The tattoo question is often the last, desperate throw of the interviewer’s dice in the search for colour, for a hint of difference. On this occasion, a six is rolled. The conversation with Marco Bizot does not need it — the AZ Alkmaar goalkeeper and king of clean sheets is engaging, expressive company — but as it draws to a close… well, a splodge of ink snakes up his arm into his shirt and you never know your luck.
Advertisem*nt
“Oh my God,” he says. “I think I’m addicted. I got this crazy idea that I wanted to be half and half, completely covered on one side of my body, my leg and my arm. I thought it would be very funny if people could see me in the swimming pool or on holiday and if I’m standing one way they see this totally tattooed guy and they think, ‘hey, this is bad ass’. And then if you look from the other side, you see nothing. It’s still clean.”
We think about that for a little while and about what, if anything, it might mean. “Maybe you can see it as two parts of a life,” Bizot says. “Most football players are tattooed nowadays and I am as well. And then in the other part of life, I’m just a normal person with a lovely wife and a kid. It’s a little bit like a story. It could be a good picture.” Bizot is a warm, generous man who laughs a lot and he does it now.
Soon enough, he is stripping for photographs behind a wall at AZ’s training ground, 15 minutes from Amsterdam, with windmills in the distance and trees all around. Here is his story, some of it etched on his body, some spoken from his lips: the bad-ass player and the family man, the dove and the designs, the song lyrics, the lips, the traveller, the human rights activist, the conservationist, the experience and the struggle. The builder.
The reason we are speaking is because later this week, AZ Alkmaar play Manchester United in the Europa League. It is a dead game — both sides have already qualified from Group L — but Bizot is in demand. He has already kept 21 clean sheets in the league in the calendar year, equalling a Dutch record set by Ed de Goey in 1991, and with 18 months left on his contract, is being scouted by clubs in the Premier League.
“I hope that’s the next step for me,” he says. “It would be the best way to make myself better. It would be amazing to be part of a team in the Premier League and just to live in England. Plenty of good Dutch keepers have played over there, so hopefully clubs will think ‘hey, a Dutch keeper is interesting!’ I think our mentalities are the same, the Dutch and the English; hard-working, professional, open and friendly. Let’s see.”
He is making a decent fist, catch and kick of it. Alkmaar’s 3-0 victory over Zwolle last weekend was Bizot’s 12th clean sheet in 16 Eredivisie matches this season. His team have conceded eight league goals, which is a very miserly and pretty astonishing record. They are second in the table, three points behind Ajax, who they host on Sunday. They were also Bizot’s first club, where he clambered through the ranks before his pathway was hindered.
“We’ve had a perfect season this year,” he says. “Not only this year, actually, but the last couple of years. We were fourth last season, third before that. This one is not finished yet, but it could the best yet.”
Can they overhaul Ajax? “It’s going to be difficult,” he says. “You can see the difference in the financial situations between the clubs and they’re a fantastic team, but if everything falls into place, we have a chance. We’re going to have a shot for it, of course.”
What’s most interesting about Bizot is not just how good he is, but how rounded. He is not simply defined by his profession. Born in Hoorn, he started at Ajax when he was eight or nine; the cliche would be to say it is all he ever knew, but there were competing plans, spasms of self-doubt. “You dream about football, but it’s also so far away from you when you’re young and sitting in your bedroom,” he says.
“I was at Ajax, but you live by the moment and go with the flow. You don’t think you’re good enough or that you have so much talent that you’re going to be a professional. You never think about it like that. I was thinking about architecture and culture. I was thinking about building houses, art and design. Sure, it was football, football, football every day, but it was only when I got to 15, 16, or 17 that I thought, ‘hey, maybe there’s something other kids don’t have’.”
Advertisem*nt
Er… architecture? “I’ve just always had this creativity, ideas,” he says. “I love to do it by myself, as well, building things in my house. A crazy example: when you live in a new house, there’s no soul in it, no real nice cosy feeling because everything is modern, so with my wife we always think ‘how can we get this really cool and cosy?’ So we ordered lots of old bricks from Belgium and started building a wall in our home and made the place — wow — awesome.
“We ordered these big old beams — 400-500kgs, two or three metres long — and put them up inside. It’s like the feeling of home. I’ve always had a creative mind to make special things and it gives you a good feeling to do it yourself. It’s something I could take up again when I’m finished. You think about it because in football you never know when the end might come; break a leg and it could be over. Maybe I’ll buy an old house or a plot and I’ll start building at my own tempo.”
Football is a bubble, but Nancy, his wife, helps with the worldview; Bizot is both the bad ass and a human being. “She is studying human rights law on the Open University and helping vulnerable people who come to the country,” Bizot says. “That’s what she does as a voluntary job at the moment; helping refugees make their way into society. It’s a bit harder now with Jack, our six-month-old son, but she loves what she does.
“Before we had Jack, we lived in Amsterdam and we were part of a ‘buddy’ system, a training programme where you help someone; you get a buddy, someone who is having a hard time or struggling to settle in Holland and you meet them once a week, try to make them feel good about things, help with paperwork, that kind of thing, because everything is new for a guy or girl coming here. That’s something we love to do as well.
“My buddy was originally from Eritrea and we’d meet up and do nice stuff together. I showed him a bit of the city, we did some sporty things, talked about his background, just helping him out. Nancy helped a family with three kids. For us, it’s a great thing to do, something we care about. As a player, you have privilege and advantages. My wife and I want to give something back to the community.”
