Dutch Soccer Weirdos: Louis van Gaal
Part 1 of a new series on weirdos in soccer who are Dutch.
I’m trying something new over here at Soccer Stories. It’s an intermittent series called Dutch Soccer Weirdos. One of my first stories in this newsletter was about Johan Cruyff, the arch-Dutch Soccer Weirdo.
The other day, it dawned on me that the Netherlands, my birth country for whose national team I still root, has given the sport two things. One, modern soccer. Today’s game probably doesn’t look remotely the same without Rinus Michels conceiving of Total Football and Cruyff executing it on the field. Their influence is still everywhere.
The other thing is weirdos. The Netherlands has produced a lot of soccer weirdos. But much of their weirdness has been lost on anyone who doesn’t speak or read Dutch, because language barrier. That’s what compelled me to write about Cruyff, a first-ballot Hall of Fame weirdo.
Since writing that piece, I’ve learned some additional weirdo tidbits about Cruyff during his time as Barca manager from Simon Kuper’s superb new book, The Barcelona Complex:
Cruyff loved watching surgeries and regularly sat in on his players’ knee operations. Once, he observed a brain surgery.
Cruyff once promised star forward Hristo Stoichkov that he would pay him a large sum of money if the Bulgarian scored twice in the first half of a game. Stoichkov quickly got a goal and Cruyff immediately substituted him out of the match.
When Cruyff was fired by Barca after 8 tumultuous years, he yelled at the club vice president that God would punish the club for sacking him. Cruyff added that He, in fact, had already begun exacting His wrath. Reading between the lines: the club president’s grandchild had recently died.
Anyway, over the coming weeks or maybe even months, I will address the occasional Dutch Soccer Weirdo, interspersed with the regular soccer stories you’ve come to expect. In order to set the record straight and to ensure that other nations may partake in peak Dutch soccer weirdness. It would be selfish not to translate and share. Because this newsletter seeks to unify before all else.
Up first--or second, I guess: Louis van Gaal.
Let’s get weird.
Weird days are here again. Louis van Gaal has come out of the retirement he had grudgingly announced after his final job, with Manchester United, ended ignominiously in 2016.
Frank de Boer had made a mess out of yet another plum assignment--to the shock of absolutely nobody but himself and, I assume, the people who appointed him. De Boer’s Dutch national team, which ought to have been a contender at Euro 2020 (+1), instead lumbered to a round-of-16 elimination at the hands of the Czech damn Republic. So, absent a qualified Dutch alternative and no appetite for the appointment of a foreigner, the Dutch federation once again knocked on old Louis’s door, making the 70-year-old manager for a third time.
Oranje got a credible 1-1 tie away at Norway and hammered Montenegro and erstwhile group-leaders Turkey by a combined score of 10-1 in the last week of World Cup Qualifiers. (Under de Boer, the Dutch had lost to Turkey 4-2.) The team is once again in capable hands. Huzzah.
But the real gift is van Gaal himself. He is back. The paranoid egomaniac. The petty tyrant. The media’s indefatigable sparring partner. The pedantic and didactic oracle. The human highlight-reel of awkward YouTube clips. The man who has likely never made it through a press conference without voicing his disdain for anybody who might question him--particularly the people whose job it is to ask him questions.
He wasted no time at all in getting started, laying into one of his many longtime foes in the press, a tabloid reporter. After the 6-1 decimation of Turkey, van Gaal complained in the press conference that he wasn’t getting enough credit for the week that vaulted his team back into first place in UEFA Group G.
“You have no understanding of [soccer] at all,” he told the reporter in an exchange about defensive play. “You’re just a journalist.”
Deep down, van Gaal never stopped being a gym teacher. During a fairly unremarkable career as a central midfielder in the Dutch and Belgian leagues, van Gaal also worked in a school after practice, keeping his second job as he climbed the coaching ranks. During the 11 years he moonlit as a teacher, he worked and drove so much, that, forever on the brink of exhaustion, he reportedly totaled his car three times in 8 years.
As a teacher, he was a strict disciplinarian. That’s how van Gaal, the youngest of nine whose father died when he was only 11, had been raised. A van Gaal biographer speculates that his many older siblings saddled young Aloysius Paulus Maria--understandably nicknamed “Louis”--with an urge to prove his worth. And that the death of his father, a strong personality himself, drove him to become a father figure in his own right.
