How Ronald Koeman Became the Netherlands' Top Managerial Export

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

It was a tired tangle of legs that Ronald Koeman had to thank for the defining moment of his career. In May 1992, as a cagey European Cup final ticked towards penalties, the attempts of Dario Bonetti, Sampdoria's notoriously aggressive centre-half, to take the ball off Barcelona utility man Eusebio Sacristan ended with both men hacking aimlessly at each other's ankles. They were fouling each other, but Barcelona were given the free-kick.

Penalties wouldn't be required. Koeman was Barcelona's free-kick taker and he specialised in making a fine art look absurdly simple. This time was no different: he strode up to the ball and lashed it with signature ferocity into the Sampdoria net. 1-0.

15 minutes later, Koeman was a European champion, again.

That was at Wembley Stadium, and if it was merely incidental that Koeman's crowning moment as a player came in England, it's no coincidence that it's now where he's establishing himself as a top-level manager. The Premier League has recently become a migration ground for Europe's elite coaches, with Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho taking star billing ahead of an ensemble cast that includes Jurgen Klopp, Antonio Conte, Arsene Wenger and Mauricio Pochettino. And, of course, Koeman.

But working among the elite of his profession is something Koeman has been doing since well before he started coaching. It has become a cliché to describe someone in terms of their contradictions, but in the case of Ronald Koeman the player, it's unavoidable. He was a defender who clocked up 193 career goals; a centre-back who was his team's chief playmaker; a player of magisterial subtlety whose signature move was his bludgeoning shot. He was nicknamed Tintin but renowned for his uncompromising aggression.

Or, to put it another way, he was Dutch to the core. If the defining trait of Dutch football is an embracing of universalism, a refusal to be pigeonholed, then Koeman embodied that as well as anyone. Little surprise, then, that he believes himself to have been shaped by one man in particular. "The biggest influence on my career was Johann Cruyff," he says of the coach he played under at Ajax and then the Barcelona 'dream team' of the mid-90s. "In my opinion the best teacher is the one who played on a world-class level. That's the best coach."

Handy for Everton, then, that their new manager can look back on a playing career that garnered eight league titles across two countries, as well as a pair of European Cups. The pinnacle of that may have come at Wembley but to England fans Koeman was always best known for his role in their country's dismal failure to make it to the 1994 World Cup. In the pivotal fixture of the qualifying campaign, Koeman somehow escaped a sending off for a hilariously cynical second-half foul on David Platt, before stepping up to caress a free-kick into the top corner of David Seaman's net five minutes later. Holland went through, England went out.

Koeman's dead-eyed foul play that night was hardly out of character. Ger van Gilder, one of his youth team coaches, described the young Koeman as having "a burning allergy to losing". "Ronald was easy to manage because he had this extreme urge to win," recalled Guus Hiddink, who coached a PSV side that included Koeman to a historic treble in 1988. "He liked to go to the edge of what was permitted."

It was during that treble season, after the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final, that Koeman publicly praised his teammate Hans Gilhaus for a vicious tackle that injured Jean Tigana, ruling Bordeaux's star player out of the second leg. UEFA suspended Koeman for his comments, but he returned in time for the final, tucking away his penalty in the shoot-out.

A month later, when Holland beat their old enemies West Germany in the semi-finals of the European Championships, Koeman marked the final whistle by swapping shirts with Olaf Thon before making a beeline for the Dutch fans and gleefully wiping his backside with the Germany strip. Asked later if he regretted doing it, he said not. All in all, the summer of 1988 was a rather good one for Koeman.

By the point, six years later, when he was dumping England out of the running for USA 94, a 31-year-old Koeman was approaching the twilight of his playing career at Barcelona. Cruyff had promoted a gangly kid called Pep Guardiola into the first-team and appointed Koeman as his in-house mentor. "Cruyff said to me, 'You are going to look after this boy. You are going to be his tutor, help him develop. From now on he's going to be your roommate,'" recalls Koeman. "Pep had an insatiable hunger for information and we spent hours talking football. There were months when I spent more time with Pep than with my own wife!"