This does not conform to the perception many of us have about footballers, the lifestyle, the trappings. “Correct, but that’s not me or where my interests are,” Bizot says. “I like having a nice safe house and a good car, but I’m different to other players, I know that. Maybe keepers are even more different! But I’m a guy that’s approachable; that’s a really important word, I think. I can understand fans.
“I love it when people say, ‘good or bad, we can talk to him in a normal way’. We’re not on a statue. It’s not my opinion that some people are higher or lower than others. We’re all on the same level, we’re all human and we all have emotions. We might have a different job to people who work from 9 to 5, but we’re not on a pedestal. We come home to our families. We need to make money to give our kids food. We’re all the same in this.”
Advertisem*nt
He has considered other areas where he might make a difference. “I’m really interested in conservation, about the oceans and plastic pollution,” he says. “I’m looking for the right moment to put my voice forward. I love to dive, I’ve got my licence and everywhere I do it, 20-30 metres down, you see so many different things going on. It’s really bad. I try not to use too much plastic, I think about where to throw it away and when to refuse it.”
In a couple of weeks’ time, he, Nancy and Jack will be in Iceland for Christmas, in a cabin in the forest fending for themselves. “We’re going to make a road trip there, take a car, go for a ride and explore,” he says. “It’s the winter break and we’re going somewhere even colder — it’s really stupid! Not a lot of people would do it — everybody else will be in Dubai in the sun and we’ll have minus 20, but we’re a little bit crazy like that.
“Nancy and I have been together since we were kids. It was young love; I love this kind of story! We’re in the same world, we have the same interests and we like to explore new cultures, places that aren’t standard. We did a road trip to Sri Lanka, with beautiful nature. We went on safari to South Africa and slept inside little cabins. We went to Abu Dhabi and lived in a tent in the desert for four or five nights — a little bit scary sometimes!”
There have been plenty of moments when Bizot’s professional existence has been discomforting. With Ajax, it came when he had to leave. “I had the chance to play in the main squad, but not as first-choice goalkeeper, so I thought it was best for me to get games, experience, so I went on loan,” he says. “You leave the club and you also leave your home for the first time in your life. You’re on your own; everything is new, it can go wrong or it can go right.”
After a season at Cambuur, he moved permanently to Groningen and then, in 2014, to Genk in Belgium. We discuss this during our chat about tattoos. “I’ve got this big No 1 on my right arm,” he says. “For sure, that stands for goalkeeping. I did it when I was at Genk. I had a really tough time there and didn’t like it all. I was thinking to myself, ‘hey, do I actually like goalkeeping?’ I thought about doing something else.
“In three years, I played almost 80 games there so that was good, but it didn’t go the way I wanted it to. I just fell back. It was difficult to adapt and we felt pretty lonely. Things were falling apart a bit. At those moments, when you’re falling, when you’re at the bottom, you think about yourself and wonder whether this is what you want, does it give me the joy and happiness I need? You’ve got to find positive things.
“So I thought, ‘f*ck, yeah, I’m here to develop myself, not only in a sporting way, but to become a better person, to learn from everything’. You’ve got to climb out of it. So that’s what the No 1 means; that I’m a keeper, I’m good enough to do this, I’m strong. The harder you fall, the stronger you become and I can say right now my mindset is full power. It’s important for to keepers to have the mentality that you’re unbreakable.”
Advertisem*nt
There is a splash of red close by. “That’s the kiss of my wife,” he says. “It’s actually her lips — she kissed me and I tattooed it.” He gazes down and around it. “The crown is like part of the No 1, there’s a lot of Polynesian stuff, just because I love those geometric designs.” There are other, more private things, “some lyrics on my legs and ribs,” which he is reluctant to talk about beyond saying: “This is not the full story and families are always complicated. It’s sad.”
On his left side, there is just one tiny mark, “hidden in my sock,” he says. “It’s like how a child would draw a scar and it’s really meaningful to me. Nancy has complex regional pain syndrome, a chronic disease of the nerves inside her ankle, and it gives her a lot of pain every day. She had an operation in exactly the same spot and has exactly the same scar, so it was my way of saying, ‘I want to feel your pain as well, I want to take it away from you.’”
A regular in the Holland squad but not yet capped — “it’s a huge ambition,” he says — Bizot is looking forward to the opportunity of Old Trafford. In the reverse game, the two sides shared a goalless draw (yet another clean sheet). “There’s no pressure,” he says. “As a really young, inexperienced team, it’s a good chance to just show who we are and how we play. That’s what we want to do. To play there will be amazing. Maybe you only get one chance in your life.”
Edwin van der Sar, who played under Sir Alex Ferguson for six years, was an early goalkeeping hero. “He was the No 1 keeper at Ajax when I was really young and he was always my idol,” he says. “I remember one time he came to our hometown to a little sports store. I had a chance to get my picture taken with him. I remember that day so well. It was really fun, ‘wow, he’s here’. It was awesome for me as a kid. His career was amazing.”
Maybe Bizot’s will follow a similar pattern. You get the feeling there will be more chapters to his story, more bits of his body to shade in. Maybe it will reflect his next move, or the total number of his clean sheets this year, each one of which is “amazing, fantastic, a bonus, not the main thing, but an extra”.
“I still have a few spots to fill up,” he says. “I’ve been getting tattoos since I was 17 and once you start, you don’t stop — more and more and more. It’s not nice, it’s not a good feeling, it hurts really bad! But when you finish, you get that adrenaline and that’s why you go on. Half and half is the goal I set myself. I’m not done yet.”
