Coaches who have worked with the Denmark midfielder explain what makes him so special – and how he needed a kick up the backside to go from good to great

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Middelfart Boldklub is the sheer number of pitches. There is plenty of space to learn football here, in this affluent spot plum in the centre of Denmark, but there has to be the appetite, too. Around 600 youngsters aged between five and 17, taken from a wider community of around 37,000, are currently signed on and, if the number seems high, it is not exactly a hard sell these days. “The name means something now,” says Claus Hansen, the chairman. “When kids start playing football they think: ‘Christian Eriksen is from Middelfart – I want to play at Middelfart too.’”

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Hansen is speaking inside the smart, modest red-brick clubhouse, standing in front of a wall that displays shirts signed, at various points in his career, by his club’s most famous son. It is March and, by coincidence, the night Eriksen and Denmark will face Panama in a pre-World Cup friendly. The room will be packed as always, eyes transfixed on the television opposite, just as it is, Hansen says proudly, whenever Tottenham are on air.

On the way in a visitor must walk past the first pitch a five-year-old Eriksen ever used – these days a haphazardly kept quadrangle with small-sided goals dotted around. It was, at first, a well-trodden path. Three decades before him Hansen had begun kicking a ball around on the same turf, progressing to play for Middelfart’s first team alongside Eriksen’s father, Thomas.

We have a lot of good kids but nobody like Christian. He was the best player from the start, but he’d never say it Claus Hansen, Middelfart Boldklub

“A good player, skilful, played on the left side and made a lot of goals,” Hansen remembers of Thomas, a car parts salesman who still lives a few hundred metres away, the family home only just out of sight beyond the fields to the back. Christian would watch the senior side play – “When we came off he would always say, ‘You were good today,’ even when we lost” – but the realisation that he would, soon enough, become a cut above most others who tried their luck in a town much better known for its links to the oil industry came quickly.

“We have a lot of good kids but nobody like Christian: when he was small, everyone could see that he was special,” says Hansen, a jocular man with a ready laugh. “More than that, he was the guy who took care of all the others. He was the best player from the start but he’d never say it. Christian was, and still is, a good boy – nice, polite, friendly.”

The Eriksens’ bond was close. Thomas was one of Christian’s coaches and success was never far away. In 2004 Middelfart’s under‑12 side finished fifth in the whole of Denmark; that year his age group also finished unbeaten in the local championship of Funen – the country’s middle island – for the third time in four years. “We try and teach them that it’s nice to have the ball, nice to do something with it that can get us quickly to the other goal,” says Hansen, pointing to a list of “Blue Lines” that spell out the 70-year-old club’s history. “We are playing forwards, not backwards.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eriksen playing football in his parent’s garden in Middelfart with his father Thomas. Photograph: Poulsen Lars/Ritzau/Press Association Images

Eriksen was moving in that direction, too. “He was the best technical player I have ever seen, quite unique,” says Anders Skjoldemose, sitting in an office at the training ground of Odense BK. “But he was a team player too. Everyone could see he was the best individual but he was just as much the best at working for the team.”

These days Skjoldemose works in the top-flight club’s commercial department but in 2005, when a 13-year-old Eriksen made the 30-mile journey from Middelfart, he was at the heart of their youth operation. “Middelfart always have one or two players who are good enough,” he says, and that year they were Eriksen and his close friend Rasmus Falk, who now plays for FC Copenhagen. The pair came as a well-established double act.

Tonny Hermansen, the current head of Odense’s academy and a former coach of Eriksen at regional level, remembers a match between Middelfart Under-12s and their rivals TPI in which the latter were 4-0 up at half-time. Within 20 minutes of the second half TPI, who included Hermansen’s son, were 8-4 down. “Christian and Rasmus just got on the ball, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa, played it between them, put it in, took the ball and started again,” he says. “They made all the goals. If you ask the guys that played at the time, they still remember.”

