Rinus Michels

Rinus Michels
Rinus Michels in 1984
Personnel
Surname	Marinus Jacobus Hendricus Michels
birthday	February 9, 1928
place of birth	Amsterdam ,  Netherlands
date of death	March 3, 2005
Place of death	Aalst ,  Belgium
position	Storm
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1946-1958	Ajax Amsterdam	264 (122)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1950-1954	Netherlands	5 00(0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1953-1954	VV Asser Boys (Amateurs)
1960-1964	JOS (Amsterdam / Amateurs)
1964-1965	Amsterdamsche FC (amateurs)
1965-1971	Ajax Amsterdam
1971-1975	FC Barcelona
1974	Netherlands
1975-1976	Ajax Amsterdam
1976-1988	FC Barcelona
1979-1980	Los Angeles Aztecs
1980-1983	1. FC Cologne
1986-1988	Netherlands
1988-1989	Bayer 04 Leverkusen
1990-1992	Netherlands
1 Only league games are given.

Rinus Michels (born February 9, 1928 in Amsterdam , † March 3, 2005 in Aalst , Belgium ; actually Marinus Jacobus Hendricus Michels ) was a Dutch football player and coach .

The advocate of total football led the Dutch national team to the runner-up world title in 1974 and won the European championship with it in 1988. As coach of Ajax Amsterdam , he won the Dutch championship, the Dutch Cup and the European Cup. With FC Barcelona he was Spanish champion and cup winner, with 1. FC Köln German cup winner. In 1999 Fifa named him “Coach of the Century”.

His best known nickname was The General . He got it through his authoritarian and tough training style, the personal distance he always kept from the players and the fact that he was tactically and strategically a visionary who initiated many developments in later football.

Life

player

Michels began his football career in 1940, shortly after Germany invaded the Netherlands at Ajax Amsterdam . In 1946 he played in the senior team for the first time. In this game he celebrated an impressive debut with five goals scored. By 1958 he scored 121 goals in 269 games for his club as a strong header striker [Note: other sources count 120 goals in 257 games] and won the championship with him in 1947 and 1957. He also played five times for the national team of the Netherlands ( Orange team ). There he scored no goals. The team, which at that time was far from the level of today, suffered only defeats with Michels as a player.

After his active time, he studied sports science at the Academie van Lichamelijke Opvoeding in Amsterdam and also trained as a masseur and physiotherapist. Then he worked as a teacher at a school for deaf and dumb children. When the Dutch Football Association held coaching training for the first time in the early 1960s, Michels also acquired a football instructor license.

Trainer

Rinus Michels (1966)

Beginning in Amsterdam

Rinus Michels gained his first experience as a trainer in September 1953. When he was stationed as a conscript in Hooghalen at the time, he took on the VV Asser Boys in Tweede Class A , where he stayed until early 1954.

He began his serious coaching career in 1960 with the amateur clubs JOS (Jeugd Organizatie Sportclub) and AFC (Amsterdamsche Football Club). In January 1965 Ajax hired him as a coach, replacing Englishman Vic Buckingham . The club had previously suffered a sporty downturn and was at times in danger of relegation. Shortly before Michels took office, Ajax suffered the biggest defeat in the club's history with a 4: 9 against Feyenoord Rotterdam . Ajax, which had talented players like Johan Cruyff , Wim Suurbier and Sjaak Swart at the time, suffered mainly from the team's disorganization and lack of discipline. Michels, who placed great emphasis on discipline, was able to change that. Ajax won the Dutch championship four times under him in the following years (1966, 1967, 1968, 1970) and the cup victory three times (1967, 1970, 1971). In 1971 he and his team won the European Champion Clubs' Cup - after they had finished second behind AC Milan in 1969 in this competition . The world-class player Cruyff says of his time under Michels: "As a player and as a coach, nobody taught me as much as he did ... I have always admired his manager."

FC Barcelona

In 1971 Michels moved to FC Barcelona , where he initially encountered problems with his ideas of discipline and tactics. Ajax, on the other hand, achieved two more European Cup victories in the following two years. In the eyes of many, the team played more creatively under the new coach Ștefan Kovács , as he gave the players more freedom.

Initially, the successes for Michels in Barcelona were a long time coming. It was only when Cruyff Michels followed to Barcelona, ​​after Gerd Müller had previously failed, that he won the Spanish championship in 1974.

1974 World Cup

During the Football World Cup in Germany in 1974 , Michels was the national coach of the Netherlands ( Bondscoach ). As before at Ajax, Michels urged the team to become more professional and disciplined in preparation, and at the Oranje Elftal , too , he introduced his system of "total football". He shaped Dutch football to this day and is accordingly also known as the "father of Dutch football." His team impressed when he participated in the World Cup for the first time since World War II with a modern style of play and a number of outstanding individual players such as Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens . Many football experts considered it the strongest team in the tournament and clear favorites for the final. Despite a multitude of chances and sometimes superior style of play, it lost against Germany with 1: 2.

