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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Roller95 on 2026-02-24 12:03:25+00:00.
In 2012, Danny de Jong took his own life. The end of the 23-year-old’s football dream was incredibly tough for him, his sister Angela says now. “For Danny, it felt like he’d failed twice.” She believes it’s important to share her brother’s story. “Even if it only helps one family or one boy or girl on their way.”
Angela de Jong (38) was in the car with her boyfriend at the end of last year when she randomly came across the podcast series De jacht op de jeugd. “My boyfriend immediately said: you should listen to this too,” says De Jong.
“I started doing that shortly afterward. Consciously on my own, for myself. After listening to episode 2, I sat on my bike, crying. There were so many similarities with my little brother’s story.”
This site’s five-part podcast series explores the football dreams of talented children and the pressure to perform and the high stakes that come with it. “I immediately recognized the impact that can have on a family,” says De Jong. “That was very confronting. Very intense.”
She wants to be clear: her brother Danny’s death wasn’t solely or directly a result of his shattered football dream. There’s no evidence of that, anyway. When the young twenty-something took his own life in December 2012, his family was left with countless questions.
“Danny didn’t leave a suicide note,” De Jong says. “He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. On the contrary, he bottled everything up. After his death, we thought so much, we worried so much. You’re constantly searching for answers you can’t possibly find.”
Still, listening to De jacht op de jeugd (The hunt ont the youth) opened a flood of memories of her brother and family life back then. At home in Dongen, Brabant, everything revolved around the ball.
“I think we lived up to the clichés of a real football family. Football was almost always on the TV. At the dinner table or in the car: it was just about football a lot.”
Her father was a good amateur player in his hometown of Dongen. Danny also had talent, which was clear from an early age. “He was very fanatical even as a child. A fierce little guy, driven by everything. When he started doing keepy-ups in the backyard, he wouldn’t stop until he reached a thousand.”
He didn’t get it from a stranger. “In our family, we were all quite ambitious and competitive,” says De Jong (38), the eldest of three children. “Achieving, winning. That was in everyone’s blood. Only my youngest brother wasn’t into football. He ended up playing rugby.”
Danny was about 10 years old when a letter arrived in a beautiful envelope. NAC youth scouts had recognized his talent on the amateur pitches of VV Dongen. The letter felt almost solemn: would he like to join the youth academy of the Breda professional club next season?
“My parents were incredibly proud and happy, of course. And so was Danny,” says De Jong. “In the beginning, it was all wonderful: he was picked up three times a week in a NAC van. It went really well, Danny really enjoyed it.”
“My father bought a new car especially for him during those years, a gas-powered one. He always wanted to be there when Danny played football. They drove all over the country together.”
De Jong emphasizes that she doesn’t tell this with regret or resentment. Without accusations either: her parents all did it with the best intentions. Before sharing her story with this website, she first consulted with her father, mother, and younger brother.
“They were okay with it. It’s my story, but they each have their own perspective on the events. We respect that in each other.”
De Jong herself saw a clear turning point in her brother’s youth. After three seasons in NAC’s youth academy, Danny was told he would be losing weight. "He was small for his age. At first, that wasn’t a problem, but when the other boys started growing, Danny lagged behind.
“In his final season, he played less often. He was increasingly on the bench. I think he already sensed then that he had to leave NAC.”
Still, that blow hit the Brabant teenager hard. “Especially when, after that summer, after returning to Dongen, he ended up in the B2 team. For him, that felt like a double failure. First, he wasn’t good enough for NAC, then they didn’t even consider him good enough for Dongen’s B1 team.”
“I think Danny really experienced that as a loss of face. As a kind of embarrassment, a failure. And there’s hardly anyone to put an arm around you.”
Quite the opposite, she thinks. “You know what some people are like, right? There’s also envy and gloating. People talk about you behind your back, like, ‘Well, he wasn’t that good after all.’”
“Or: ‘I never thought he was that special.’ I could tell Danny was struggling with that situation. He was truly unhappy. He became even quieter than he had been before.”
De Jong believes it’s important to share her brother’s story. “Even if it only helps one family or one boy or girl. Because I think there are so many people who experience this or recognize it. The fear of failure, the dark thoughts.”
“If you don’t get the right tools to learn to live with disappointment, it can be very difficult. No, not for everyone. But it is if you’re sensitive to these kinds of setbacks. When the feeling of failure keeps growing in your mind.”
She’ll never know for sure what was going on in Danny’s head. That’s why his story isn’t an indictment of the NAC youth academy, its youth coaches, or football academies in general.
“But what I did see up close with Danny: there’s little to no aftercare. I don’t think that’s changed: as a young boy, you get cut and that’s it.”
That culture is incredibly tough, De Jong observed with her brother, who is two years younger. “In his last season at NAC, he was sometimes allowed to come on as a substitute for just one minute. He had to sit on the bench for the rest of the match.”
“As a 13- or 14-year-old boy, you just have to deal with all that. But is that really so normal? I’m a mother myself now. I think: that’s no way to treat children.”
Of course, disappointments are part of life. Children also need to learn to be resilient, that’s all true. But I do wonder if this is the way to go.
“The idea often is: such a disappointment makes you stronger. But it doesn’t make you stronger if you don’t know how to deal with it. For Danny, that was a real struggle. And there wasn’t a safety net to help him through it.”
His parents did their best, De Jong says. But the teenager gradually became more withdrawn. “We had more and more difficulty reaching him. He did have friends, mind you, but boys that age don’t talk much among themselves either. Certainly not about a difficult topic like fear of failure, or about feelings in general.”
When Danny joined the second team of the amateur club Dongen, he seemingly blossomed. “He’d finally found his place, it seemed,” his sister says. “He was respected by his teammates. But life still wasn’t exactly easy.”
“He started studying sports economics in Tilburg, but even there, he struggled with performance. Danny had very low self-esteem. He didn’t really think he was good enough for anything. Even when he was doing well in his studies, he was afraid of failing.”
Things went wrong on a December evening in 2012, shortly after a team outing with his teammates from Dongen 2. The team went out to nearby Oosterhout, Danny was along, but he returned home alone late that evening.
“We don’t know for sure what exactly happened during those hours. Danny was home briefly that night, but the next morning he suddenly disappeared.” After an hours-long search, the young man in his twenties was found in a meadow near Dongen, not far from his amateur club’s fields.
“Everyone was in complete shock. At first, you couldn’t believe it, couldn’t grasp it. For the first few days, we were just preoccupied with wondering exactly what had happened and why. But you never quite get the full picture.”
The podcast felt like a piece of that puzzle, De Jong explains. Not the final piece, but an important part of Danny’s story. “I told my parents about it in detail and asked them a lot of questions. That was difficult, but in a way, it also felt good and comforting to talk about Danny.”
“I don’t think you’re born with a fear of failure. That fear develops over time. A major event, like his time at NAC, had a huge impact on Danny. Little was said about the impact that had on him.”
De Jong shares her story primarily to raise awareness. "A major disappointment can have a profound impact on someone’s life, especially if you experience it in your youth. Talk about it with each other. Ask how someone is really doing and how they feel now that their dream has been shattered.
“There are also many children who, for example, give up their favorite sport altogether. They’ve lost the joy. As a society, we have a responsibility to help young children with this. Not only the professional club has a role to play in this, but also parents, schools, and people at the local football club.”