Things continued in a similar vein at Odense, where their age group would win the national title in 2006. Skjoldemose, who coached them directly at under-16 level, quickly noticed “some kind of magical atmosphere around that team”, Eriksen’s seriousness and maturity setting him apart. “He was invited to trials abroad at places like Chelsea and Milan,” he says. “When he got back the guys in the dressing room would go: ‘How was it in Milan?’ but he’d just say, ‘Yeah, it was OK. Are you ready for another session now?’ Every other kid would have been walking in the sky.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christian Eriksen with Ajax in 2011. ‘They played the kind of football the family wanted,’ one his former coaches says. Photograph: VI-Images via Getty Images

Out on Odense’s pitch No 1, Eriksen would score free-kick after free-kick, rinse and repeat. Sitting next to Skjoldemose, Hermansen reaches for his laptop and pulls up footage from a technical skills DVD he made for the Danish FA in 2005, one that is still shown in seminars around the continent today. It showcases one star pupil in particular. “His touch on the ball – 13 years old!” he exclaims, as if watching Eriksen for the first time, as the youngster passes and dribbles, but the most familiar-looking piece of footage is of a technically perfect set piece, curled into the corner of the goal. Six of his 41 goals in the Premier League have come that way and there is a thrill in seeing the past presage the future so unmistakably.

It was 2008 when Eriksen, then 16, joined Ajax. Hermansen believes that, back then, he would have found first-team chances hard to come by at Odense – it was not the fashion, he says, for Danish clubs to trust youngsters, even exceptional talents. “It was very smart of them,” he says of the Eriksens’ choice. “I think they knew 100% what they wanted to do with Christian and how. Amsterdam is five or six hours’ drive away. They’ve always had Danish guys there and they also played the kind of football the family wanted.”

Morten Olsen first watched Eriksen play in November 2009, two months before his promotion to the Ajax first-team squad. Denmark’s under-17s were playing a friendly against France and Olsen, nearly a decade into his 15-year stint as the senior national team’s coach, found himself transfixed.

Some people said I was too hard, but I had to press another button, knowing the human being and the footballer Morten Olsen, former Denmark coach

“After five minutes watching, I might as well have gone home,” he tells the Guardian. “He was playing against a very physically strong side but the technique, the mentality, everything was obvious straightaway. From the beginning he was what I call a ‘wow’ footballer.” By the following March Eriksen was in Olsen’s squad; three months after that he would be the youngest player at the World Cup in South Africa, appearing against the Netherlands and Japan.

His path towards becoming the country’s footballing fulcrum was set, although there was the occasional bump in the road. If there was one thing lacking in Eriksen, his coaches at Odense had thought, it was a dose of fire and brimstone; his way from the very beginning had been to let the ball speak but Olsen thought that, playing for Denmark, that was lending itself too much to passivity. In October 2014 he fiercely reproached Eriksen after a Euro 2016 qualifying defeat by Portugal, saying the player was not managing to control games and that this was “not Ajax any more … not development”.

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“He’s the only guy in the national team I have criticised as much as that after a game,” Olsen says. “Normally I do it indoors but I said to myself that he could live with it – and that he had to live with it. Because of the kind of player he is, he needed to learn to live with the responsibility. Some people said I was too hard but at the time I had to press another button on Christian Eriksen, knowing the human being and the footballer.”

It was a carefully calculated kick up the backside. In Eriksen’s next 20 internationals he scored 15 goals, including the hat-trick in Dublin that in effect took Denmark to the World Cup. These days the team’s style, under the current coach, Age Hareide, is designed to put him in areas where he can hurt opponents to a degree none of his peers can match. “Even on a bad day Christian would run 13 or 14km for the team,” Olsen says. “So we can never really say he played a poor game. If he and the team can find form together, I think Denmark can surprise in Russia.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eriksen celebrates after scoring for Denmark in the play-off against Republic of Ireland which sealed a World Cup berth. Photograph: Lars Ronbog/FrontzoneSport via Getty Images

Whether or not they do, Eriksen will almost certainly be back in Middelfart later this summer, staying with his parents and dropping in on old friends. He will see the pitch Middelfart Boldklub constructed with the £35,000 they received on his move from Ajax to Tottenham; perhaps he will also pass by his old school, Lillebælt, whose “Cruyff Court” bears his name and was bequeathed during his time in the Eredivisie. An unassuming town and its equally demure offspring have served one another well.

“It would be great to have one like him every 10 years but nobody can promise that,” Hansen says. The regret is a trifling one at most; his club has already delivered a talent for the ages.