History of Memphis Depay: A lion with a thousand faces

It is impossible to explain the personality of Memphis Depay without visiting his town, Moordrecht, in the last years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. There, in a complicated environment, the Barça striker grew up.

There he forged his personality during an unconventional and difficult childhood: his Ghanaian father left home when Memphis was only three years old. Soon after, his mother, Cora Schensema, started a relationship with another man, but things didn't go well either: when his stepfather won the lottery, he too disappeared. His mother spent a few months in a mental health center and Depay lived with his maternal grandparents.

"Memphis grew up with the feeling that he had no one to talk to," explains Dutch journalist Sjoerd Mossou, who knows Memphis and his surroundings well. “He never had things easy: Moordrecht is the typical mediocre Dutch town, and then there were the racial conflicts, frequent at that time."

Memphis was a withdrawn and untrusting child. The constant fights with his stepbrothers did not help him to open up to others. “At school he also had a hard time. He was a different kid, and pretty soon he was tagged as a bad boy. Parents did not want their children to play with Memphis. They never invited him to a birthday party,” recalled his mother in a report published in the newspaper 'AD'. Those years forged a tough, distrustful, narcissistic and rebellious Memphis, a personality that has been tempered over the years. Lately, religion plays a fundamental role in his life (his mother acts as a Protestant leader in his community, in the town of Wesepe, very close to the farm where she lives in the centre of the country, which Memphis gave her five years ago.

"He is a special boy, with a very strong personality," confirms Mossou. “When he came to United in 2015 he used to say that his goal was to be number one in the world and that he was not content to be just another player. But over time he has tempered his ambitions as he matured. He realized that aiming to be number one in the world just meant putting more pressure on himself.”

Music and clothes 

But his personality goes much further: he is interested in fashion and music, but not as a simple listener or consumer. He has his own clothing brand, MDC (Memphis Depay Clothing) whose symbol is an image inspired by his celebrations, with his hands behind his ears, challenging the fans and especially his detractors. On a musical level, Depay has published several tracks as a ‘rap’ singer.

He debuted in 2018 with the album called 'No Love' and in one of his last songs, 'Big fish', released in November 2020, he sent a message to the Manchester United owners. "I need money, like the Glazers," the lyrics read.

That profile has built an image around Memphis that does not always correspond to reality. “From the outside, he sometimes looks like an NBA player: expensive cars, big houses, jewelery, and so on. He likes that style, it's undeniable,” adds Sjoerd Mossou, who also explains why the Dutch seem to have a love-hate relationship with Depay. "In the Netherlands we have a saying - 'behave normally, that's crazy enough.' People here prefer standard behavior, which doesn’t stray outside the box, so imagine how many Dutch people view Memphis; like a weirdo. With Frenkie de Jong the opposite happens.”

The symbol of the country, a lion, occupies Depay’s back in the form of a tattoo. But not everything that surrounds Depay is frivolous: In 2019 he started a foundation that bears his name and that works to help deaf-mute and blind children in Ghana, the country where his father was born. His circle of trust is very closed: there are barely ten people he trusts blindly, including a 'coach' with whom he has worked since his time at PSV.

“Deaf and blind to the world. That means a lot to me: people will always have an opinion and I am always open to criticism, but in the end I am the one who makes the decisions in my life,” he said.