Toulouse. Branco van den Boomen, Eindhoven in the veins
Born in Eindhoven, Branco van den Boomen is having the best season of his career. Best passer in Ligue 2, elected player of the month twice in a row, in February and March, the midfielder found a crown at the end of exile and a justification for his destiny.
As he attacks his very Dutch club sandwich – bacon, chicken, cucumber, tomatoes, egg – Harry van den Boomen rewinds: “Branco was almost born with a ball in his feet. couldn’t walk, he’d uncoil at the railings and shoot a ball on the other side, cling around, pull in the other direction, and so on for hours. moment, he would drop tired, sleep a little, and he would do it again. I never saw him play cars or anything else.”
Childhood in Veldhoven, a city of 45,000 souls in North Brabant, close to Eindhoven and Nuenen where Van Gogh lived, resembles that experienced by thousands of other children throughout Europe. “We were happy, and best friends,” recalls Vinnie van den Boomen, little brother born two years later. In the brothers, the foot takes up all the space, or almost. The time that remains, when the legs are too tired, they kill it on the PlayStation, at FIFA and GTA, or squeezed on the living room sofa at Champions League parties. Harry said his second son had as much or more talent than the eldest. It makes him laugh: “Branco, since I was 2 years old, has always said that he would be a professional footballer. He only had that in mind.” At 16, he will repeat it in the form of a promise addressed to his grandfather Frans Leemans during his funeral: “I swear to you, I will become a professional player.” The father concedes: “Vinnie, maybe he didn’t have Branco’s character. He was provided by other things, like music.” The one who now divides his time between football, which he plays as an amateur at the RKVVO, the Veldhoven club, the pop music he composes and his night job in the bakery, thinks a little when asked when he knew things were getting serious for his brother. “Probably when Ajax came for him,” he finally answered.
We are in 2011. Branco van den Boomen has been rehearsing his scales for seven years at Willem-II, the Tilburg club, when his father’s phone rings. “It was the manager of Ajax, Jan Olde Riekerink, who told me that he wants to talk to me about Branco. I hung up, three times in a row! I thought it was a joke, and I am for him. PSV!” The fourth call will be the right one. Deep down, Harry van den Boomen knows it: when Ajax Amsterdam rings at your door, you have no choice but to open it wide. Branco is packing his bags for the capital and the biggest club in the country, where he will make his debut with the reserve team in 2013, after winning the title of European Under-17 champion with the Oranje. But he will never wear the first team jersey. “The step was perhaps too high”, analyzes Robin Pronk ten years later. Coach of the Ajax U17s at the time, he was one of the men behind Branco’s arrival in Amsterdam: “He already had this magnificent quality of passing, of striking, he was excellent from a free kick. But I thinks that certain defensive weaknesses and his speed prevented him from crossing this level to the very top level.”
“Branco, in Eindhoven, everyone loves him”
This Friday evening, the Jan Louwers Stadion, 4,600 seats, was not full. However, the stakes are high for FC Eindhoven, in a good position to win their accession to the Eredivisie when they receive Almere City. But south of a city where attention is vampirized by the PSV, we have resigned ourselves to living in the shadow of a giant. The club founded in 1909, four years before Philips created the PSV for its workers, still has its history and its legends. Pascal Maas, 44 years old in blue and white as a player then coach, is certainly one, from the top of his 88 goals. “And as a midfielder!” he laughs. Looks like that big, gnarled guy has always been there. He was when Branco van den Bommen signed in 2014 after his failure at Ajax. “I never felt that he was disappointed,” he replays. “Branco is not someone who looks back. He says to himself, ‘What can I do today?’ he was one of the best seasons of FC Eindhoven, who failed at the gates of the climb, second with 80 points behind a staggering NEC Nijmegen and their 101 points. Too strong for the Eerste Divisie, van den Boomen will still discover the Dutch first division, in Heerenveen, where he landed in 2015 to replace Marten de Roon, who left for Atalanta Bergamo. But two years and 31 games later, he will return again, endowed like a magnet by his hometown, after another failure and a new “step perhaps a little high” according to Pascal Maas. It was during his second period in Eindhoven, between 2017 and 2019, that van den Boomen would become “the Branco you see today in Toulouse. You can’t compare him to any other player we’ve had here” , admires his former coach. “When he came back, he added goals and tempo management to his palette. He had become an excellent player, our master at playing. He had statistics, and above all he had remained a very good human being. he’s someone I really enjoyed working with, never angry, always enthusiastic, with this desire to win, even in training. He’s a normal guy. Branco, in Eindhoven, everyone likes. It matched between him and the club. He felt good here, he was in a comfort zone, but ready to explode.” This is what he will do, far from Eindhoven, but with the eyes of his city fixed on him.
