Move over David Beckham. Football’s newest best-dressed man is Canadian.
Jonathan David has graced the cover of FASHION for the magazine’s October 2024 issue.
“He has been described as a nightmare to play against, a silent assassin and the symbol for a new generation. But if you ask him about it, he’ll say he’s just doing his job,” writes Fashion’s Natalie Michie.
Yeah, we’d have to agree with that.
Soccer savant Jonathan David has a knack for scoring and a razor-sharp fashion sense. Known colloquially as “the Iceman,” he is pretty smooth, indeed. But there’s more to him than meets the eye.
Simply put, the role of a striker is to score goals — lots of them. Even those utterly unfamiliar with soccer can understand the weight this holds. In a team-based sport, it’s a big, sometimes-solitary burden to bear. Luckily, it’s a role that David is extremely skilled at. Once you witness his playing style — his never-cracking composure, confident boldness and impressive ability to score with both feet — his unmeltable moniker makes perfect sense. He has been described as a nightmare to play against, a silent assassin and the symbol for a new generation. But if you ask him about it, he’ll say he’s just doing his job.
To my surprise, the personality behind this larger-than-life player is calm and collected.
Canada’s joint all-time top scorer is one of the quieter players on Jesse Marsch’s squad, and while he has started a podcast with CanMNT teammate Cyle Larin — appropriately named ‘Strikers Corner‘ — and regularly scrums with the media for both club and country, the quiet and humble star rarely shows as much personality as displayed in the photos with the bold threads he’s rocking for October.
Those are $3,200 pants and $850 shoes he’s wearing.
“I like the fact that I don’t give much away,” David said in the magazine. “It’s hard to read me. I try to keep it that way.
“I’m a very calm guy; I don’t get ahead of myself. I just took the compliments and kept working toward the greater goal of mine, which was to become a pro.”
Despite the rumours every transfer window, David stayed at Lille this summer. It came as more of a surprise this time because LOSC president Oliver Létang had said in June that the striker could leave for the right offer. However, despite links to multiple clubs in Italy and England — Chelsea reportedly held talks with his reps — David is still a Lille player.
“It just didn’t happen,” David told The Athletic’s Josh Kloke after he became CanMNT’s joint all-time leading scorer with his 29th goal for his country in a 2-1 win over the United States earlier this month.
“There were a couple of offers and we just didn’t finish the deal, that’s it. I spoke to a couple of teams. I spoke with coaches. But ultimately [we] made the decision to stay.”
David said a couple of months ago on Striker’s Corner podcast with Larin that he was waiting for an offer to be put on the table from another club. Evidently, he did not feel that any proposals were the right move for him at this stage.
We’ll see David back on Canadian soil when CanMNT host Panama in a friendly on October 15 at BMO Field in Toronto.
