I don't think international football tells you a lot about players alone tbh. Proven to be a very unreliable indicator of who is good or not. Different pace of football with vastly different systems. Players barely spend any time together as opposed to club level so different characteristics are important.
Exactly.
There are a few problems with Frenkie:
1. each player has good and bad games. His actual ability is somewhere in the middle between those high and lows.
Yet, fans who believe in Frenkie rate him based on his best games = At Ajax in 2019.
So, he had 5 good games then and 100 meh matches after that, but people still think that Ajax is his real face and his real level and not 90% of other games.
Is Neymar that player from 2015 or that hot and cold player from all other years?
2. further, the sample from Ajax is too small. Teams sometimes hit a perfect combination of good players, a right coach, hot streak, momentum, good chemistry and they fly (like Lucho's Barca in 2015).
Is that their true level? No. That is the peak of their careers.
So, the sample of Frenkie in a CL with Ajax is very small, one KO tournament.
3. further, another factor, he was a rookie back then and when the opponents don't know you yet, you often have a free pass and more room to run, dribble and make wonders.
So, a part of Frenkie's magic from 2019 comes from that fact, he was given more freedom and no one took him seriously back then.
Now when teams know his tricks, some of his main strengths are neutralized.
Also, even in early 2019, I remember that he sucked against Germany and I had a few fights here on a forum.
But what happened? Germans obviously studied him, put a man-marker on him and he didn't have any room and he was just doing meh sidepasses for 90 minutes.
4. about NT team, as a few users said, with NT team, there is no chemistry, no time to gel together and everything is chaotic.
And often teams who have a lot of players who play together on a team level, have a huge advantage at an NT level against NT teams with 11 players from 11 different clubs.
Spain always had that advantage with Busi-Xavi-Iniesta-Pique-Fabregas-Pedro over other NT teams.
But, the same is with Ajax.
In 2019, a large part of their NT team was from Ajax where those players had a good chemistry and played in the same formation/system.
On top of that, his good games for NT came in a League of nations, which is a semi-friendly tournament like Supercup or something, where big teams play with 50% of strength but weaker teams and young players play at 120% and want to prove themselves.
Netherlands was meh for years before that and their new young team was flying and played with 120% against Germany, England and similar.
All in all, fans who are still judging him based on Ajax days are in a denial.
This is more or less the real Frenkie.
He could play better in a different team, but so can any single player.
Even Busi is better for Spain than for Barca where his teammates are a better fit for his flaws.
Does that make him a good player in 2021? Not really.
