With the weight of expectation that comes with managing Manchester United, Louis van Gaal is perhaps just being prudent in urging caution among supporters.
The start of the 2014-2015 English Premier League season, the most-watched football league in the world, is only eight days away.
Fresh into his new job after leading the Netherlands to third place at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Van Gaal is feeling a little rushed.
Speaking on the club’s own tele-vision station, MUTV, he admitted that he could have done with more time to prepare for the big kick off. “We are not ready yet,” he said.
Time is not available in abundance to the Dutchman, 63 today, with a giant-sized ego, outlandish hairstyle – “he looks like a sausage wearing a wig,” said one non-United fan at an irreverent online forum – and a macho nickname (the Iron Tulip).
Van Gaal has taken charge of one of football’s greatest clubs, a sporting institution whose fans number in scores of millions and are scattered in every country. They cannot always place Manchester on a map, but they’ve long been accustomed to winning as a way of life.
That cycle of success was broken last season, the first since the end of the reign of Sir Alex Ferguson, which covered more than 26 years and yielded 38 trophies.
It leaves Van Gaal in no doubt about the task ahead: restore United swiftly to the very top of English football, competing again with Europe’s elite, or be judged a failure and sent packing.
The lack of readiness, a consequence of that Brazilian summer, may be an early obstacle to the quick fix. But if the hint of uncertainty in the comment to MUTV smacks of preparing excuses in advance of a slower return to glory than the fans – and the United board – demand, there’s compensating reassurance. Van Gaal describes team spirit as “fantastic”, and, having already begun an inevitable spending spree, lets it be known more major signings, and departures, are certain before the closure of the summer transfer window on September 1.
Old Trafford, or the “Theatre of Dreams” in the words of one of its past starring characters, Sir Bobby Charlton, is no home for the meek. Van Gaal would barely recognise the word, and his limitless self-esteem may offer fans further encouragement.
The former England striker Gary Lineker, now a television presenter, recalled on Twitter having asked him 20 years ago what he would do if other managers worked out his system of play? “This will never happen,” Van Gaal replied.
More recently, when he took over Germany’s top side, Bayern Munich, in 2009, Van Gaal introduced himself with the words: “I am what I am: self-confident, arrogant, dominant, honest, industrious, innovative.”
His honesty – acknowledging that time before the season’s start is running short – has already been witnessed. He now needs to draw on those other attributes as he tries to overcome the six clubs that finished above United last season. Inter-club rivalries matter a great deal in football, and the challenge is all the more fascinating because those clubs include United’s arch-rivals Liverpool and also Manchester City, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed’s Abu Dhabi United Group, favoured by a large part of the city of Manchester and crowned Premier League champions twice in the past three years.
For United, last season was one of dismal failure by any standards set in recent times.
Under the shaky leadership of David Moyes, for whom Ferguson’s boots proved too big to fill, despite his promising record as Everton’s manager, United never looked like they could retain the league title that they snatched from Manchester City in 2013.
For the first time since 1996, they were unable to qualify for the Uefa Champions League, participation in which is now considered – for financial and sporting reasons – an absolute must by the men who own Europe’s top clubs.
Further glancing blows to United’s pride were dealt by an early exit from the FA Cup, with a wretched home defeat to Swansea City, followed by a failure to overcome Sunderland, then in the Premier bottom three, to reach Wembley for the consolation of a League Cup final.
For the Glazers, the American family that owns United, it was too much to bear, and Moyes was sacked 10 months into his six-year contract. Van Gaal was appointed on a three-year term; the Glazers can be relied upon to be equally unforgiving if he stumbles, too.
Aloysius Paulus Maria van Gaal, the full name reflecting his family’s devout Catholicism, was born in Amsterdam, the youngest of nine children. His father, a salesman, died when he was only 11, but he grew up in middle-class respectability in Watergraafsmeer, a district of the city that also produced the legendary Dutch player Johan Cruyff.
Van Gaal, as a player, was no Cruyff. He failed to make the first team of his home-city club, Ajax, and, despite an eight-year spell at Sparta Rotterdam in which he made 248 senior appearances, was more journeyman than maestro. He kept his playing career semi-professional, simultaneously working as a physical education teacher. It wasn’t until he graduated to management that he proved his worth, starting with Ajax.
He achieved three successive championships in the Dutch top flight, from 1994 to 1996, and a victory in the 1995 Champions League final to cap a remarkable season without a single defeat. He went on to win La Liga twice at Barcelona, another Dutch championship with AZ Alkmaar, and a Bundesliga title at Bayern Munich in 2010, when he also took the side to a losing Champions League final against Inter Milan.
Along the way, there have been fallouts. Van Gaal’s style is as eccentric as it is tough. Players say that he wants to know every detail of their lives. “He will ask you questions about your life and about your personality,” said Jean-Paul Boëtius, a young winger promoted by Van Gaal to the Netherlands national side in 2013. “He wants to know all about your family, your upbringing and what you do in your private life.”
Boëtius seemed compliant. But Franck Ribéry, the French international who played for Van Gaal at Bayern, complained to Sky Sports television: “I cannot say that I have much fun with him.” Ribéry, presumably, was also unamused when Van Gaal illustrated a lecture on the need for making tough decisions by dropping his trousers in the middle of a Bayern team talk.
Old Trafford may learn soon enough of his habit of clashing with players and journalists. The Brazilian player Rivaldo, one of the top footballers of his era, furiously accused Van Gaal of playing him out of position at Barcelona. When that stint in Spain came to an explosive end, Van Gaal blamed a hostile media, ironically congratulating his “friends of the press”.
A Dutch journalist, Peter Zantingh, has offered sportswriters covering Manchester United a 10-point guide for their dealings with the new boss.
Essential tips to follow include: being prepared for any post-match mood, however inconsistent with the result; guarding against the tables being turned so that Van Gaal is more interviewer than interviewee; and accepting that anything the manager says is fact, whereas the journalists have only opinions. Above all, Zantingh warns the Old Trafford press pack: “Don’t introduce yourself, or else he’ll know your name, remember it and use it against you.”
It sounds almost as if Ferguson is back in the job. The two men clearly share a ruthless, self-opinionated streak.
Away from football, Van Gaal appears less intimidating and more sensitive. He was devastated when his first wife, Fernanda, the mother of their daughters, Brenda and Renate, died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.
His second wife, Truus, probably captured the competing sides of his personality and professional outlook when she told the media: “Louis is actually extremely warm-hearted, but he doesn’t get the idea of being nice to people he doesn’t think are nice.
“He’s also very honest and naive. Almost no one is as honest as him. It makes life difficult, but Louis has this complete belief in himself and his methods.”
That self-belief will be put to its first Manchester United test next Saturday afternoon. Swansea, tormentors of Moyes in last season’s FA Cup tie, are the opponents. There’ll be the customary 75,000 crowd inside Old Trafford, the vast majority rooting for United. The atmosphere will be electric, but perhaps a little apprehensive. Short of preparation or not, Van Gaal needs them to go home happy.
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