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EPL On the outskirts of the city centre, the shoppers queue to buy their groceries. It is all self-service these days and, of course, the prices have gone up over the years. But that’s really the only change since the checkout counter of this Aldi supermarket was occupied by a 19-year-old Tijjani Reijnders. Advertisement This is Zwolle, in the Dutch province of Overijssel, and it is not too far from the part of the city centre where the Liverpool head coach, Arne Slot, has a beautiful townhouse. Did the Slot family ever shop at Aldi? And, if so, did they realise the dark-haired boy scanning their items through the checkout was on the fringes of the team where Slot himself spent most of his playing career? “In Dutch, we call it a vakkenvuller (aisle filler), ” says Bas van Wijnen, who worked at Aldi at the same time. “Tijjani’s job was to stack the shelves, work as a cashier and do a bit of everything. He was always focused on football, but at that age, he wanted to earn some extra money. It opened his eyes and left him thinking, even more than before, that he wanted to make it as a footballer. ” Van Wijnen, a talented footballer himself, knows the story well because he and Reijnders were friends at the time, and still are. They played for the same junior team, aged seven upwards, then progressed all the way to PEC Zwolle, their hometown club, in the Dutch Eredivisie. And the story is rather wonderful if you consider that, in the space of eight years, Reijnders has gone from stacking shelves at Aldi to running out at San Siro with Milan and in the Premier League with Manchester City. Perhaps you might be wondering why a promising young footballer at a top-division club in the Netherlands would, in his own words, take a job at Aldi “to stock the shelves, work behind the till and earn a few hundred euros a month”. The answer tells us a lot about the way Reijnders, now 27, was brought up. His younger brother, Eliano, played for PEC for seven years (and, for good measure, used to work in the local Lidl supermarket) before leaving last month. Their father, Martin, was a former PEC striker who played 250 matches in professional football, including a season with Nashville Metros in the old United Soccer League. Advertisement But Martin, now 53, knew from his years in the industry how easy it was for young footballers to become detached from the realities of life. His view was that it would be beneficial for his sons to experience a ‘normal’ job. Angelina, the boys’ mother, thought the same. She was the one who saw the advertisement for “staff required” on the Aldi bulletin board. “I immediately went to see the manager, ” she later explained in an interview with De Stentor newspaper. “I was given a form. ‘Not for me’, I said, ‘it’s for my son’. I went back to Tijjani and told him, ‘Go on, fill it out now’. And the best thing is, Tijjani had a great time working there. ” It helped that two of his friends, both with football aspirations of their own, had jobs at the same supermarket. One was Van Wijnen, now a midfielder for Dutch amateur team VV Berkum. Another was Steyn van Ark, a year older, who plays at DOS Kampen. “At that time, we were all at PEC Zwolle together, ” says Van Ark. “When we didn’t have training, we worked at Aldi together. It was the three of us. And, yes, it was great fun. We made some money and we found out what it was like to have a proper job. Though Tijjani, of course, always had a very different plan for the future. ” Three games into the new season, these are still the getting-to-know-you stages for many Premier League watchers when it comes to the player who marked his City debut at Wolverhampton Wanderers last month with a beautifully taken goal and man-of-the-match display for Pep Guardiola’s team. What you might not know is that the new wearer of City’s No 4 shirt owns a Pomsky — a cross between a Pomeranian and a Siberian husky — that is named Messi after, well, you can probably guess who. The people who know Reijnders best talk about how grounded he is, how he has never lost touch with his childhood friends and how family means everything to him. He and his wife, Marina, his childhood sweetheart, have a baby son, Xavien. Tijjani speaks to his brother every day and, if he is home in Zwolle, he loves to collect his younger sister, Syane, a talented dancer, from school. Barely a day goes by that he does not ring his parents. Advertisement Even when he won his first call-up to the Netherlands squad, he was happy for his mother to drive him to their headquarters in Zeist. “Do you really want that? ” she asked. “You don’t see many Dutch internationals being driven by their mother. ” It didn’t bother him at all, so mother and son travelled in together. But there are many stories from Zwolle, a small city of 130, 000 people, that tell us a lot about who he really is, why he is so well-liked and his dedication to football, even from a very young age at Zevensprong, his primary school in the Stadshagen neighbourhood. “Everybody in the class wanted to be on his team, ” Nanda Mast-Krol, his class teacher, tells The Athletic. “He was always kicking a ball, behind the bushes, on the fields. He loved doing his tricks. “At the end of his final year, when everyone had to say goodbye, I told him he was going to make it. I was quite emotional. And I said to him, ‘If you’re going to be a footballer, you have to give me your autograph’. He didn’t seem to believe it himself, that he was going to be that good. But, yes, I got his autograph. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote his name down for me. ” And the worst thing? “I’ve looked everywhere and cannot find it. I had a big box where I kept all that kind of stuff. But I’m still searching. ” At least she still has her old photographs. One shows the schoolboy Reijnders with his classmates: grey cardigan, flappy collars, big smile. Another is from a camping trip and this time he is perched on a friend’s shoulders. Again, his smile is on full beam. What was he like in class? “Very social, never in any trouble, ” says Mast-Krol. “I didn’t realise at first that his father was a footballer. Then I got to know his parents and you could see their influence. Tijjani always had that big smile. The smile you see today, it’s just the same as I remember. ” Advertisement His talent started to flower at a junior team called WVF in the suburb of Westenholte. Reijnders joined the club at the age of seven and stayed for five years. “Even at a young age, he had that ability of knowing what to do with the ball even before it came to his feet, ” says the coach, Rijk van Ark. “He could dribble, score goals, make goals. He was small for his age and we put him in a team against boys who were one or two years older and, physically, much stronger. But it made no difference: he was always one of our best players. ” Steyn, Rijk’s son, was in the same team. “Even as a young boy, Tijjani had something special, ” he says. “You see him now and he’s physical and strong. When he was younger, he was smaller than everyone. It didn’t matter, though, because technically he was special. ” Did he get kicked? “Not often, ” Rijk replies. “They would try sometimes. But he was so quick, so talented and dynamic, nobody could ever catch him. ” To begin with, it was FC Twente who spotted the youthful promise of the Reijnders boys. That meant a morning commute of an hour each way, setting off at 6. 