Who is Donyell Malen, Aston Villa’s new signing?
That depends on who you ask. At different times in his career, Malen has been a star in the making, but also a drifting, latent talent. A prodigy at Arsenal, a thrillingly effective forward at PSV and a source of goals, but also a great frustration at Borussia Dortmund.
Which player are Villa getting? All of them.
GO DEEPER
Malen completes Villa move from Dortmund
The best season of Malen’s career happened when nobody was there to see it. In the 2020-21 season, Dutch football was still in a post-pandemic wilderness, with Malen and PSV playing in empty stadiums.
But he played extraordinarily well. His 27 goals in 45 games across all competitions were the headline, but Malen — playing at the top of Roger Schmidt’s 4-2-2-2 formation alongside Eran Zahavi — performed with tremendous range and great class, scoring goals with either foot, beating defenders and scoring from range, or arriving late and finishing moves from under the crossbar.
His partnership with Zahavi was often a delight — check out their beautiful combination against Ajax at the Johan Cruyff Arena below — and, combined with his own attacking versatility, helped make Malen one of the most sought-after players in Europe.
It was a future he was long expected to have. Malen grew up idolising Ronaldinho and trying to mimic his gallery of skills. He joined Ajax’s academy when he was seven and was coached at under-10 level by Dennis Bergkamp. By 14, he was represented by Mino Raiola, the late superagent, when such a relationship seemed a guarantee of future stardom.
Raiola was rarely bashful about his clients. In 2017, two years after Malen had left Amsterdam for Arsenal, Raiola was being especially hawkish in an interview with the Daily Mail.
“Gianluigi Donnarumma is already in the national team at 17, Moise Kean is doing very well at Juventus, but I am most looking forward to a player who is already under contract with a Premier League club: Donyell Malen from Arsenal,” he said.
At the time, Malen was heading for his first senior tour with Arsenal as they travelled to Australia. He made his senior debut during the trip, coming on with Eddie Nketiah as a second-half substitute against Sydney FC, in what seemed a significant step towards the first team.
Malen in action for Arsenal against Sydney in July 2017 (Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
In reality, it was one of his final acts. Malen left Arsenal for PSV a month later, moving back to the Eredivisie for around £500,000 ($600,000 at current rates).
Steve Morrow was Arsenal’s head of youth development between 2014 and 2019.
“When I think about bringing Donyell into Arsenal, we invested a lot of time in him and profiled him for quite a while,” says Morrow. “Not a lot of players do this, but at first, he wanted to just come over for a week: not to train, but to wander around the training ground and meet people. Donyell massively impressed me. Arsene (Wenger, Arsenal’s manager at the time) met him and was impressed with him, too.
“Every club was interested and we did a good job of selling the club to him. The expectation was that he would progress very quickly to the first team.”
That never happened. That Malen departed so abruptly when he seemed on the cusp of a breakthrough still seems strange.
“He had a quite difficult start to life in England,” Morrow says. “I’m not sure he ever settled in this country or in Hertfordshire, with his parents having to come over from the Netherlands to see him, and he maybe wasn’t progressing as quickly as he wanted to or as quickly as his agent wanted him to, and that was an issue.
“I was very against him leaving because I was convinced he would have made it to the first team. Everyone saw the quality of his speed, his intelligence, his movement and his finishing.
“I always found him very respectful, too. He sometimes needed an arm around his shoulder, but he was one of the best young strikers I’d seen in quite a while.”
Stefan Coerts is the executive editor-in-chief at Footballco, a football media company. During Malen’s formative years, he covered the Eredivisie for Goal.com and witnessed what made the Netherlands international so successful upon his arrival in Eindhoven.
“He was one of the country’s biggest talents when he left Ajax for Arsenal as a youngster and it’s fair to say they were not happy,” Coerts tells The Athletic. “They lost Timothy Fosu-Mensah, Javairo Dilrosun and Mink Peeters the year before to big foreign clubs and that meant four of their hottest prospects were gone in a little over a year.
“Things didn’t quite work out for him at Arsenal as it’s simply very difficult to break into the first team at a major Premier League club unless you’re truly special, like Bukayo Saka. Malen wasn’t at quite that level, but it was clear the talent was there and PSV were the perfect club for him at that stage.
“They gave him the time and support he needed to adapt to senior football, slowly preparing him for the first team by giving him playing time with Jong PSV (the club’s youth team). When Steven Bergwijn and Hirving Lozano left, Malen was ready and wasted no time taking his chance.”
Malen made his Eredivisie debut in February 2018, replacing Luuk de Jong as a late substitute in a 4-0 win over PEC Zwolle. In the autumn of 2019, Malen made his debut for the Netherlands’ national team, coming off the bench to score in a 4-2 win over Germany in Hamburg. By the start of that 2020-21 season, with Lozano and Bergwijn both having left PSV, Malen was a force in Dutch football and his departure to a higher level of the game was inevitable.
Malen celebrates scoring for PSV against Granada in the Europa League in December 2020 (Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images)
Juventus, owing to their relationship with Raiola, were among the favourites to sign him but — ultimately — it was Dortmund who spent €30m in the summer of 2021, making him their biggest signing of a cautious summer.
This is when his career became more complicated.
Malen could cover all three attacking positions — centre-forward and both winger roles — but his greatest success had come through the middle. His most prolific season saw him work in combination with Zahavi — a goalscorer who could also drop deep, disrupt the defensive line and create — but in front of Mario Gotze and Cody Gakpo.