Love, IPTV and Semiconductors
15 hours. In the living room of the small, dark brick house typical of Veldhoven, the first bottles of Bavaria are being opened. On the walls, a purple jersey flocked with the number 8, framed alongside other photos of Branco and stickers of the Indians Tolosa, brought back by Harry van den Boomen from his trip to the parking lot with the Toulouse ultras, this season in Valenciennes. This Saturday, the TFC is at Guingamp, and like every match, the TV is connected to IPTV in what he calls his “men’s cellar”.
Maurice, Syef, Michel and Bart are there. Friendships go back a long way. They are mostly linked to the factory of ASML, a giant in the semiconductor industry which employs nearly 30,000 people, independent of Philips since 1988. In Veldhoven, where its head office is located, it part of life and conditions solidarity. “Whether I’m talking to Comolli, to a player, to a peasant, to an ultra, it’s the same for me”, repeats Harry van den Boomen, whose philosophy is appreciated by another of his executives: “Live , Love, Laugh” (Live, Love, Laugh) can we read. “I love life, it’s too short not to do what you want. And it’s not important to fall, you have to get up. That’s what I wanted to teach Branco.”
On TV, the prodigy son distributes two new Decision Makers passes on the lawn of Roudourou and brings the TFC a little closer to Ligue 1. Guingamp is on one knee, the “We are the champions” burst into the living room and the five friends are already preparing for their next trip to Toulouse, asking for the supporters’ song “Who doesn’t jump isn’t Toulouse” to be translated for them. Then the discussions return to normal. At PSV Eindhoven. “Of course we would have liked to see Branco play there” blows Maurice. The story was played out little by little. “PSV wanted Branco back when he was 8 years old, but wanted to leave him for another season at RKVVO to train with the youngsters, and when Branco saw that, he had stars in his eyes. He said to me: ‘Dad, I don’t want to wait.” Harry van den Boomen then turns to PSV legend Willy van der Kuijlen. “He was like, ‘Harry, it’s okay if the kid wants to go to Willem, let him.'”
18 years later, after a few detours and false starts, Branco van den Boomen has still not worn the jersey sassy but is finally a prophet, even far from his country. Adulated in Toulouse, “he has never been so strong” according to his brother Vinnie. “It’s also because he is confident. He has stability, his girlfriend, his family. He no longer focuses solely on the foot, and that allows him to be more serene, more mature.” Father of a little girl since last year, it is now up to him to pass on the inheritance. Definitely red and white, asking for a little purple.
Passion is non-negotiable. The one that has always thrilled Harry van den Boomen is sassy, red and white like the colors of PSV. The 55-year-old man made an appointment at the “Eetcafé de Verlenging”, a bar-restaurant nestled in the bowels of the Philips Stadion, the stadium of the legendary club of Eindhoven, because he is at home here. Between two bands on the back of the boss, he navigates among the windows that adorn the room, where sleep jerseys, photos and pairs of crampons, witnesses of the glory of PSV and its legends. His eye lights up like a child’s: these objects tell the story of his life. Somewhere, they belong to him. This is true for all supporters, but for him perhaps a little more. Trained at PSV, by Guus Hiddink in particular, player of the Dutch national team in U18, Harry van den Boomen was broke before the age of 20 by a rupture of the cruciate ligaments and had to put away his dreams and his striped jersey. Leaning on the railing of the small terrace overlooking the lawn where Willy van der Kuijlen, Phillip Cocu, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Ronaldo have thrown flashes of eternity, he wonders: “What would my life have been like without this injury?”
Today remain memories, immortalized by yellow photos and press articles, like this tournament at Croix where he finished top scorer ahead of the attackers of Real Madrid, Milan, Saint-Étienne. There is also, above all, a legacy: “My injury prevented me from realizing my dream. Now I see my son achieving it, and that is magnificent.” At 26 years old and at 1,000 bor-