As well as priming the next generation of players, Koeman had started to train one eye on his own future. Having paid close attention to the coaching methods of Cruyff for the best part of a decade, Koeman eventually made the transition from pitch to dugout by joining fellow Cruyffians Johan Neeskins and Frank Rijkaard as part of Hiddink's backroom team for the 1998 World Cup. Holland were arguably the tournament's outstanding team and provided one of the all-time great World Cup moments, but self-destructed in typically Dutch fashion in the semi-final shoot-out.

After that came a return to Barcelona, where he took his seat as part of the coaching class that would effectively go on to shape the next two decades of European football. Koeman was appointed by Louis van Gaal as joint-assistant, alongside a fresh-faced young scamp named Jose Mourinho. The two haven't lost touch. "He's a good friend and a great coach," Koeman said of Mourinho last year. "It was nice in our period in Barcelona and it's always nice to meet."

By this stage his old roommate Guardiola had graduated from scrawny newcomer to first-team captain. With Frank de Boer, Luis Enrique and Philip Cocu all on the books, too, Van Gaal's Barcelona was a production line for elite-level coaches of today.

Vitesse Arnham soon came calling with Koeman's first managerial job, and he began a nomadic first decade in coaching which encompassed six clubs, three countries and a decidedly mixed bag of success. And just as in his playing days, Koeman the manager threw up a number of odd contradictions: not least that the jobs in which he's won silverware are among his least vaunted. Three years at Ajax added trophies to his CV but the feeling remained that his achievements were about par for a squad that contained Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Christian Chivu, Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart; his failure to fit the latter two successfully into the same side, or ease the tension between them, led to his eventual departure. Stints at Benfica, where he won the Portuguese Super Cup, and Valencia, who he guided to a Copa del Rey, are among the briefest and least successful of his career, while his time at PSV soon garnered a Dutch league title but ended bitterly with him leaving for Spain after barely a year. His spell at AZ Alkmaar was even more short-lived, taking over the reigning champions and overseeing 23 games and nine defeats before being handed his P45.

Which isn't to say all the above jobs were failures on a par with that one. Ibrahimovic, for instance, recalls the new Ajax boss joining the players for a spot of dead-ball practice in his first week on the job: "He was terrific. We were taking free-kicks and after a while he just stepped in and blasted some home. Talk about respect, he'd only been with us two days and he had it from everyone."

Koeman's return to Amsterdam as coach encompassed more than simply winning hearts and minds on the training ground: he won medals, too, taking a club that was in a tailspin when he took over in December 2001 to domestic double-winners six months later, and regaining the Eredivisie title in 2004.

Koeman's single season in Eindhoven also saw him triumph in what is among the most thrilling title showdowns in living memory: AZ Alkmaar, Ajax and his PSV side all entering the final day of the 2006/07 season level on points. Alkmaar led the way by a healthy margin on goal difference so just needed a win to confirm the title, but lost 2-0 to already-relegated Excelsior. This effectively opened up a straight shoot-out between Ajax and PSV, with the former going into the day a single goal-difference point ahead.

Ajax won their game 2-0, but PSV managed to dismantle Vitesse 5-1, leapfrogging their way to the title by a single goal. The pivotal fifth strike, deep into the second half, was pummelled into the net from close-range by Phillip Cocu, an old servant of Koeman's from Barcelona and by this time a grizzled 36-year-old veteran. Small world. "Straight after the final whistle Philip came to me and told me that the players did it for me," said Koeman amid frenzied celebrations.

His peers were less overjoyed. "We are a bunch of idiots to give it away like this," barked Ajax coach Henk ten Cate; "My players didn't have the experience to clinch it," was the introspective assessment of Louis van Gaal, then in charge of Alkmaar.

It was an astonishing, cinematic climax – one of the greatest ever – but with Koeman's PSV having led the league by 11 points at Christmas, should it really have been allowed to reach a photo-finish? Again Koeman had a trophy, again his doubters were left unconvinced. His soiree in Spain only compounded this further: Valencia's 2008 Copa del Rey win wasn't enough to redeem their season from outright disaster, Koeman sacked in mid-April with the club two points off the relegation spots. Then came the fleeting stint at Alkmaar, another catastrophe.

But, after a decade of roving from one short-term post to the next, Koeman finally settled down. And to continue the contradiction, it was this three-year stint with Feyenoord – trophy count: zero – that properly cemented his coaching credentials.