Amsterdam, America and Barcelona

After he had coached Ajax Amsterdam again in the 1975/76 season, he went a second time to FC Barcelona, ​​with whom he won the Spanish Cup in 1978. This was followed by two years of coaching - in Michel's words "paid vacation" - in the USA with the Los Angeles Aztecs .

1. FC Cologne

From 1980 to 1983 Michels worked in the Bundesliga for 1. FC Cologne . He became the highest paid coach in the league at the time. There were problems because the DFB was reluctant to recognize his Dutch coaching license and only after some time. At the beginning of 1978, the commitment of Ernst Happel by Hamburger SV had failed due to the DFB's unwillingness to recognize foreign licenses. "We have to protect the trainers who have acquired a license from us," said the German association.

In Cologne, where the previous coach Karl-Heinz Heddergott had previously given the players a lot of freedom, there were similar problems getting used to as in Barcelona. The team around Rainer Bonhof , Pierre Littbarski and Toni Schumacher only finished eighth in the first season. In 1981 Michels strengthened the team with Klaus Allofs and Klaus Fischer and increased the intensity of the training. Schumacher, who was also a private friend of Michels and was just as loyal to Michels as he was to Schumacher during most of his time in Cologne, sums it up:

“Michels was a tough guy, hated and respected at the same time. ... The training was a complete torture: gymnastics, running to exhaustion, 'cheered on' by insulting remarks such as 'crawlers', 'bottles', 'idiots', 'dilettantes'. My friends Pierre Littbarski and Klaus Allofs were deeply offended, glowing with anger, and felt they were being treated like slaves. A real uprising threatened. ... Rinus Michels could never be nice; Like no other he was able to drive the last bit of humor out of his players, humiliate them. "

1. FC Köln managed an important 4-0 win over Bayern Munich, the club became autumn champions and three points behind HSV, who was trained by Ernst Happel, German runner-up. In 1983 the team won the DFB Cup by defeating local rivals SC Fortuna Köln . The time in Cologne was not free from conflict. Littbarski, who had a much more distant relationship to Michels than Schumacher, says in retrospect:

“Maybe he really had a strategic skill and modern football shows that he had a vision that is already a reality today. But for individualists like me, it was deadly. ... He just wanted to break my will, drive me out of the joy of playing and make someone else out of me. "

Dutch European Championship

From 1984 Michels worked as technical director of the Dutch national team. In 1986 he took over the coaching position again. At the European Football Championship in Germany in 1988 , this time he triumphed over Germany in the semi-finals 2-1 and thus achieved revenge for the defeat in Munich . His team with Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten then won the European Championship in the final in Munich with a 2-0 victory over the Soviet Union .

Factory footballer

After the successful European Championship, he moved again to the Bundesliga at Bayer 04 Leverkusen . After disappointing results, however, the club released him prematurely shortly before the end of the 1988/89 season. Although financially lucrative, he felt the commitment as a sporting decline. He stated: “In Cologne I failed because of the stars. In Leverkusen because there are no stars. The players here are far too good for the football business. The team is just mediocre. "

Again the Netherlands

After the Dutch were eliminated from the 1990 World Cup in Italy against Germany, Rinus Michels was again national coach of the country. After losing on penalties to eventual European champions Denmark , he finally said goodbye to the coaching bench in the summer of 1992. He later took on various advisory tasks for the national football association and UEFA . In 1999 he was named Coach of the Century by FIFA .

Michels died after heart surgery in Aalst, Belgium.

Act

As a coach at both Ajax Amsterdam club level and later the national team, Michels played a major role in the fact that the Netherlands became the major player in international football in the late 1960s and early 1970s that it is today. During this time he demonstrated the system of total football . In this very offensive style of play, the previously rigid positions of the players were dissolved, they were constantly castling , defenders (especially the full-backs) intervened in the attack and attackers now helped in defense.

In terms of football history, however, the work of the Austrian trainer Ernst Happel in the Netherlands should not be disregarded, who worked at ADO Den Haag from 1962 and introduced a pressing game based on good physical preparation . With SC Feijenoord, he won the European Cup for the first time in 1970 .

Quotes

• Top football is like war. If you are too dear, you are lost. (Often rendered abbreviated as football is war. )

literature

• Ingo Schiweck: Rinus Michels - General in the service of the enemy . In: ders. Kicking the enemy? - The everyday peace behind the German-Dutch football war . MaveriX, Düsseldorf 2006

Web links

• Literature by and about Rinus Michels in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Birthdays", Sport-Bild from February 3, 1993, p. 48
2. ↑ Michels , Rood-Wit thuis, September 6, 1953, p. 11
3. ↑ Paul Gallagher "Father of Dutch Football dies" in: The Age v. March 4, 2005
4. ^ Zebec is the favorite , Hamburger Abendblatt , 1978-03-23
5. ↑ ^{a b} Cf. on this: Ingo Schiweck, General in the service of the enemy
6. ↑ Harald Richter: "Exclusive interview - after being kicked out, EXPRESS spoke with Rinus Michels" in: Express (Düsseldorf) of April 14, 1989 p. 13 quoted. n. Schiweck