I have a pet theory: slow footballers make the best managers. Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho, whose lack of pace and power never allowed him to make it as a professional, all fit the bill. So, too, does Manchester United’s manager, Louis van Gaal, who as a defensive midfielder for Sparta Rotterdam in the late 1970s was said to resemble “a slug on sandpaper”, or a medieval knight clunking around in a full suit of armour.
Tall, bolt upright, he ran, in the words of one spectator, “as if he’d swallowed an umbrella” and would direct games from the centre circle, recycling possession, barking instructions at his team-mates and rolling his eyes at their technical shortcomings regardless of their seniority. He was not only a control freak but a battler, too, his flattened nose testimony to his fearlessness in attacking aerial balls with his “Minotaur noggin”. To his eternal surprise, he was never selected to play for Holland, though he went on to manage the national team twice – an ill-fated spell from 2000 to 2002 and then, by way of penance, at the 2014 World Cup, when he led them to the semi-final in which they were defeated by Argentina on penalties.
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