A taste of what the expect:
Louis van Gaal: Manchester United turn to an anti-Moyes disciplinarian
The Dutchman, one of the well-travelled elite of European management, represents the opposite of his predecesso
Barney Ronay
The Guardian, Monday 19 May 2014 14.01 BST
Louis van Gaal 'remains a hungry-looking 62-year-old managerial genius who clearly feels he has another dynasty in him.' Photograph: Corbis
There is a famous story about Louis van Gaal from his time at Bayern Munich. Van Gaal had insisted from the start on two major protocols at team meals: players must eat in the same space every day and they must sit up straight. A few weeks later Van Gaal spotted Luca Toni slouched in his seat at lunch and began to shout across the canteen. When Toni took no notice Van Gaal marched across, grabbed him by the collar (he is 6ft 1in, Toni 6ft 3in) and yanked his centre-forward up and almost out of his seat before walking back to his lunch in silence. Nobody slouched after that. Least of all Toni, who left on a free transfer before the year was out.
There are plenty of these stories, from pants-dropping testicular displays at Bayern to the more refined domestic details. Van Gaal likes discipline. But how much? There are two forms of the word "you" in Dutch, the familiar and the formal. At home Van Gaal has always insisted his two daughters use the formal version when addressing him, even in private. Suddenly, the spectacle of Manchester United's first-team players calling their temporary manager "Ryan" during the hiatus between David Moyes's departure and Van Gaal's appointment feels like a holiday camp-ish intermission.
If there is a cartoonish element to the details of the Van Gaal myth – here he comes, this wild-eyed Don Quixote, gripped by the unreconciled obsessions of extreme discipline and creative attacking football – then this is also a deadly serious business for the world's most indebted football club, fatigued by the prospect of a season outside the elite and in real need of a post-Ferguson sense of direction. United have never had a foreign manager, the Irishman Frank O'Farrell aside. They have never appointed a manager anywhere near Van Gaal's 62 years of age. So why this one?
The obvious answer is that Van Gaal represents, in outline, the complete opposite of his predecessor. Indeed, from a distance it is tempting to conclude United have been swayed a little by the managerial rotation inflicted on the England team: foreign doesn't work, go English; nice doesn't work, go nasty. Moyes offered trophyless continuity with the promise of a long stay. And received opinion seems to be that Van Gaal represents the anti-David Moyes, not so much continuity or longevity, but a gold-standard track record and a sense of playing once again with the big boys.
It is a more nuanced succession, just as Moyes was a sentimental, oddly literal kind of continuity appointment. United has been managed by Scots for 75 of the past 100 years (it seems fairly likely they will never be managed by one again), but Moyes was only ever the most flattering, rootsy Glasgow-centred Ferguson-Busby facsimile. It is Van Gaal, José Mourinho and the well-travelled elite of European management who represent continuity. Ferguson broke up, bought in and sold off teams on a similar scale to the itinerant big beasts of European football through his own successive United eras. He just didn't have to move house to do it.
So to Van Gaal, whose career makes a fairly good case – according to Louis van Gaal at least – for existing in a class of one. In the past few days the word genius has been routinely bandied about. Sir Bobby Robson once called him "the top of the tree". "He is a genius, the best I've ever seen on a training pitch," Mehmet Scholl told the Guardian. And certainly Van Gaal: The Early Years looks like a rare talent at work. The Ajax team he led to three league titles, the Uefa Cup and Champions League in the mid-1990s is one of the great untempered footballing joys of the modern age, a team of brilliant players – Marc Overmars, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank and Ronald de Boer, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf – managed according to a seductive total football template. Van Gaal's Ajax became champions of Europe with an average age of 23, beating a dominant Milan in the final with a goal from the 18-year-old substitute Patrick Kluivert. Had he achieved nothing else afterwards, this was a mini-era to set his name in stone.
The subsequent years have been good, if not as luminous. It is worth noting that Van Gaal, widely proclaimed serial winner, has won two league titles and the German Cup in the past 15 rather staccato years, taking in his disorientating, aborted succession to Ferguson in 2002, a difficult second spell at Barcelona and periods with the Dutch national team. His outstanding achievement in that time was another superb standalone league title with AZ Alkmaar, in a year when Van Gaal might have left the club but ended up instead recalibrating his team dramatically and drawing from his players a season of sublime total football overachievement.
