You will doubtless be familiar with the game "Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon". The central premise runs thus: so formidable is Bacon's influence on the last generation of American cinema that virtually any Hollywood actor, living or dead, can somehow be linked to Bacon in no more than six steps.
If you were to play a similar game in the world of football, there are a number of names you could start with. You could look at Johan Cruyff or Rinus Michels, architects of the Dutch school in the 1970s. Or the maverick Marcelo Bielsa, currently at Marseille, whose uniquely idiosyncratic approach has won a legion of devotees from Pep Guardiola to Mauricio Pochettino. But one look at the landscape of modern European football is enough to end the discussion. It is a map drawn, above all, by Louis van Gaal.
As Van Gaal prepares to face his former assistant Jose Mourinho for the first time in English football, it is a decent moment to take stock of his dynasty. Whether it is via Mourinho, Guardiola or Frank de Boer, all protégés at Barcelona in the late 1990s, Van Gaal's fingerprints are all over European football.
The current managers of Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Chelsea, Ajax, PSV Eindhoven, Liverpool, Zenit St Petersburg, Southampton and Spain Under-21s are all direct or indirect descendants of Van Gaal. In addition to his own success with Ajax in 1995, you could legitimately offer Van Gaal partial credit for six of the last 11 Champions League wins: three for Barcelona, two for Mourinho and one for Bayern Munich - Philipp Lahm believes his influence is still being felt.
The Nou Camp during Van Gaal's tenure became one of the most successful managerial finishing schools the game has ever known. In the years since, "Barcelona" has a sort of blue-chip brand in coaching, the one word on a manager's CV that is guaranteed to open doors. "We had a strong dressing room, really strong personalities," Oscar Garcia, who went on to manage Brighton and Watford, said in an interview with the Evening Standard this year. "Everyone was trying to help everybody. A lot of us have gone on to be managers."
Stylistically and tactically, many of the foundations were laid by Cruyff between 1988 and 1996. But it was Van Gaal who played a decisive role in the development of the two pre-eminent managers of our generation. At the age of 26, Guardiola was quickly identified not just as a midfield general, or a leader, but as a visionary. "He could speak like a coach, even then," Van Gaal said.
Mourinho's experience was markedly different. When Barcelona sacked Bobby Robson in 1997, Mourinho fully expected to follow him out of the door. Those at the club described him, somewhat condescendingly, as El Traductor – The Translator. "I sometimes think I was the only guy at the club who believed in Jose," Van Gaal said.
Van Gaal persuaded Mourinho to turn down a job as Benfica's assistant coach, and for two years the pair were almost inseparable. They lived just 15 metres apart in the beach resort of Sitges, and would spend long days and nights talking about little but football. Eventually, however, Mourinho's ambition outgrew his job description, and when he departed it was not on entirely amicable terms. When they met in the 2010 Champions League final, Van Gaal accused Mourinho of playing defensive football, a complaint that Mourinho described as "like throwing sand in your eyes".
But then, Van Gaal has often had an uneasy relationship with his protégés. He fell out with Ronald Koeman when he returned to Ajax as technical director in 2004. He also alienated Hristo Stoichkov during his second spell at the club, with Stoichkov later describing him as a "total fool" with a "large head and small brain".
Yet for all that, the man's influence remains undiminished. From Barcelona to the Baltic, from Anfield to Amsterdam, Van Gaal disciples populate top jobs across the continent. They differ greatly in style and character. And yet if one trait unites them all, it is a steadfast adherence to the cult of the manager.
For them, the manager is not merely the occupant of a job, but as someone who can, through tactics and personality, be the single most transformative force at a football club. Even Mourinho's own managerial offspring, the likes of Steve Clarke and Brendan Rodgers and Andre Villas-Boas, obsessively invoke one of Van Gaal's favourite buzzwords: "philosophy".
Van Gaal did not invent the idea of football manager as ideologue. But arguably, he has done more to spread it than anyone else.
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