Tijjani Reijnders said he biked every day after school to a store in the centre of Zwolle and worked four hours as a cashier when he was 19.
He remembered carrying jarred pickles from the storeroom to the shelves, scanning groceries and coming back to training with the same tired legs other young players did not know about. "Tijjani, you really need to get a job. You’re an adult now. Maybe you could deliver newspapers?" he recalled his mother saying, and she filled out an application for Aldi before making him hand it to the manager. The manager called the next day and he got the job.
At the same time Reijnders had signed for PEC Zwolle, but his involvement on matchday was limited. He was on the bench for the first three games of the U19 season, then after one training session he found himself not even in the squad. His father, who had coached him at PEC, told him bluntly: "I wouldn’t pick you either. If you keep training like this, you can play for my team in the fourth division." Reijnders said he cried while riding his bike to school after being left out.
He kept working. "I was back at Aldi scanning groceries the next day," he said. His father did not stop there: the criticism hardened into instruction. "You have the talent, but you need to work harder," his father told him, and his mother agreed, "Tijjani …….. he’s right." Reijnders remembered thinking, "What is this? It’s a different world!"
The toughness in his household did not come from nowhere. Reijnders said his father had been a professional footballer in the 1990s, then opened a video rental store after retiring and later sold tactics boards to coaches. He coached both sons at PEC, and when the brothers were younger they were signed by Twente — Reijnders when he was about 12 and his brother when he was about 10. The club sent a massive taxi to their house every morning at 6 a.m., and their mother prepared juice boxes and sandwiches for the trip.
The concrete details Reijnders gives — the four hours at a cash register, the jarred pickles, the bench for the first three games — do the work a statistic never could. They stop the tidy story of a prodigy and replace it with the kind of daily grind that changes careers slowly: unpaid hours on a bike, the humiliation of being overlooked, the return to an evening shift at a supermarket.
The friction is sharp. He was a signed player at PEC Zwolle while still earning pocket money and practical experience behind a till. He had a father who knew professional football’s standards but who also ran a shop and a small-business life off the pitch. Those two worlds met most plainly the day his father said he would not pick him and Reijnders cycled home in tears.
That collision—between the ordinariness of supermarket shifts and the aspiration of top-level football—is the story Reijnders told. It explains how a player raised on 6 a.m. taxis and prepared juice boxes learned that aptitude alone did not substitute for the invisible work: running without the ball, showing up, grinding through the days others skip.
The immediate consequence is that the version of Reijnders now known at elite level carries those Aldi shifts inside it. The remaining question, and the single one that matters after the detail he supplied, is when and how the break from tills to first-team minutes actually came: the account stops after the return to Aldi and the rebuke, not at the moment his career irreversibly turned. That gap — the precise moment the work paid off on the pitch — is the next scene readers will want to see.