The Rotterdam club were in ruins when he took the reins in summer 2011, an all-time low having been reached the previous season when they were thumped 10-0 by PSV en route to their lowest ever league finish. With the dressing-room a viper's nest, the club's coffers empty and all its star names – Georginio Wijnaldum and Leroy Fer among them – hawked in a summer firesale, Koeman looked to be glugging from a poisoned chalices at a time when his own career hung in the balance. Feyenoord, it seemed, were sinking like a stone, and were about to take him with them.

By the end of his three seasons there, Koeman had twice secured the club Champions League qualification, rebuilt a solid foundation for its future, and restored Feyenoord among the Eredivisie's elite. Two second-place finishes were impressive, but even more so was that it was done so sustainably. In every year under Koeman, Feyenoord's youth academy was voted the best in the country, with its graduates steadily populating the club's first-team and then the national team, too. "I believe when you build a house you start at the bottom, not at the top," he has since said.

Before Koeman's final game in charge, in August 2014, he was given a guard of honour – something Feyenoord had never before offered to a coach. Jordy Clasie, the young midfielder whose progression from the youth academy to club captain had been overseen by Koeman, was in tears on the pitch as his manager gave his farewell speech. "He basically raised me," said Clasie. "He taught me how to be a leader and has made me a much better player. I'll never forget him."

With this project under his belt, then, perhaps the success Koeman accomplished in his next job shouldn't have been any great surprise. He left Feyenoord to take over a Southampton side who, on the back of their highest league finish for three decades, were being shorn of all their best players. The summer he arrived, Adam Lallana, Luke Shaw, Rickie Lambert, Dejan Lovren and Calum Chambers were all swooped on by the Premier League's wealthy vultures. Southampton had punched above their weight for a couple of years, but this time most pundits expected relegation.

Not one to meddle with a winning formula, Koeman continued to trawl Europe's bargain basements and carried on promoting from the academy. Rather than sink, Southampton continued to rise: under Koeman they moved from eighth in the Premier League into seventh, and then, the following season, to sixth. And Southampton weren't just effective, they were good to watch. Their football – high-tempo, clever, pragmatic and disciplined – bore all the hallmarks of a well-coached side. Again, there wasn't a trophy in sight, but Koeman's reputation continued to snowball.

His most recent move, to Everton, was once again far from straightforward. The Merseysiders finished five places beneath Southampton last season and Koeman's first task was to negotiate the sale of the club's prize asset, John Stones, to Manchester City. But Koeman was sure about his switch from the south coast – "If I didn't see ambition at Everton I wouldn't have come here" – and, seven games into the new season, that five-place difference between the clubs has switched around: Everton sit in fifth, Southampton 10th.

It's early days, but already there is infinitely more nous about Everton's backline (last season it was the division's sixth worst; right now it's the second best) and his intolerance of underperformers showed itself when he withdrew Ross Barkley, the club's star player and fans' favourite, at half-time in only his fifth game in charge. "In all aspects he needs to improve," Koeman said, after Everton went on to win 3-0.

Baseball caps and headphones have been banned on away trips, youth prospects such as Tom Davies and Mason Holgate have already been given significant game-time and there have been eye-catchingly canny ventures into the transfer market, most notably for Ashley Williams and the brilliant Idrissa Gueye. The Koeman blueprint, you feel, is now well-honed.

It's also well-proven. What the future holds for Koeman is anyone's guess but his roving career thus far suggests a man whose loyalties lie with himself and his medal collection rather than any one club. It may not be a golden age for Dutch coaching, but he is surely the country's outstanding manager working today – though whether he would ever want to take charge of the national team is dubious. Two years ago, he was first passed up for the job and then given the ignominy of being offered the role of assistant to Guus Hiddink, the man he missed out to. "The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth," he said about the incident. "I am not a number two".

As a player, Koeman's route to the top was straightforward. But, as a coach, he's taken a much more scenic route – and a far more interesting one – than most. He's also yet to break that weird quirk: to win silverware and plaudits in the same job – although that's starting to feel like a matter of time.

With Everton having not won a trophy in two decades, a return to Wembley, the scene of Koeman's greatest glory, would be a good place to start.

@A_Hess