In August 2021, Louis van Gaal was elected as the new head coach of the Netherlands men’s national football team. He was seventy years old, hadn’t trained in five years, his last experience at Manchester United had been tumultuous from start to finish and – although not yet publicly known – he was already being treated for severe prostate cancer. However, he left his home in the Algarve to coach Holland for the third time.
As a club manager, Van Gaal has won it all: seven national championships (four in the Netherlands, two in Spain and one in Germany), several national cups, a UEFA Cup, a Champions League and an Intercontinental Cup. The Dutch national team did very poorly the first time, failing to qualify for the 2002 World Cup, and much better in 2014 when his Netherlands were eliminated on penalties by Leo Messi’s Argentina in the semi-finals. Today Van Gaal’s Holland plays again – this time in the quarterfinals – against Messi’s Argentina.
When we talk about Van Gaal we almost always mention that he is a rigid, grumpy man and in a way even dictatorial and authoritarian in the way he runs the teams, someone who has – in his own words – “structure, Rules and discipline likes. A stern and demanding manager like few, one whose antics or abrupt and harsh responses to journalists were widely narrated, particularly in his final years at Manchester United, and his players’ skills were less talked about on the field.
In recent months, and especially in recent weeks, Van Gaal has also made himself known for something else: for making jokes and even called a celebration dance, but also to have set up a team with a conservative but very effective game.
However, he remains a sometimes contradictory figure, and one that is often difficult to define and frame: he has been portrayed, for example, as a “seventy-year-old innovator”, but also as an inflexible and dogmatic coach who nonetheless frequently changed forms and approaches. One of those coaches who dislike certain players or groups and, as seems to be happening with the current Dutch national team, others instead follow with respect and sometimes almost devotion. One who retired five years ago and now doesn’t rule out coaching other national teams again.
Van Gaal in 2010 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Born in Amsterdam in 1951, Van Gaal tried to be a footballer, but without great results: despite an unusual ability to see and understand the game, his technical qualities and athletic ability left a lot to be desired. He then became a physical education teacher, assistant football coach and, by the age of 40, coach of Ajax. There he proposed a game with complex tactical premises based on the imaginary division of the field into many triangles, the importance of controlling possession and a systematic offensive approach to the game.
With a promising squad of young and immature players, Van Gaal won the 1995 Champions League and lost to Juventus on penalties in the final the following year. The fact that in those years the door to Van Gaal’s office had written “Quality is the rule of chance” is often cited.
From Ajax, Van Gaal went on to coach Barcelona where he won two championships, where he reached the semi-finals of the Champions League and where he had two coaches among those who were with Pep Guardiola as a player and José Mourinho as an assistant would have shaped the football of this century the most. However, Van Gaal had problems with players, management and fans, which led to him leaving the team and taking over the Netherlands for the first time.
Things went badly, he returned to Barcelona, things went badly there too and in 2005 he returned to the Netherlands to AZ in Alkmaar, with whom he won the championship in 2009, 28 years after the predecessor. He then became coach of FC Bayern Munich, with whom he reached the Champions League final in his first year (loss to Mourinhos Inter) and won both the championship and the German Cup there. However, he was fired midway through the second season.
The anecdote from that time is well known, told by striker Luca Toni, according to which Van Gaal, whose sexual references in football are numerous, lowered his trousers and underpants in front of the team to show his masculinity.
Re-elected coach of the Netherlands, he survived the quarter-finals in 2014 with a risky, high-profile decision, replacing the goalkeeper just before penalties. He was then eliminated again on penalties (without first substituting the goalkeeper) in the semifinals by Argentina.
Van Gaal in 2014 (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
Commenting on the experience at Manchester United, which almost ended in mutiny among its players, the Guardian wrote that Van Gaal immediately conveyed the feeling of being “a dour general being overtaken by events, a Napoleon who is being overwhelmed by his bombastic theories.” is mocked downfall and its cartoonish ways».
Van Gaal in 2014 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Apart from a few statements and anecdotes here and there, from the summer of 2016 to 2021, Van Gaal was mostly referred to as a former coach who really seemed to have his days in football behind him. However, after the Netherlands’ disappointing result at Euro 2021, where they were knocked out by the Czech Republic in the round of 16, and after Frank de Boer was kicked out, Van Gaal was called back to coach Holland and said: «If I had been instead of the Dutch FA I would have undoubtedly chosen. I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it for Dutch football.”
Since Van Gaal trained for the third time, the Netherlands have not lost a game and qualified in a difficult group with Turkey and Norway. He assumed a defense with three central defenders instead of two central defenders and two full-backs and a waiting set of football as a reaction to the opponent. Two elements that stand in stark contrast to Holland’s ruthless football tradition and the first teams of Van Gaal, who has been described as ‘a Cruyffian hated by Cruyff’, the symbol of Dutch ‘total football’ and creativity.
It was only in April, a few months after successfully qualifying, that Van Gaal opened up about prostate cancer during a Dutch TV show. It was later revealed that unbeknownst to the players, he also happened to be carrying a catheter and colostomy bag under his coat, which is why he had turned up for the Netherlands v Norway playoff in a wheelchair.
In the Netherlands, which led to the World Cup in Qatar, Van Gaal found conditions similar to those at Ajax in the 1990s: a very young side, with a third of the players under the age of 23, with some very strong, established players and talented – like defender Virgil van Dijk and midfielder Frenkie de Jong – but many others nowhere near the same level. Statements and attitudes from Dutch footballers suggest a great deal of unity and trust in Van Gaal’s ideas and leadership.
Van Gaal in Qatar (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Van Gaal has also made himself known in recent months by how and how much he has taken a stand on the World Cup in Qatar, unlike many other coaches. He said that the Dutch fans who wanted to boycott them were right (and later added that he wanted to reach the final though, to convince them to at least watch that one) and back in March he had already defined these World Cups as “ridiculous” and adds that FIFA says “bullshit”. .
Van Gaal is the oldest manager at this World Cup and one of the three oldest in the history of the competition. At the helm of one of the youngest teams in the tournament, he plays Argentina at 8 p.m. on Friday, one of the teams with the highest average age, coached by 44-year-old Lionel Scaloni, the youngest coach in the World Cups.
Excluding overtime and penalties, including games in 2014 and this year, Van Gaal is unbeaten in 11 games at the World Cup. Speaking of the team he coaches in Qatar, Van Gaal said they have more quality than the one they lost to Argentina in 2014 and of his tactical approach he said: “I thought you always had to attack but I got me evolved and now I’m more focused on how to win.”
Often attacking and playing very well, the Netherlands have reached the World Cup final three times in their history – in 1974, 1978 and 2010 – but have never won them. Regardless of his result in Qatar, Van Gaal is still replaced by Ronald Koeman, the former Barcelona manager who already has an agreement with the Dutch FA. However, Van Gaal himself said he did not rule out the possibility of training elsewhere, including with the Belgium national team, which had sacked his coach following his World Cup elimination.
– Also read: For Argentina, the World Cup is a different matter