While his generation grew its hair long and wore ever wider pants, van Gaal kept things square. It’s how he would manage as well, predictably flying into a thundering rage over a jacket improperly buttoned or a boot left untied.
He rose to manage Ajax to consecutive Champions League finals and a place in the semifinals the following year, but he never stopped belittling and lecturing his young stars.
It was a habit he has never shaken, no matter the caliber of players he coached.
Yet Van Gaal saves his biggest helpings of rage for the press.
“Are you that dumb?! Are you that dumb?!” he famously bellowed in 1996, aiming his ire at a reporter who had asked about the leak of the news that Michael Reiziger and Edgar Davids would be leaving Ajax for AC Milan. “Am I the one who is so smart or are you that dumb? … And now I’m the arrogant, authoritarian asshole again, but these are dumb questions.”
When he was appointed to FC Barcelona, van Gaal faced its notoriously bloodthirsty press corps and responded in kind--in his catastrophically accented Spanish.
After star forward Rivaldo’s refused to keep playing on the left wing, van Gaal banished him from the team. That led to incessant questions, and van Gaal’s iconic “siempre negativa; nunca positiva” response to the reporter. “Tu eres muy malo.” You are very bad, he kept telling him.
There are, in fact, entire compilations of van Gaal’s bizarre quotes.
But van Gaal isn’t just awkward. He is also extraordinarily sensitive.
And for all his success and recognition, his skin never grew any thicker. He holds grudges for decades, picks fights under the thinnest pretenses. He has been known to end decades-long friendships over trivial matters he sees as betrayals. The death of his first wife to cancer at a young age didn’t soften van Gaal any either, although it did caused him to renounce his once-devout Catholic faith.
All his career, van Gaal has worn his loathing on his sleeve, like in this exchange with a journalist.
What’s your game plan tonight?
“Beat PSV.”
How will you do that?
“With 11 players.”
How will they play? Did you think of a special game plan?
“I’m not telling you. You’ll have to watch for yourself.”
One time, when van Gaal was working as an analyst on Dutch television, he learned from the anchor’s signoff--a plug for next week’s episode and its analysts--that he would no longer be involved. Van Gaal confronted the embarrassed anchor on live television, then denigrated his announced replacements and stormed off set as the cameras rolled and a nation watched on.
Yet those don’t even crack the top-5 of odd van Gaal moments.
Like the time, after winning the German league with FC Bayern Munich, when he shouted out all the women in the crowd and promised them a big kiss, then showed off his lederhosen as his players looked on behind him, embarrassed.
Or when van Gaal announced his return to Ajax through a cringeworthy poem.
“Here, at Ajax, lay my heart.
A club, fascinating, always apart.”
I’ll spare you the rest.
Then there’s his exchange with fellow manager Claudio Ranieri, who told van Gaal: “You are doing a fantastic job.” Van Gaal, without missing a beat, responded: “I am.”
Of course, this was towards the end of the 2015-16 Premier League season, when Ranieri was, unimaginably, leading little Leicester City to the Premier League title and van Gaal’s mighty Manchester United would place fifth and miss out on even Champions League qualification.
Van Gaal craves praise, no matter how much of it he has already accumulated. But Dutch soccer, which has always heralded process over product, already had its luminary: Cruyff. Van Gaal couldn’t bear to stand in another man’s shadow. So the two feuded for decades. They both wanted to be seen as the foremost thinker in the Dutch game. Or maybe it’s that van Gaal had never made it into Ajax’s first team back when Cruyff was its captain and more or less running the slow, giving the slick-passing but leaden-footed central midfielder no choice but to move to Royal Antwerp.
Yet Cruyff inarguably influenced van Gaal. Much of van Gaal’s playing philosophy was clearly built on Cruyff’s. So van Gaal, desperate to leave his own legacy, took a different approach. He was the detail-obsessed disciplinarian whereas Cruyff was laissez-faire and couldn’t even bestir himself to watch video of upcoming opponents. But no matter how much they diminished one another, their view of how the game should be played was pretty much identical. Their rivalry broke the Dutch managerial ranks into Cruyffists and van Gaalians, even though that Venn diagram was practically a circle in the actual execution of their ideas.
They might have gotten along famously, had they not been mortal enemies.
Soccer Miscellany:
Great writing on van Gaal, wanted more! Funny, pithy!