Socceroos star Aaron Mooy on track to stay in Premier League after Huddersfield is relegated
Huddersfield Town is going down but Aaron Mooy is almost certainly heading up, bound for a bigger deal with another Premier League side next season.
Huddersfield Town is going down but Aaron Mooy is almost certainly heading up, bound for a bigger deal with another Premier League side next season.
As the Terriers stare down the barrell of relegation as soon as next week, it’s understood several top-tier rivals are on standby ready to circle in the English summer.
And the coach who helped remove the shackles at Melbourne City is backing the 28-year-old to play up to five years with a strong club.
John van’t Schip was central to transforming Mooy, once a deep-lying Western Sydney Wanderers midfielder, into an incisive creative outlet playing with the kind of freedom that made him a key Socceroos cog and a man in demand.
The Dutchman named Everton, Newcastle and Crystal Palace as the standard at which he believed Mooy would thrive.
“Aaron is a player who should go far,” van ‘t Schip said.
“He’s experienced and has shown he can play for the best teams.
“He is at the perfect age now to make a step to try to play for or five years for a really strong team. I’m sure it can happen and he can adapt easily. I would not be surprised.
“Of course he can go to, say, a Bundesliga club, but I think England really fits him.
“He was too good for the A-League and he’s shown he’s very important for Huddersfield with the way he plays.”
Mooy is, by most standards, also too good for the Championship.
Eyebrows were raised when he first went to Huddersfield on loan from Manchester City.
Surely his talents suited him to somewhere bigger?
But the move to Yorkshire turned out to be a masterstroke - every week he started and every week his worth to both the club and its fans - and its rivals - increased.
In his first season he won a clutch of awards including club player of the year and the Championship’s PFA team of the year.
Nicknamed ‘Pasty Pirlo’, the painfully yet endearingly shy orchestrator has been likened to Zinedine Zidane by British press and was even recently named as social media celebrity and former porn star Mia Khalifa’s top three favourite footballers of all time alongside Zidane and David Beckham.
Despite outside interest, Huddersfield’s promotion to the Premier League made it almost a no-brainer to sign permanently under then manager David Wagner.
His seamless subsequent transition meant the club wouldn’t have sold him for any amount, even after last year’s World Cup showing piqued the interest of West Ham and Newcastle.
Now, though, under new manager Jan Siewert, the Terriers need to cash up in readiness for a potentially long stint below.
Mooy’s contract expires in 2020 and it’s his ambition to stay in the top flight, though he’ll likely wait until the end of the season to consider his options.
Wherever he ends up, van ‘t Schip hoped Mooy would continue to play further up the field, as he did with City, and as Graham Arnold foreshadowed him doing with the Socceroos before injury ruled him out of January’s Asian Cup.
“Aaron was very strong in the final third – good passing left or right, he can feed players and always been very effective,” van ‘t Schip said.
“Of course he can play a little deeper but if you ask me for my opinion I really like him playing a little higher up.”
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