What type of manager is Louis van Gaal?
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Andy Mitten
Louis van Gaal sat his Barcelona players down in the Camp Nou dressing room before what would prove to be the most heated clasico in memory.
"The team who will win will be the team who will control their emotions," he said.
It was Oct. 21, 2000, and emotions were running high in Catalonia following the transfer of Barcelona's best player, Luis Figo, to Real Madrid.
"Van Gaal was right," recalls Luis Enrique, another Barca star. "How many times have we seen teams lose their heads and someone get sent off?
"I like the clasicos, the coach to the stadium. Even the warm-up was different ... because you didn’t need one. You were already up for it. I could have started any clasicos without a stretch."
This particular occasion was most memorable for the moment a
pig's head landed near Figo as he prepared to take a Madrid corner.
"But at that pig’s head game," says Enrique, "I saw the Barca fans angrier than I’ve ever seen before. They’re usually reserved. They go to Camp Nou to see a spectacle. The players said before: ‘We’re going to win this game. We have to win it.' It was strange that they only threw the pig’s head; I thought they might throw the whole pig."
Barcelona duly won, yet while some had sympathy for Figo and his treatment, Barca’s coach didn't.
“Figo provoked the situation,” said van Gaal. “He walked over to the corner slowly, picked up a bottle slowly, went back to the corner -- and all this consciously and deliberately, without the referee doing anything to stop it.”
Sentiment or sympathy is not something that the Dutchman specialises in.
As well as van Gaal, Enrique, now manager at Celta Vigo, played under Vicente del Bosque, Bobby Robson, Jorge Valdano, Leo Beenhakker, Serra Ferrer, Camacho and Javier Clemente.
"The trainer I learned most from about the field of play was van Gaal, even though he’s the one I’ve had the most confrontations with," says Enrique.
"Well, disagreements," he adds with a smile. "He’s got an obsession with work ethic, the way he plans. Maybe I preferred a lighter style to his.
"You learn something from everyone, even the bad coaches. Because they tell you something, and you think: ‘I’ll never do that in the future.’”
AllsportLouis van Gaal has been out of club management since leaving Bayern Munich in 2011.
Van Gaal is being lined up to be the next manager of Manchester United. If Ryan Giggs has more days like Saturday in the next three weeks, the pressure from fans for him to be appointed full time will grow. United fans would love to see Giggs appointed, just maybe not now while he lacks experience.
Van Gaal is the favourite, and the Dutchman is adaptable too. When he took over from Robson at Barca in 1997, on a mission to make the club play like his Ajax team that had won the European Cup two years earlier, he inherited an assistant named Jose Mourinho.
Robson could have been angered at his departure, but he encouraged Mourinho to stay on with his replacement and even recommended the Portuguese.
The former Ajax boss discovered “an arrogant young man who didn’t respect authority that much, but I did like that of him. He was not submissive; he used to contradict me when I was in the wrong. Finally, I wanted to hear what he had to say and ended up listening to him more than any of the assistants.”
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Van Gaal promoted Mourinho and trusted him to scout big-game opponents. He also placed him in the stands rather than on the bench for a different perspective. Mourinho would report to him at the start of half-time, and van Gaal would relay this to the team. The manager saw talent and trusted his assistant. He was right, but the two would argue.
"Mourinho wanted to know everything that was going on, not just with the coaching," former Barca defender Michael Reiziger told me. "The players liked that. I’m not sure van Gaal always did, as they both wanted to speak the most. So he wasn’t a normal assistant. It was clear that he wanted ‘something else.'"
VI Images/Getty ImagesJose Mourinho and van Gaal during their time together at Barcelona.
Mourinho learned. “With Van Gaal,” he said, “the practice sessions were set out already. I would know everything beforehand that we were going to do in training. From the aims, to the exact time each exercise was going to take place. Nothing was left to chance, everything was programmed to fine detail.”
But he tired of working under the Dutchman. Van Gaal’s downfall was that he failed to lift the Champions League in two spells at Barcelona.
Fans had hoped to do it in 1999, the club’s centenary year, in the final at Camp Nou, but a team of red-shirted heroes earning their living in the northwest of England had other ideas.
Several of those players are now in charge at Manchester United, at least until the end of the season. Should van Gaal come in, he may choose to keep them in his team. Or he may not. And that's the biggest question hanging over Manchester United.
Van Gaal delivered the league title in each of his first two seasons at Barcelona, but unfavourable comparisons with the football played by Johan Cruyff’s “Dream Team” didn’t help his case.
Nor did his confrontational public demeanour in front of journalists, or the fact that he virtually transplanted the Dutch national side (of which he is the current manager) to Catalonia.
It’s important to Barca fans that Catalans represent their club. They welcome foreigners, but the balance that Cruyff had managed was not maintained by van Gaal. Critics questioned the “Hollandisation” of the club and debated the merits of why so many of Europe’s great underachievers were being transplanted to Catalonia.
When he was brought back for a second spell at Barcelona in 2002, the decision was derided, even though Van Gaal promised that he had changed.
For all of a week, he did seem relaxed, shaking hands and kissing babies in public, only to return to his usual confrontational self when his team faltered immediately in the league.
Salvation could have come with the re-signing of Ronaldo, offered to the club by Internazionale, but van Gaal declined. The Brazilian went to Real Madrid and started scoring freely. Van Gaal lasted six months.
Yet this is a man who gave a debut to Xavi in a Champions League game at Old Trafford.
"It was so intense," Xavi says. "Imagine what it was like for me? I was 18 and had been playing for Barca B. I’d not even played for the first team. I was still getting the metro to training, and there are 50,000 crazy Englishmen screaming in my ear.”
Xavi has since gone on to make more appearances for Barça than any player in the club’s history. Like Giggs at United, he has become a decorated club legend admired by the football world.
But could Giggs work with van Gaal? Would he want to? And would van Gaal want to work with the “Class of '92”?
There are always questions to be answered at Manchester United, but none more so than in this troubled season.