10am, four days a week, to Twente’s training complex in Hengelo. Later, when Tijjani and Eliano were older, the club sent a minibus to pick them up. In the first year, however, it was Angelina behind the wheel. Every day, she would make her sons a Nutella chocolate-spread sandwich for the journey. And, as she explained to De Stentor, they burned through a lot of petrol in those days. “I sometimes say, ‘We’ve sponsored quite a few Essos and Shells’. But I never thought, ‘I’m not doing it’. They wanted to go pro. As a mother, you’d do anything to help, wouldn’t you? ” It was a routine that ended in 2015 when Tijjani left Twente, aged 17, and went to play alongside Eliano, then 15, at CSV’28, the amateur team in Zwolle where their father was manager. One piece of fatherly advice stuck in Tijjani’s mind from that time: there are “enough grey mice”. Shoot more, was the instruction — back yourself, do something different. And that advice proved useful in the coming years, especially after a growth spurt gave the teenager the physical attributes to deal with the kicks and elbows that came from playing against men often twice his age. Advertisement As Reijnders recalled in a 2022 television interview: “We often heard from opponents: ‘Are we playing against the boys’ team today or something? ’. But in the end, they had a hard time against us. ” It was a journey that led the Reijnders brothers to PEC and a first-team breakthrough for Tijjani, aged 19 and still doing shifts with Aldi, with his hometown club — though only one appearance and, even then, as a 91st-minute substitute — before his career really ignited with a move to AZ in Alkmaar. Then the elite European clubs started paying attention. Growing up, Reijnders counted Ronaldinho and Kaka as his favourite players. So it meant a lot, in July 2023, when he signed for Milan and pulled on the red and black striped shirt that the two Brazilians had worn with distinction. It meant a lot to his father, too, given the success his own idols — Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard — had at San Siro. For a while, however, it looked as though Reijnders would go to Barcelona. The Catalan giants were keen and, in Zwolle, Reijnders’ old team-mates followed the story intently. “When he told me he was going to Milan, I was like, ‘Wow! ’, ” says Steyn van Ark, his old friend, who is flying into England to see City play Manchester United on Sunday. “Not many players leave AZ for a club of that size. And, for Tijjani, it was the perfect step. He always said he had just one plan. No Plan B, only Plan A. And that plan was to play in the Champions League. ” Reijnders won the award for Serie A’s best midfielder last season, scoring 15 times. He has established himself as a regular starter for the Netherlands, with 25 appearances for his country in little over two years. Many people within the sport remain surprised that City did not have to pay more than £45million ($60. 9m) to sign him in June, especially when the deposed Premier League champions needed a high-calibre replacement for Kevin De Bruyne. Advertisement In Zwolle, meanwhile, they talk about how proud they are. Everyone says the same: that fame hasn’t changed Reijnders, that he is still the same down-to-earth guy, and that his success is the reward for years of dedication. “He and Eliano gave it their all, ” says Jabir Mazouz, a former winger at CSV’28. “They always went to bed on time, didn’t go into town for a beer. At most, they’d have fries, then go home. ” Reijnders is still in a Whats App group with six of his old friends from his junior team. His family motto is still the same: ‘Walk with your head high, but never look down on anyone’. Just ask Rijk van Ark, who remains in contact with Reijnders and likes to joke that his former player has made it to the top only because, as a kid at WVF, he had the best coach in the business: Rijk himself. In November 2023, Van Ark’s son, Steyn, went to Milan to see them play Udinese at San Siro. When he flew back to the Netherlands, he had a gift for his father: Reijnders’ No 14 shirt. It was a present from the man himself, with a message for Van Ark written on the back: ‘Voor de best trainer’. Translation: ‘For the best coach’. And now, under Guardiola’s management, Reijnders is looking to make a name for himself in the Premier League. “It’s amazing to see how well he has done, ” says Van Wijnen, his old team-mate and Aldi colleague. “It’s almost indescribable if you look back at how far he has come in the last eight years. Yet I’m not surprised. I still remember one game for WVF when the ball came in from the right and he scored with a bicycle kick. He was eight or nine at the time… amazing! You just didn’t see boys that age scoring with bicycle kicks. ” At Aldi, meanwhile, do they even realise?   “He was not so famous back then, ” says Rijk, with a laugh. “If you went to the supermarket at that time, you would never have realised that the cashier helping you with your shopping was a great footballer of the future. But that’s ‘T’ — a very normal guy with a lot of talent. ” (Top photos: Visionhaus/Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton/The Athletic) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Daniel Taylor was named Sports Journalist of the Year at the 2025 British Press Awards, the third time he has won the award. He is also a four-time Football Journalist of the Year and the winner of numerous other awards for his reporting, investigative work and feature writing. Daniel, a senior writer for The Athletic, is based in Manchester and was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian/The Observer. He has written five books. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic