When Louis Van Gaal meets Gerard Pique this weekend, he could be forgiven for looking up at the Barcelona defender and thinking "Pfff, I won't be trying that again in a hurry."
If it wasn't for the fact that admitting he's wrong isn't really something Van Gaal does, he might even reflect that maybe, just maybe, he was wrong back in 2000. More likely, the pair of them will shake hands and laugh about the day they met. After all, the day the Manchester United manager was first introduced to Pique, he walked straight over to him and ... pushed him to the floor
It was 15 years ago now and Pique was 13 but the memory is fresh, and no wonder. Pique's grandfather was a board member at Barcelona, Van Gaal was the manager, and one afternoon he came for lunch. Young Gerard was there too, a hopeful skinny kid from the youth system; "my grandson", Pique senior said proudly, "is going to play at the Camp Nou one day". Van Gaal, though, was not so sure. He shoved Pique over and, standing over him, declared him "too weak" for Barcelona.
"He came to my grandfather's house and, s---, it's the coach of Barcelona and I want to impress him. I was thinking: 'in three or four years I want to play'," Pique recalled, rolling about laughing. "He pushed me and I wasliquidated! I didn't say a single word during the entire meal. He pushed me right over. People have told me that he was a very straight person, very honest, and that he was a good guy, but that first impression ... wow!"
Pique is not the only one Van Gaal left an impression on during two spells at Barcelona. On Saturday in California, the club captain will be Andres Iniesta. He has taken over from Xavi Hernandez, who took over from Carles Puyol. All three were given debuts by Van Gaal. So too were Gabri, Pepe Reina, Thiago Motta and Víctor Valdes. "Víctor, Xavi, Puyi, me ... our generation is very grateful to him," Iniesta says. They are not empty words: when Iniesta got married, Van Gaal was invited to the wedding
Omitted from United's current tour party after a clash with Van Gaal, Valdes probably doesn't see it like that now, but the list remains impressive. It is also one that the current Old Trafford boss is proud of. "It's not normal to bring so many through. Those players are the backbone of Barcelona and a model for football in Europe," he said when he looked back on his time at camp Nou in 2012. "That's my contribution."
In Van Gaal's first season -- 1997-98 -- Barcelona won the league and the Copa del Rey; in his second, they won the league again. That made him the first Barca coach to win the title in his first two seasons since Helenio Herrera and meant that in almost half a century, he and Johan Cruyff were the only coaches to have won more than one league title. As for his third season, Barcelona finished runners up and reached a Champions League semifinal. In total, between 1997 and 2000 Van Gaal won three trophies, two of them league titles -- a quarter of the total won by the club in 25 years.
And yet, Van Gaal's time at Barcelona is not remembered as fondly as those figures might suggest, despite some recent attempts to rehabilitate his memory. For some, his time is almost forgotten. For others, forgetting is preferable to remembering those times. Looking back, reading the judgments, Van Gaal could be forgiven for feeling that ultimately everything he did was held against him, right down to the fact that he was attacked for his constant use of a little notebook -- as if writing things down was a crime.
If it wasn't for the fact that admitting he's wrong isn't really something Van Gaal does, he might even reflect that maybe, just maybe, he was wrong back in 2000. More likely, the pair of them will shake hands and laugh about the day they met. After all, the day the Manchester United manager was first introduced to Pique, he walked straight over to him and ... pushed him to the floor
It was 15 years ago now and Pique was 13 but the memory is fresh, and no wonder. Pique's grandfather was a board member at Barcelona, Van Gaal was the manager, and one afternoon he came for lunch. Young Gerard was there too, a hopeful skinny kid from the youth system; "my grandson", Pique senior said proudly, "is going to play at the Camp Nou one day". Van Gaal, though, was not so sure. He shoved Pique over and, standing over him, declared him "too weak" for Barcelona.
"He came to my grandfather's house and, s---, it's the coach of Barcelona and I want to impress him. I was thinking: 'in three or four years I want to play'," Pique recalled, rolling about laughing. "He pushed me and I wasliquidated! I didn't say a single word during the entire meal. He pushed me right over. People have told me that he was a very straight person, very honest, and that he was a good guy, but that first impression ... wow!"