Three spells at Europe's established financial giants – Bayern and Barça twice – have ended less well. Despite winning two Spanish titles, Van Gaal was whistled away from the Camp Nou and sacked with Barcelona three points above the relegation zone, a manager perhaps too interested in promoting the theory and practice of Van Gaal than submitting wholesale to the Catalan way. This despite the fact that beneath the antipathy Van Gaal was stoking the Barça academy production line and honing that possession-based style.
This is something that could work in United's favour. Van Gaal – who lost up to £4m in the Bernard Madoff scandal in 2009 – remains a hungry-looking managerial genius, a man who clearly feels he has unfinished business, another dynasty in him.
This is where the Dutchman starts to distinguish himself most favourably from his immediate successor. With United right now it isn't just about trophies won or clubs managed, but methods, development and attitude. This is a club still in the process of a traumatic succession. Van Gaal has the aura, but more than that the philosophy, the clear and unarguable structures to make a productive break with the old ways. We're not talking Steve Round, Jimmy Lumsden and Phil Neville here. Van Gaal is an enduring intellectual aristocrat of the European game, with a strong personal connection to a distinct footballing philosophy, Ajax's triumphant total football of the 1970s and his own bespoke 90s era. In this light Van Gaal again starts to look less like a stopgap or a three-season stabilising force and more like a more wide-ranging answer to United's current need for a clear-out, a bolt-on set of methods, an answer to the basic question of how this team wants to play.
The players will need to adapt. Van Gaal fell out with Rivaldo at Barcelona and traumatised Franck Ribéry for a while at Bayern ("When the coach always speaks badly about you, when he keeps on putting you down, then it is tough," he said at the time). But hindsight suggests this ruthlessness is what United needed most after Ferguson, and what Van Gaal would have brought as standard. Not that Van Gaal is unable to manage transition and continuity where necessary: witness his well-managed succession from Robson at Barcelona, where Robson was retained as a high-end roving scout and Mourinho promoted from translator to coach because Van Gaal recognised him as an asset.
Louis van Gaal: Manchester United turn to an anti-Moyes disciplinarian
The Dutchman, one of the well-travelled elite of European management, represents the opposite of his predecesso
Barney Ronay
The Guardian, Monday 19 May 2014 14.01 BST
Louis van Gaal 'remains a hungry-looking 62-year-old managerial genius who clearly feels he has another dynasty in him.' Photograph: Corbis
There is a famous story about Louis van Gaal from his time at Bayern Munich. Van Gaal had insisted from the start on two major protocols at team meals: players must eat in the same space every day and they must sit up straight. A few weeks later Van Gaal spotted Luca Toni slouched in his seat at lunch and began to shout across the canteen. When Toni took no notice Van Gaal marched across, grabbed him by the collar (he is 6ft 1in, Toni 6ft 3in) and yanked his centre-forward up and almost out of his seat before walking back to his lunch in silence. Nobody slouched after that. Least of all Toni, who left on a free transfer before the year was out.
There are plenty of these stories, from pants-dropping testicular displays at Bayern to the more refined domestic details. Van Gaal likes discipline. But how much? There are two forms of the word "you" in Dutch, the familiar and the formal. At home Van Gaal has always insisted his two daughters use the formal version when addressing him, even in private. Suddenly, the spectacle of Manchester United's first-team players calling their temporary manager "Ryan" during the hiatus between David Moyes's departure and Van Gaal's appointment feels like a holiday camp-ish intermission.
If there is a cartoonish element to the details of the Van Gaal myth – here he comes, this wild-eyed Don Quixote, gripped by the unreconciled obsessions of extreme discipline and creative attacking football – then this is also a deadly serious business for the world's most indebted football club, fatigued by the prospect of a season outside the elite and in real need of a post-Ferguson sense of direction. United have never had a foreign manager, the Irishman Frank O'Farrell aside. They have never appointed a manager anywhere near Van Gaal's 62 years of age. So why this one?
The obvious answer is that Van Gaal represents, in outline, the complete opposite of his predecessor. Indeed, from a distance it is tempting to conclude United have been swayed a little by the managerial rotation inflicted on the England team: foreign doesn't work, go English; nice doesn't work, go nasty. Moyes offered trophyless continuity with the promise of a long stay. And received opinion seems to be that Van Gaal represents the anti-David Moyes, not so much continuity or longevity, but a gold-standard track record and a sense of playing once again with the big boys.
It is a more nuanced succession, just as Moyes was a sentimental, oddly literal kind of continuity appointment. United has been managed by Scots for 75 of the past 100 years (it seems fairly likely they will never be managed by one again), but Moyes was only ever the most flattering, rootsy Glasgow-centred Ferguson-Busby facsimile. It is Van Gaal, José Mourinho and the well-travelled elite of European management who represent continuity. Ferguson broke up, bought in and sold off teams on a similar scale to the itinerant big beasts of European football through his own successive United eras. He just didn't have to move house to do it.
So to Van Gaal, whose career makes a fairly good case – according to Louis van Gaal at least – for existing in a class of one. In the past few days the word genius has been routinely bandied about. Sir Bobby Robson once called him "the top of the tree". "He is a genius, the best I've ever seen on a training pitch," Mehmet Scholl told the Guardian. And certainly Van Gaal: The Early Years looks like a rare talent at work. The Ajax team he led to three league titles, the Uefa Cup and Champions League in the mid-1990s is one of the great untempered footballing joys of the modern age, a team of brilliant players – Marc Overmars, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank and Ronald de Boer, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf – managed according to a seductive total football template. Van Gaal's Ajax became champions of Europe with an average age of 23, beating a dominant Milan in the final with a goal from the 18-year-old substitute Patrick Kluivert. Had he achieved nothing else afterwards, this was a mini-era to set his name in stone.
The subsequent years have been good, if not as luminous. It is worth noting that Van Gaal, widely proclaimed serial winner, has won two league titles and the German Cup in the past 15 rather staccato years, taking in his disorientating, aborted succession to Ferguson in 2002, a difficult second spell at Barcelona and periods with the Dutch national team. His outstanding achievement in that time was another superb standalone league title with AZ Alkmaar, in a year when Van Gaal might have left the club but ended up instead recalibrating his team dramatically and drawing from his players a season of sublime total football overachievement.
Three spells at Europe's established financial giants – Bayern and Barça twice – have ended less well. Despite winning two Spanish titles, Van Gaal was whistled away from the Camp Nou and sacked with Barcelona three points above the relegation zone, a manager perhaps too interested in promoting the theory and practice of Van Gaal than submitting wholesale to the Catalan way. This despite the fact that beneath the antipathy Van Gaal was stoking the Barça academy production line and honing that possession-based style.
This is something that could work in United's favour. Van Gaal – who lost up to £4m in the Bernard Madoff scandal in 2009 – remains a hungry-looking managerial genius, a man who clearly feels he has unfinished business, another dynasty in him.
This is where the Dutchman starts to distinguish himself most favourably from his immediate successor. With United right now it isn't just about trophies won or clubs managed, but methods, development and attitude. This is a club still in the process of a traumatic succession. Van Gaal has the aura, but more than that the philosophy, the clear and unarguable structures to make a productive break with the old ways. We're not talking Steve Round, Jimmy Lumsden and Phil Neville here. Van Gaal is an enduring intellectual aristocrat of the European game, with a strong personal connection to a distinct footballing philosophy, Ajax's triumphant total football of the 1970s and his own bespoke 90s era. In this light Van Gaal again starts to look less like a stopgap or a three-season stabilising force and more like a more wide-ranging answer to United's current need for a clear-out, a bolt-on set of methods, an answer to the basic question of how this team wants to play.
The players will need to adapt. Van Gaal fell out with Rivaldo at Barcelona and traumatised Franck Ribéry for a while at Bayern ("When the coach always speaks badly about you, when he keeps on putting you down, then it is tough," he said at the time). But hindsight suggests this ruthlessness is what United needed most after Ferguson, and what Van Gaal would have brought as standard. Not that Van Gaal is unable to manage transition and continuity where necessary: witness his well-managed succession from Robson at Barcelona, where Robson was retained as a high-end roving scout and Mourinho promoted from translator to coach because Van Gaal recognised him as an asset.
