When PSV Eindhoven won the Eredivisie title last year, the positive press coverage just wouldn’t stop. It was all fair, they had just ended bitter rivals Ajax’s reign of dominance in Holland. Former Barcelona man Frank de Boer had led the Amsterdam side to four consecutive league victories and cemented himself as one of the most exciting young coaches in the game.
It seemed like the only thing that could stop Ajax, who remained in the shadow of their own history from Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, was the inevitable departure of de Boer, with a number of clubs making admiring glances. But then something happened at the Phillips Stadion. De Boer’s former team-mate at Camp Nou, Phillip Cocu, took charge and ousted the kings from their thrown.
They stormed to victory with a 17 points difference to Ajax, but it became clear they would soon be victims of their own success. Even before the season was out, their top scorer with 22 goals, Holland winger Memphis Depay moved on. After weeks of rumours and speculation, a tug-of-war between Manchester United and Liverpool, the 21-year-old made the move to Old Trafford. Van Gaal was in charge and, twenty years after leading Ajax to the Champions League title, he took Depay, who he had worked with at the World Cup just 12 months earlier when Holland boss, for £25million.
Unsurprisingly, given his achievements, Cocu was given the de Boer treatment, and hailed as the mastermind who had put his own stamp on the Dutch ‘total football’ style of play and brought success back to the club he had two spells with, sandwiching his time with Barça, between 1995 and 1998, then 2004 and 2007. It wasn’t bad for a first job, just like de Boer.
Dutch football has a ceiling. England, as a nation, have been searching for the magic formula when producing players for many a year. but Holland has its own special recipe, and it’s never short of talent. But, football is becoming more and more about the money, and the game in England, along with a handful of other countries, is incredibly profitable. Holland just can’t compete, and the cream of the Dutch crop will only rise if it leaves the Eredivisie. Depay is just the latest and certainly won’t be the last because once the title is won, there is not much else to achieve, which makes de Boer’s decision to remain at Ajax all the more puzzling.
The other big name from the PSV title winning side heavily linked with the bright Premier League lights is playmaker Georginio Wijnaldum. He impressed last term, scoring 14 goals in 33 games, creating 41 chances and registering 41 chances. Van Gaal has once again reportedly taken a look, but more pressingly, North-East rivals Sunderland, where former PSV boss Dick Advocaat is currently in charge, and Newcastle, who have Dutchmen Siem de Jong, Vurnon Anita, Daryl Janmaat and Tim Krul in their ranks, are in a battle for him (Express).
Bayern Munich boss Pep Guardiola, a team-mate of both de Boer and Cocu in Catalunya, once said before Barça faced Arsenal in the Champions League that there were many a midfielder in the B team who could do what Jack Wilshere, the golden boy of English football at the time could. It was 2011, and Guardiola was making history with the Blaugrana, in the process of winning 16 trophies in four seasons before leaving and later taking up his job in Bavaria.
What he said, while probably outrageous to the narrow-minded British media, was probably correct. Wilshere’s game is based on technique, touch and balance, but that style that Barça perfected stemmed from the same one that Cocu and de Boer had used, ‘total football’.
Therefore, in Holland, there are numerous midfield players who play in that way every day too. The man who did so for PSV last season, 21-year-old Adam Maher, has been unfortunate in that he has not been linked with a move away this summer like Depay and Wijnaldum, despite playing a key role in the success. In 31 games last season, he scored seven goals, but more impressively created 61 chances and completed 1095 passes with 83%.
He is the archetypal ‘number 6′ as van Gaal would say (MEN), and the type of player the United boss is on the lookout this summer. But if it won’t be Maher that he goes for, perhaps Ronald Koeman, another former Barça man and total football theorist, should at Southampton. Saints midfielder Morgan Schneiderlin looks set to complete a move to Old Trafford (Telegraph) and, without too much fuss, there is a hungry, young, extremely talented and readymade replacement for the Frenchman in Maher.
Southampton are a selling club, a fact they will never be able to get away from. But they have an opportunity to build on that, sell their best players and bring in talented players to fill their shoes. There is a strange, but beautiful pattern about Dutch football and they are the masters of continuity. Maher, schooled in the same system as Koeman, Guardiola, de Boer and Cocu, would fit perfectly at St Mary’s, but they must wake up and realise it.