Most top-level footballers spend their careers on planes, and think nothing of it. Dennis Bergkamp, one of the most technically gifted players ever to wear an Arsenal shirt, spent his entire eleven years at the club refusing to fly at all - a fear that developed after some frightening early experiences with air travel, and that no amount of coaxing from managers or teammates ever fully talked him out of.
In practice, it meant Bergkamp missed a meaningful number of Arsenal's away fixtures in European competition, wherever a flight was the only realistic way to travel in time for the match. It's the kind of limitation that would sink most careers at the highest level, where continental football is treated as a non-negotiable part of the job. Bergkamp's ability was good enough that Arsenal simply built around it, treating his availability for long-haul away trips as an exception to plan for rather than a problem to solve.
What actually defined him had nothing to do with travel logistics. Bergkamp's touch, vision, and control of a football were the kind that got compared, fairly, to the best players anywhere in the world during his prime - a forward who could kill a difficult pass dead in one movement and set up a chance in the next, timed to a fraction most players never develop. His goal against Newcastle in 2002, a turn that left a defender facing the wrong way entirely, remains one of the most replayed individual moments in Premier League history.
The nickname 'the Non-Flying Dutchman' - a play on the Wagner opera - started as a joke about the fear itself, but it stuck because it captured something true about him: a player whose genius was entirely unbothered by a limitation that would have derailed almost anyone else. Arsenal fans who watched him across the Wenger years rarely mention the flying at all when asked what made him great. It was always about what he did with the ball, not how he got to the stadium.