what a professional footballer's body needs. When he watches Leonardo play fifteen minutes and sees him gasping in the sprints, he says what he sees. That is his job. And if what he sees is true — if Leonardo really is not fit enough to play at the intensity the Eredivisie demands — then saying so is necessary, not cruel.

Stand in the shoes of Leonardo. He is 23, far from home, arriving in a new country, a new culture, a new league, with the price of 20 million euros hanging over his head like a boulder. Every appearance is a chance to prove, in fifteen minutes, that he is worth the money. No one can play well in that state of mind. No one.

Stand in the shoes of the coach. He must choose between a No.9 in form and an expensive No.9 who is not yet ready. He is criticised if he uses Leonardo, and criticised if he does not. He is the one absorbing pressure from both sides, and no choice silences everyone.

Stand in the shoes of the board. They spent 20 million euros — a large sum by their own standards — on a player who is now called "not fit" on national television. Their recruitment credibility is being questioned, not on the balance sheet, but in the newspapers.

When you stand in all four pairs of shoes, you begin to see that this story has no villain. It has only people trapped in a system no one designed to fail, but which is operating in a way that makes failure almost unavoidable.

I remember someone once asking me why I tend to stand at the edge of the stand rather than sit in the press room. The answer is simple: at the edge of the stand, you hear breathing. In the press room, you only hear answers that have been prepared in advance. And the true story of a player does not lie in the answers, but in the breaths.

A counter-intuitive angle: the biggest risk is not "failure"

Now I want to offer an angle I believe is right but few want to hear.

There is an implicit assumption running through this whole story, and it goes like this: a player bought for 20 million euros who does not start is a failure. I believe that assumption is wrong, or at least not ripe enough to conclude.

There are two bad scenarios that could befall Marcos Leonardo at Ajax. The first is that he genuinely lacks the ability — a true "flop", an investment written off entirely. The second is that he has the ability, but is never placed in the right circumstances to prove it, and simply sits on the bench until his contract ends or he is sold off cheaply.

Of those two scenarios, which is more likely?

I believe it is the second. And here is why.

At 23, Leonardo's career curve is still rising. He has not passed his peak. That means a fitness problem at this age is, in principle, fixable — young bodies recover faster, adapt faster, and a proper conditioning programme can make a difference within months. If Leonardo were 29, the story would be entirely different. But he is 23.

This brings me to an observation about how the football industry values assets. Transfer-data models are very good at measuring young potential — they look at age, minutes, goals, assists, and produce a number. But they are very poor at measuring dressing-room chemistry, cultural integration, and the invisible factors that decide whether a young talent blossoms in a particular environment. A player can score highly on every metric and still fail, simply because he never found his place in a particular group, in a particular city, under a particular coach.

Leonardo is a living example of that gap. No data model could predict that a 23-year-old "penalty-area magnet" would be stuck behind another No.9 in Amsterdam, and dissected on television for not being fit enough. That is a human variable, and models cannot measure it.

There is one more detail I want to put on the table, though it needs further verification. In the discussions around Leonardo, people mention that supporters of a club in the Gulf — where he was once attached — know him well and describe him with the image of "a magnet in the penalty area". This detail, if true, raises an interesting question about the transfer supply chain: was Ajax buying back an asset from the secondary market, rather than discovering it for the first time? If so, the "value discovery" logic of the deal changes entirely. I leave this open, because it needs independent verification, and because in my profession an unverified hypothesis should remain only a hypothesis.

Back to the two scenarios. If I am right, and the second — stagnation rather than collapse — is the more likely, then it is a far worse kind of failure than being called a "flop". A player called a flop is at least sold on and continues his career elsewhere. A stagnating player loses years that cannot be recovered — and for a striker, those years are his most valuable asset.

This is what data models can never grasp: the value of a young player lies not only in present ability, but in the time remaining. Every season on the bench is a season subtracted from that stock of time, and no amount of money buys it back.

What is really being bet on

I want to tell another story, from Valencia, on a night in 2026. I missed a flight back to Madrid because I stayed to watch a closed youth training session. There I came across a twenty-year-old boy practising a free-kick wall, repeating one movement until it was fully dark. The next day he made his official debut. I wrote a long piece about the detail of him wiping his boots before going onto the pitch, and the article drew twelve hundred shares overnight.

What I learned from that night is this: sometimes the smallest detail is the truest detail. Not the goal, but the act of wiping the boots. Not the celebration, but the breath.

And that is why I believe the story of Marcos Leonardo at Ajax cannot yet be closed with a verdict. We have only seen one part of three hundred and forty-three minutes from a 23-year-old. That is not a book, it is the first page.

But if there is one worrying thing in this whole story, it is not two goals in ten matches, nor the 20-million-euro price. The worrying thing is how a complaint about fitness, repeated twice in two months, can quietly reshape how a young player sees himself. Confidence in football is a fragile asset, and it is eroded fastest not by defeats, but by doubts repeated over and over.

Signals to watch

So what will tell us where this story is heading?

I will not look at the goals. Goals are the result, not the cause. I will look at three other things.

First, the average minutes per appearance. If that figure of 34 minutes begins to rise — thirty-five, forty-five, sixty — that is a sign the coaching staff are gradually coming to trust his condition. If it stands still or falls, the problem is unresolved.

Second, I will look at whether Leonardo is given a start in a big match. Starting against a strong opponent is the clearest signal that a player has crossed the testing phase. Conversely, only coming on in the closing minutes of settled games is a sign of stagnation.

Third, and perhaps most important, I will listen for whether the complaints about fitness disappear. If by winter the pundits are still repeating the same old story, then the problem runs deeper than a simple conditioning programme. It could be a sign of a gap in the club's medical process, or a personal professionalism issue that this article does not have enough data to distinguish.

There are evenings when I choose to stay at the ground instead of going home, and in return I get a story no one has told. That Amsterdam night was one of those evenings. I did not bring back a goal to tell. I brought back a breath. And sometimes, in this profession, a breath tells more than a goal.

The story of Marcos Leonardo is not over. It has only just begun to breathe.

And you — reading these lines — what do you see at that distance of one and a half metres? A player who was overhyped, or a player who was forgotten at the very moment he most needed to be trusted?