Pique is not the only one Van Gaal left an impression on during two spells at Barcelona. On Saturday in California, the club captain will be Andres Iniesta. He has taken over from Xavi Hernandez, who took over from Carles Puyol. All three were given debuts by Van Gaal. So too were Gabri, Pepe Reina, Thiago Motta and Víctor Valdes. "Víctor, Xavi, Puyi, me ... our generation is very grateful to him," Iniesta says. They are not empty words: when Iniesta got married, Van Gaal was invited to the wedding
Omitted from United's current tour party after a clash with Van Gaal, Valdes probably doesn't see it like that now, but the list remains impressive. It is also one that the current Old Trafford boss is proud of. "It's not normal to bring so many through. Those players are the backbone of Barcelona and a model for football in Europe," he said when he looked back on his time at camp Nou in 2012. "That's my contribution."
In Van Gaal's first season -- 1997-98 -- Barcelona won the league and the Copa del Rey; in his second, they won the league again. That made him the first Barca coach to win the title in his first two seasons since Helenio Herrera and meant that in almost half a century, he and Johan Cruyff were the only coaches to have won more than one league title. As for his third season, Barcelona finished runners up and reached a Champions League semifinal. In total, between 1997 and 2000 Van Gaal won three trophies, two of them league titles -- a quarter of the total won by the club in 25 years.
And yet, Van Gaal's time at Barcelona is not remembered as fondly as those figures might suggest, despite some recent attempts to rehabilitate his memory. For some, his time is almost forgotten. For others, forgetting is preferable to remembering those times. Looking back, reading the judgments, Van Gaal could be forgiven for feeling that ultimately everything he did was held against him, right down to the fact that he was attacked for his constant use of a little notebook -- as if writing things down was a crime.
The question was: why? His is a case study in internal politics, personalities and players, image and reality. "People maybe have not valued what I did for Barcelona but I know," he has said.
Both Xavi and Iniesta have defended him. "He always treated me well. In good times and bad, he was always straight and honest with the players: he was very up front," Iniesta said. Xavi insisted: "People see him as arrogant or aloof but he's really not." But for some there is no doubt that Van Gaal was just too much of a disciplinarian and his relationship with some in the dressing room could be tense, something that finds its echo at United now.
The stars in particular struggled to get on with him. Hristo Stoichkov hated him -- the feeling is mutual -- and Rivaldo's falling out with him was as public as it was damaging. "He doesn't want to think for the team, he wants to think for himself," Van Gaal remembered. "For the first two years he was not a big problem. I invested a lot of time in him, but he thinks he is bigger than the coach. He won the World Player of the Year award [in 1999] when he was playing on the left wing, which was where he was the most benefit for the team. But he wasn't interested. He wanted to be a No. 10. I like talented players and individual skill is vital but the team has to come first. [Lionel] Messi is a star but doesn't behave like one; [Luis] Figo was a star but he didn't either. Rivaldo did."
I'm sure that Stoichkov and Rivaldo were not happy, but I have a feeling that the players liked me as a coach but also as a human being," the Dutchman added. When those words were conveyed to another member of the Barca squad, the text message reply said simply: "haha". Another text arrived moments later: "Look, seriously," it read, "if he feels like that, I'm pleased. And he was a brilliant coach on the training pitch. But the truth is he was very hard to get on with."
Those tensions were played out through the media, informing the popular portrayal of the coach and that tough image entered into the public sphere. The battles were common, the manager challenging the media and not backing away from confrontation, accusing journalists of putting players on a "pedestal" that they "cannot handle." Tu eres malo, muy malo -- you're bad, very bad -- Van Gaal told one reporter, a phrase that was repeated over and over.
Superficial though it may have been, it did not help that his Spanish sounded guttural and what he said was held against him at least in part because of the way he said it. His delivery meant that even if he said "I love you", it could sound like he was announcing plans to do something terrible. And so, as the battle wore on, in the hands of critics, he became a caricature.
In Spain's version of Spitting Image -- Guinoles -- instead of a face, Van Gaal's character was a stack of bricks with a mop of hair on top, barking aggressively in mangled Spanish and repeating the catchphrase, which was forever transliterated from the correct positivo to the incorrect positifo to capture his accent. The catchphrase was: siempre negatifo ... nunca positifo -- Always negative, never positive. And even though he had first delivered the phrase in a press conference to bemoan the fact that the media was always negative, it came to refer to him.
Other critics saw a difference between image and reality. Van Gaal had explicitly arrived as the man who would be a Cruyff figure: Dutch, committed to "good football", playing 4-3-3, the man who had won the European Cup with Ajax, and the man who would bring youth team players through. But the division between Cruyff and Van Gaal, the mutual animosity, went back some way and only deepened. This did not look much like Cruyff, they said.
