It was the astute Philipp Lahm who once said during the summer break about his future coach at Bayern Munich: “The absolutely most important transfer is the coach.” At the time, he didn’t mean either Pep Guardiola or Carlo Ancelotti, two title collectors on duty, because they didn’t come until later. But: Louis van Gaal. FC Bayern was down in 2009, the experiment with the former national coach Jürgen Klinsmann and some cultural reforms including Buddha statues on the club grounds had failed. The people of Munich longed for a coach who would teach them game culture. Lahm knew early on: there would be someone who could do it.
The fact that the Dutch football coach Aloysius Paulus Maria van Gaal knows his trade is now known to all other football enthusiasts. From the summer of 2009 to April 2011, he taught FC Bayern the kind of possession-oriented football that Jupp Heynckes and Guardiola continued to develop and that the club still plays successfully today. “From a purely technical point of view, Louis van Gaal is one of the best coaches in the world,” said club patriarch Uli Hoeneß. In Munich, van Gaal not only taught, but also celebrated titles by declaring himself the “party beast”. On Mother’s Day 2010, he gave “Mutti” a “big kiss” at the championship party on the town hall balcony. He shouted the words into the microphone.
It was an expression of a self-confidence that he had already revealed: when he tried on leather pants, van Gaal found that he looked like God in them. Ultimately, this self-image did not get along with that of Hoeneß, the main god in the association, for more than two years. But it took van Gaal to the biggest football venues in Europe in the course of his professional life: he worked for FC Barcelona, Manchester United, and with Ajax Amsterdam he had already won the Champions League in 1995.
Once in Munich he let his pants down
What he fails at all: to retire and stay there. He once announced to his wife Truus that he would quit at the age of 55, and later raised his retirement age to 65. Now, after five years of retirement, van Gaal has decided to take on the Dutch national coach for the third time, as the 70-year-old successor to Frank de Boer, 51, who once played under van Gaal. He gave his inaugural address on Tuesday. He said, “Who else is going to do it?” His goal is to become world champion. “I’m not doing it for myself, but to take Dutch football to a higher level.” Van Gaal altruistic? Let’s put it this way: a Dutch coach and the country have never won a World Cup.
Van Gaal dissected football so much that he had to write a book (“Vision”) about it. And yet he also uses antiquated methods in his work: Once he was standing in front of the team in Munich with his pants down. “The coach wanted to make it clear to us that he can replace any player – no matter what his name is because he has balls,” said striker Luca Toni afterwards. This deal irritated some players, Toni was soon gone. Others were only invented by van Gaal: The spatial interpreter Thomas Müller might never have appeared in prison rooms without him. “Müller always plays!” Said the coach eleven years ago. The motto is still valid today.
When van Gaal introduced himself twelve years ago in Munich, he said: “The Bavarian attitude to life fits me like a warm coat. Why? ‘Mia san mia’, we are us – and I am me: self-confident, arrogant, dominant, honest, hardworking, innovative! ” The words “dominant” and “arrogant” triggered headlines in Germany that he later could not really catch. It remains to be seen whether van Gaal will now prepare the way or stand in it himself. He has shown several times that he is capable of both.