It’s not every day that a 16-year-old becomes a regular part of a first team in a 2nd division club, but Pachanga Kristensen is not like many other players his age.
Pachanga initially started in AB’s youth academy as a 6-year-old and returned to the club as a 14-year-old in the summer of 2021. But now – just two years later – the young centre-back has already secured his first professional contract and made six appearances for AB’s first team this season, including an entire division game against FC Roskilde and 120 minutes in the third round of the cup against FA 2000.
Pachanga’s decision to return to AB kickstarted what looks to be a very promising football career.
“I decided to come back to AB because they played in a higher league and had a better academy,” he says.
“I got playing time almost every weekend here in AB, so I just chose to stay here, and it ended perfectly,” he elaborates.
Pachanga also attributes his time at AB’s Academy to helping him adapt to senior football.
“At [former club] GVI, for example, you didn’t have to travel by bus to matches,” he says. “It wasn’t as professional as in AB for U17 and U19, where you traveled up to four or five hours to matches, got your meal three and a half hours before the game, and where people around the team took good care of you. That was the biggest difference.”
Newly appointed head coach of AB, David Roufpanah, had the opportunity to see Pachanga during a training session in the summer and chose to take him on the first team’s training trip to Hamburg, Germany a week later. Soon after, the talented defender was invited to become a permanent part of the first team.
“Pachanga is a very exciting talent from our own academy,” Roufpanah said at the time.
“He is a strong player who already has a good understanding of the game. A central defender develops a lot during his career, and that development especially comes with more experience. It will be very interesting to see how good Pachanga can become, especially as he is already part of the first team at such a young age.”
The transition to senior football has brought with it many experiences. Pachanga has found that training and matches are much more physical than at an academic level, and he is getting used to the new high-tech equipment that the first team uses to track performance. He has also had to adapt to working with more experienced players, many of them with significant professional experience from different countries.
Both on the trip to Hamburg and in the dressing room, Pachanga finds the diversity of experience very useful.
“We have a (new) young generation now and we have bought players,” he says. “We don’t just have players who have come up through [AB’s] youth system. This is a big change from before. You can really feel the international dressing room. You really feel it with all the languages and different cultures, and it’s really fascinating.”
“It’s good to get to know other cultures and talk to different people than you do every day when you live in one country.”
In fact, Pachanga is one of six academy players in this “new generation” of AB talents in the first team, along with defenders Christian ‘ET’ Troelsen and James Iheme (on loan), midfielder Hakim Sighaoui and forwards Ilias Namli, Frederik Lindgaard and Emil Mygind (the latter is recovering from a long-term injury). Five of these players are 20 years old or younger.
But as the clearly youngest in the group, Pachanga gives even more hope for academy players that they can also realize their dreams in AB – perhaps earlier than they think.
“They were surprised. They didn’t understand it at first,” Pachanga says about his academy mates’ reactions when he was called up to the first team.
“They thought that maybe I would have a training session with them in two years or something like that. But they couldn’t imagine that it would happen so quickly.
“It wasn’t something [normal] back then when I came to AB. You couldn’t just get a contract as a young player. It was much more difficult to train with the first team. So now the younger players will think that it is more possible than, for example, when I came to AB.”