Some questioned the quality of the football. Some bemoaned the money spent -- Rivaldo had cost 4,000 million pesetas, Sonny Anderson 3,500m, Michael Reizeger 800m, Christophe Dugarry 750m, Winston Bogarde 700m -- and others bemoaned the nationality of those who arrived.
In 1998-99, Barcelona's centenary season, the Catalan core was reduced; so was the Cruyffist core. By his final season, Figo was the only Cruyff-era signing left (and he had not actually played under Cruyff). Barcelona had made 16 foreign signings. The fact that the trend was not just about Van Gaal was conveniently overlooked: when Dani García Lara arrived in 1999, he was the first Spaniard in 23 signings, going back to before the Dutchman's arrival.
Dani joined a dressing room that included eight Dutch players. By 1999, none of Van Gaal's Ajax's 1995 European Cup-winning team were still in Holland and six of them were at Barcelona: five Dutchmen -- Reiziger, Bogarde, Frank and Ronald De Boer, Patrick Kluivert -- and the Finn Jari Litmanen. When the De Boer brothers joined, Kluivert admitted: "So many Dutch players is dangerous. It is going to be too easy to blame us if things go wrong." It was not so much the Dutch players who were blamed as their Dutch manager.
In the meantime, Guillermo Amor, Albert Ferrer, Ivan de la Pena, Oscar García, Roger García, Albert Celades and Carlos Busquets had departed Barcelona. Cruyff had his say: "Is it really so hard to have a dozen local players in the squad?"
"They called them 'the Cruyff five' or something, but can any of them really compare to my products, Xavi, Puyol, Motta, Fernando, Iniesta, Valdes, Reina?," Van Gaal responded. The answer, of course, was "no" but still it became an emotive issue, a stick with which the manager was beaten.
A banner at Valencia read: "Welcome to Mestalla, Ajax". Another banner, this time at the Camp Nou, demanded "Mas catalanes, menos tulipanes" -- More Catalans, fewer Tulips. A poll showed that 63 percent felt the club was losing its identity. Manuel Vazquez Montalban, the Marxist writer often seen as the club's ideologue and the author who articulated the notion ofMes que un club, complained: "Barcelona only has its identity in the colour of its shirts and the conviction of its fans." The full-back Sergi Barjuan moaned: "It will soon feel like we are the foreigners."
When Jordi Pujol, the president of the Catalan parliament, complained of the lack of Catalans, Van Gaal responded: "What has he got to do with the club?" When Jose Maria Aznar, the president of the Spanish government and a Real Madrid fan, expressed his concerns at the lack of Spanish national players, Van Gaal responded: "I've told Pujol and I'll tell Aznar: you know nothing about football. Stick to your own business. I don't talk politics." One Catalan politician lost all sense of perspective to melodramatically denounce "the most savage dismantling of Barca's traditions since Franco."
It rumbled on and all the while the opposition was moving. Joan Laporta's Elefant Blau pressure group challenged the president Josep Lluis Nunez. A war was brewing and, in the middle of it, stood Van Gaal and he did not always help himself. "The battle was not me, it was Nunez and the Elefant Blau, but I was the victim," he insisted. "I never change. I do not want to deny my own identity. Lots of coaches play a role, but I don't. Maybe I wasn't political enough."
Eventually, results deserted him too. In an atmosphere that was already charged, white hankies came out in protest, calls for him to resign. When he did eventually depart he did so with the message: "Barcelona is nowhere near as important a club as everybody here thinks it is. You have not won much. I won more in six years at Ajax than Barcelona have won in 100." He thought that phrase summed up Barcelona's inflated sense of self-worth, the unrealistic expectations; critics thought that it summed up his inflated sense of self-worth, his failure to "get" Barcelona.
By then Nunez had been pushed out, resigning and calling elections for July 2000. Van Gaal went with him. When he was called back three years later by Nunez's successor Joan Gaspart, the move was a disaster. It also badly hurt Van Gaal, who had been so keen to make amends. He lasted just six months and left in tears, full of sadness and regret.
The first exit, in 2000, had been different; then there had been anger. Van Gaal announced his decision in another famous press conference in which he sat before the media and delivered an opening line that became legendary: "Friends of the media," he said. "I am leaving. Congratulations."
