Digital Cover | Malick Thiaw: For The Love of Defending

“I think from the stories I’ve been hearing, I was a pretty stressful kid,” he tells me, sitting back slightly, as though amused by the gap between the boy he is describing and the footballer people now see. “I was always making a lot of noise. I was wild. That’s what I’d say. I knew what I wanted.”

This is not quite the opening you expect from one of the most composed young defenders in Europe. Thiaw, now 24 and already a pivotal cog in both the Newcastle United and Germany national team, plays the game with a kind of large, quiet authority. He does not seem especially interested in looking busy.

He won’t mind me saying that he isn’t a defender of unnecessary flourishes, nor one who mistakes aggression for presence. He has that very modern centre-back quality of appearing to move at a slightly different tempo to everyone else, even when the match around him is going very fast indeed.

But before all of that, before Schalke, Milan, Newcastle and Germany, there was a noisy child kicking a ball against a wall in Düsseldorf. “My first experience [of football] was actually playing football in the streets with my dad and friends,” he remembers. “As an event, I think in 2006 there was the World Cup in Germany. I was around four or five years old. I just remember everybody going to watch the games in the streets.”

He recalls this with the looseness of a memory that is not quite a scene, but more a feeling. People outside, football everywhere, Germany in summer, the kind of thing a child half-remembers, but somehow carries with them for years.

Thiaw’s father, a former goalkeeper in Senegal, was the first person to put the game properly in front of him. He was also, from the sound of it, not easily impressed. “My dad was my first coach,” he says. “He always gave me advice on what I could do better and what I was doing well. He was not really satisfied with us after some games, and he made sure to let me know.”

Still, perhaps some of that last-line seriousness passed down. The understanding that football, for all its freedom, eventually asks you to be responsible.

At first, Thiaw wanted nothing to do with defending. Which is fair enough. Very few children start out dreaming of shepherding someone towards a touchline.

He began as a striker, then moved into midfield, wanting the same things most talented boys want: goals, assists, the ball, influence. “I always wanted to score, to assist, to influence the game more in an offensive way,” he says. “So I never really wanted to become a defender.”

Then, when coaches first tried him at centre-back, he did not exactly stage a rebellion. But his feelings were not hidden. “I didn’t refuse to play in defence, but it was clear from my body language that I didn’t want to play there. I wanted to play more offensively.”

Then, at 17, a coach at Schalke sat him down and showed him something different. With his body, his timing, his ability on the ball, centre-back was less a compromise, and more a route. “He showed me that with the abilities I had, in this position I could really go pro,” says Thiaw. “So I trusted him.”

It is one of those small redirections that, from a distance, can look like fate. A forward becomes a midfielder. A midfielder becomes a defender. The thing he resisted becomes the thing that defines him. “Then I fell in love with defending. Now, to be honest, I don’t want to play any other position.”

The midfielder has not entirely disappeared, though. You can see it in the way he receives the ball, in the way he seems happier than most defenders to invite pressure before taking the simple option.

This is often what people mean when they talk about the modern centre-back: someone who can defend space, defend the box, pass under pressure, carry the ball, and not look like any of it is causing them great inconvenience.

The word composure follows Thiaw around. In person, too, there is something measured about him. Not cold or shy exactly, but careful in the right ways. He listens and then answers without rushing. There is a steadiness there that feels quite rare in football, an industry not exactly built on the art of keeping things small.

It’s worth noting that our meet-up comes less than 12 hours after he was called up to Julian Nagelsmann’s 26-man Germany squad for the upcoming World Cup, so you’d have forgiven him for being somewhat giddy. Yet, he’s as relaxed as ever.

The interesting thing is that he does not see calmness as the opposite of competitiveness. In fact, he seems to see it as the thing that allows competition to survive properly.

“I love competition,” he says. “With everything I do, even the small things, there has to be competition. That’s how I am.” Then he draws the line himself.

“If you say you’re competitive, it doesn’t mean that you are wild under pressure. It just means you want to win, but you can still show calmness and relaxation. I still want to win the game, I still want to win my duels, but I don’t express it in a way where I have to go wild.”

There are, as he later puts it, different kinds of centre-backs. The crazy ones, and the composed ones. Both can work. Both can become great. But Thiaw belongs very clearly to the second category. Quiet intensity rather than theatre. A defender whose strength seems to come from the fact that he does not need to keep proving it outwardly.

Schalke gave him his first real education, but it also gave him a fairly brutal introduction to the adult game. In his early years there, the club went down, then came back up. He saw the romantic version of football and the painful one almost side by side.

“I experienced the highs and lows very early in my career,” he remembers. “That definitely gave me strength. It showed me both sides of football.”

His debut came just before the world closed in. The final game before football was halted by COVID-19. A few minutes at the end, sent on to hold a result. From there, his career became a kind of European education in defending. Germany taught him aggression. Italy taught him detail. Milan, with all its ghosts and gold frames and old defensive gods, gave him a new appreciation for the position itself.

“In other cultures, it’s more about scoring goals that you celebrate,” he says. “But in Italy, they also celebrate how you defend. It’s all in a unit: the back four, with the goalkeeper. Everybody works together, we celebrate together.”

This is where Thiaw’s love of defending seems to have deepened into something closer to pride. Not just the satisfaction of a good tackle, but the collective pleasure of denying something. “That’s why I really got the passion and the love for clean sheets,” he says. “To have a clean sheet was really important. I didn’t have this view before.”

Now in the Premier League, the education has become quicker, louder, more relentless. “There is much more intensity [than other leagues]. Better opponents as well, quality-wise. The Premier League is by far the toughest league I’ve played in.”

Still, Thiaw carries previous lessons with him. The German schooling, the Italian detail, the Premier League speed. That is what makes him feel like such a neat example of the modern defender: not just a ball-player or an athlete, not just a stopper, but a little bit of everything. 

It’s worth remembering that Thiaw is still only 24, which feels worth repeating, because centre-backs tend to grow slowly and gather authority over time. They learn through mistakes, through strikers they should not have followed, spaces they should not have left, tackles they should not have made. Thiaw knows this. He is ambitious, but not deluded by impatience.

“Sometimes you want things so quickly that you don’t give yourself the time you maybe need – especially as a defender, a lot of things come through experience,” he says. “If you see some older defenders, maybe they’re not that fast anymore, but they solve problems through the brain and through experience.”

There is Germany, too. The weight of that shirt, and of that position. Beckenbauer, Hummels, Boateng, Rüdiger. Thiaw mentions Hummels and Boateng as examples he goes back to watch.

He speaks with Rüdiger often, sometimes after games, sometimes about specific situations. A different personality, certainly, but perhaps that is the point. Football does not produce one kind of defender. It produces temperaments. “That’s what I hope for,” he says, when asked whether he feels part of a new generation of German centre-backs. “That’s what I’m working for as well. After my career, I want to look back and say I did something for Germany in my defending position.”

Near the end of our chat, I ask how Thiaw wants to be remembered. He does not take long to find it. “As a player, first and foremost, I would say as a great defender. Hopefully one of the best in my time and generation.” Then comes the more revealing bit: “I also want to be remembered as a good modern centre-back, but one who fought to keep clean sheets and was not soft.”  

Modern, but not soft. It’s a neat little phrase, and probably the clearest definition of Thiaw’s game. The modern defender can pass, carry, read, adjust and speak multiple tactical languages. But still has to defend. They still have to enjoy the ugly work and feel something when the ball does not go in.

This is the quiet force of Malick Thiaw. Not the absence of aggression, but more the organisation of it and, above else, a real love for the art of defending.

Photography by Lewis Taylor / Styling by Jacob Levine