Multiplied by PSV’s natural strength in their domestic league, the environment was perfect for Malen. He was supported by players who could create opportunities for him but who could also contort opposing defences in a way that opened space.
For a skilful, direct goalscorer, it was an optimal environment — and one which has never been fully replicated at Dortmund, where he was nearly always played in support of a single forward, be it Erling Haaland, Sebastien Haller, Niclas Fullkrug or, most recently, Serhou Guirassy.
A further complicating factor was the departure of Jadon Sancho. The English winger was sold to Manchester United the same summer that Malen arrived. Notionally — and in the media — it made him the replacement for a player to whom he was not that similar.
Still, Dortmund admired his technical ability and reasoned that the imperfections in his game — a lack of defensive contribution and wavering intensity — were age-related issues that would be cured in time and helped by a change in environment. Internally, Malen was seen as having become a big fish in a small pond and as needing more competition to develop further. When he arrived at the Westfalenstadion, the squad he joined included self-starting young players Jude Bellingham and Haaland and he was presumed to be on a similar trajectory.
Three and half years later, that progress has never materialised. Malen has been a good player for Dortmund. He has even been a difference-maker in important games. In their difficult 2023-24 season, when Dortmund limped to fifth place in the Bundesliga despite reaching the Champions League final, he was his side’s joint top-scorer with 15 goals from 38 appearances.
Nevertheless, long periods of anonymity have been just as frequent and that duality of form has never gone away.
Malen lines up a shot during the Netherlands’ Euro 2024 semi-final loss to England in July 2024 (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Jurgen Koers covers Borussia Dortmund for newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten (RN). He tells The Athletic that Malen’s time at the club has been a “rollercoaster, with lots of ups and downs”.
“He has shown his potential to be a very good forward on many occasions,” says Koers. “At the same time, he’s been a disappointment for long periods as well. When he had his good form, he was one of the best strikers in the Bundesliga, but he also had weeks and even months when he didn’t score at all and could not be found anywhere on the pitch.
“He has had struggles with defending and has frustrated his coaches, but his biggest problem is that he’s quite one-dimensional. He has a very fast first five steps. He can accelerate so quickly and he can turn and shoot really fast, but he tries to shoot from everywhere. When he’s close to the box, he won’t pass to anyone. He’ll always shoot, shoot, shoot, but that’s really all he has to offer, so his set of skills is not very balanced and that has stopped his development.
“I’m pretty sure he can compete in the Premier League, but for Dortmund, it’s also a disappointment because there were times when his value was up to €40m-€45m (roughly £36m or $43m) and now they’ll be happy just to get back what they invested.”
In October 2024, journalist Kevin Pinnow, one of Koers’ colleagues at RN, described Malen as “consistently inconsistent: just like Borussia Dortmund over recent years. Malen is the perfect symbol of the BVB crisis”.
Therein lies important context: Dortmund’s identity on the pitch — all intensity and bombast — has weakened significantly over the past decade. Malen shared a pitch with Bellingham and Haaland, Marco Reus, Mats Hummels and Julian Brandt, but the surrounding systems have never been as strong as they were under Thomas Tuchel or Jurgen Klopp.
In the years since, under Lucien Favre, Marco Rose, Peter Bosz and Edin Terzic, very few players — Sancho, Bellingham and Haaland are the exceptions — who have come through Dortmund have evolved significantly.
So, while Malen’s development plateaued, it’s difficult to know where the club’s culpability for that ends and his responsibility begins.
Many of the criticisms that he has received — about attitude, application and perceived entitlement — have been aimed at many other players, too. At the time of last month’s winter break, the team were running for a collective average of 114.5 kilometres per game, only the 14th-highest distance per team in the Bundesliga. They are not athletically dominant.
(Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)
Beyond disappointing performances, Malen attracts more criticism for a variety of reasons — some reasonable, some less so. He can be quite introverted. He’s not as demonstrative as some of his Dortmund team-mates, past and present, and that does not play well with a crowd who like their footballers to be emotional.
His desire to leave Dortmund has been public for at least a year, too, and that has strained local relations. Since the end of 2023, he has changed agents twice in 18 months to get the move he wanted, leaving Rafaela Pimenta to join the Sports Entertainment Group, before then moving on to Wasserman, which still represents him.
That a buyer has been elusive describes the uncertainty surrounding Malen — particularly concerning what he contributes off the ball. Concerns about his defensive work rate and his low number of sprints per game have been noted by the mainstream media. Malen averaged around 19 high-intensity sprints per 90 minutes this season before his sale. During the same period, Jamie Gittens averaged just over 34 and Guirassy, the Guinean centre-forward, managed 27.
Perhaps that is symptomatic of a player who needs a new challenge. It’s possible, but Malen is habitually a rocks or diamonds footballer whose form can change with the wind.
His final starting appearance for the club typified his career in Germany. He was terrific in the first half against Wolfsburg in December. He menaced them down the right side, scored the game’s first goal with a beautifully cushioned volley, then contributed to the move that ended with BVB’s third goal. And then, in the second half, he vanished from the game. Seven touches in 20 minutes later, he was substituted off, having taken no more shots and attempted no more dribbles.
Have Aston Villa signed a talented player? Absolutely. But Donyell Malen is one of European football’s Rubik’s Cubes. Even now, at 25, nobody has quite worked him out. Unai Emery will be the next to try.
(Top photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)
