The best moments of Louis Van Gaal’s first season at Manchester United were all of a certain type. Let’s say they were all more verbal than tactical. Or, actually, let’s be specific: Louis Van Gaal’s best moments were all interviews featuring Louis Van Gaal.
Remember this one? “That’s how highly you rate the performance?” he was asked after describing a defeat to Chelsea as his side’s best match of the season. “Yeah,” he paused, “You don’t?” It was, as the kids say, a classic. The reply came in deadpan Dutch, Van Gaal’s preferred mode of communication, and formed a part of a far more substantial oeuvre: a series of interviews that showcased unfiltered sincerity and, so often, were laugh-out-loud funny as a result.
When he was happy, he told you; when he was sad, you knew. There was nothing equivocal about his self-belief. There was no nonsense. It was excellent.
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And it worked for him. His interviews made him entertaining, even when his team wasn’t. They made him look as though he had a certain direction, even if his team didn’t always follow through on it. They even helped define him against his predecessor, David Moyes, in helping project relaxed self-assuredness rather than awkward incompetence.
But there was a problem. As much as Van Gaal was great, the background to his interviews was that his team was trudging through games using Marouane Fellaini as a reference point for long balls. It was dystopian football. Van Gaal was in effect able to be his own biggest success because his team was often tedious and regularly not that good, finishing fourth having cost more money to come together than any other team in the Premier League.
Ultimately, this has to be an unsustainable managerial model. A manager can’t be more successful than his team for very long or people will start thinking he’s actually a failure. And thus we arrive at the central dilemma of Van Gaal’s second season at United: how does he make his team equally as successful as himself?
The solution is, to me, quite obvious: If Van Gaal’s team is going to be as successful as Van Gaal then it has to become more like him. It has to happen, because he obviously didn’t do well at managing a team that existed quite far outside of his own personality. The winning consolation for United fans must be that this is exactly the idea that Van Gaal appears to have been pursuing all summer at their club. He’s currently shaping his team in his own image.
Observe its current trajectory. United has lacked a midfield of almost any description for the past, say, ten years but at last this summer the issue has been addressed in full. Not with youthful potential or subtle rearrangements, but with real, concrete class in the form of Morgan Schneiderlin and Bastian Schweinsteiger. There’s nothing nuanced or underhand about what the manager has done here: he’s now definitively got a midfield that doesn’t involve Wayne Rooney.
And his other two signings are along the exact same line. Matteo Darmian is in at right back, at 25 a hard-tackling, secure prospect to end years of uncertainty in his position. Memphis Depay arrives as a pacey forward in a team that had been meanderingly slow throughout last season, Antonio Valencia’s sporadic lurches excepted. They’re each like Van Gaalian interview answers: completely straightforward; even a little blunt.
Where before there was doubt in the team, Van Gaal and his board have set about systematically erasing it. There’s none of the confusion of last summer, where some signings seemed to overlap (all of those left-footers) and major issues (the midfield) seemed to go relatively under-noticed. Gone, too, is the playing-around with three centre backs that blighted United’s early league season last time around; such uncertain, experimental tinkering now seemingly a long way off.
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There’s even been room for an audacious clash of egos with Real Madrid. United and Van Gaal were expected to back down quickly over David De Gea’s request to move to the Bernabeu this summer, but here we are, heading into the new season with De Gea remaining in place and instead counter-questions emerging over the future of Sergio Ramos at Real. United appears to have spun it so that if it loses De Gea, it possibly gets Ramos in return: a neat move, if it’s real, and one that would demonstrate the self-assuredness that always comes from Van Gaal, but did not always come from his club and team last season.
Taken as a whole, this new summer certainty translates into the beginnings of an answer to Van Gaal’s second season dilemma. It’s taken time, but we’re now able to witness the manager transferring that winning personality from the surface level of his fun interviews into the ground floor of his team. The “Dutch deadpan” words are beginning to form the basis for a “Dutch deadpan” team, one that deals in similarly little nonsense.
However it works out, manager and team are now tied together more firmly—there’s no longer any room for one to succeed while the other fails. They’re both tied to the Van Gaalian way for better or worse. What’s more, having just beaten Barcelona 3-1 in a friendly, the sense that you are unlikely to fail if you have straight, deadpan answers as good as Schneiderlin and Schweinsteiger remains very much intact.
For my money, Manchester United could be onto something here.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter