Why Rinus Michels remains the greatest coach of all time
The essence of leadership
Comparing players is an eternal debate in football. But what about football managers? What can be the criteria for measuring their achievements? What makes a football manager the greatest ever? The answer to this complex question involves revisiting the legacy of Rinus Michels.
1988. European Championship Final. Van Basten has scored an impossible volley to set a sea of Oranje fans into rapture at the Munich Olympiastadion. Rinus Michels covers his face in disbelief. Van Basten’s celebration and Michels’ utter delight remain enduring images for football fans till today.
For the Netherlands, this was their first-ever international trophy. For Michels, it was partial compensation for 1974, when his TotalVoetbal side lost to arch-rivals Germany — at the same ground.
In a way, this was fitting for Michels. His true legacy is not so much in what he won, but what he changed.
Great: remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness
Great coaches
Defining greatness of managers is a complex task. If we look at effectiveness, then trophies are perhaps the most objective count. Simplistic maybe but objective. If we look at legacy, a more qualitative metric is required.
Quantitative view
During his managerial career, Michels won a total of 13 trophies with Ajax, Barcelona, Koln and the Netherlands. This is a credible figure but there is significant competition from other coaches in this area.
At the time of writing Pep Guardiola has 27 senior-level trophies, Jose Mourinho (25) and Carlo Ancelotti (20). Alex Ferguson though cleans out the arena with a whopping 49 trophies! He’s won more trophies than any manager — and indeed even more than many more famous names put together even. From breaking the Old Firm’s duopoly with Aberdeen’s title-winning run to claiming every domestic and continental honour (except UEFA Cup) with Manchester United at least once, Ferguson remains unparalleled in terms of elite-level silverware.
Qualitative view
Beyond trophy count, great coaches have also left their mark qualitatively. Some have excelled as tacticians, some have excelled in management while others have excelled in defining new paradigms.
Alex Ferguson combined discipline, control and tactical flexibility to win numerous titles with Manchester United. Jose Mourinho, the master tactician, led unheralded Porto and unfancied Inter to Champions League titles. Helenio Herrara interpretation of the catenaccio, not only yielded Inter Grande European glory but also set the blueprint for decades of Italian football’s defensive mastery. Carlo Ancelotti brought an explicitly human dimension to coaching, which played a big part in his success.
Arrigo Sacchi built on the ideals of TotalFootball to make his AC Milan side the greatest club side ever assembled. Johan Cruyff, the poster boy of TotalFootball, worked closely with Michels and would become the biggest collaborator in, and propagator of, his ideas. Infused in Cruyffian ways at Barcelona, Pep Guardiola would introduce the complex elegance of tiki-taka to football. The only manager to win the World Cup twice, Vittorio Pozzo pioneered the WW tactical formation (Metodo) in the 30s.
In terms of influence though, Michels has no parallel. To understand fully, we must look at the history of football.
Leadership is about influence. Nothing else. — John Maxwell
History of football tactics
The earliest formation in football was “2–3–5”. This formation maximized forward manpower. Formations refined over time in response to law changes (particularly the offside rule amendment) and opposition tactics. After the offside law was changed to allow more attacking football, the response which “won” was defensive in nature. The desire to control the midfield or add defensive solidity led to “WW” and “WM” formations, both of which achieved considerable success. While formations continued to morph, the unifying theme remained defence. Having an extra man at the back (a central tenet of verrou and catenaccio approaches) allowed defensive solidity. The threat of attack was (to be) countered with better defence.
In the mid-sixties, Herrera’s rendition of catenaccio popularized a modified “5–3–2”, leading Grande Inter to great success. Michels’ now had to solve the puzzle of countering well-organized defences. It was then, in response to the success of catenaccio, that a counter-strategy, later termed TotalFootball, started to take shape.
The foundations of TotalFootball can trace to Jack Reynolds, under whom Michels trained at Ajax. A handful of teams had started to experiment with concepts like fluidity and versatility, two key components of TotalFootball, which Michels would retain. Most famous among these were the Magical Magyars, the great Hungarian side of the 50s. The ability of players to switch attack and defence and change positions was an innovative counter-measure against teams who played defensively or used fixed man-marking.
A new concept
Michels tactical developments at Ajax resulted in a system that used versatile players in interchangeable attacking roles moving fluidly across the pitch to “shock and awe” opponents. While fluidity and dynamism became popular aspects of TotalFootball, it was the concept of space that effected a fundamental shift in football thinking. It was the central concept around which everything revolved.
Michels’ and his players at Ajax, interpreted football in terms of creating and organizing space. Cruyff distilled the essence of using space as a founding visualization — If you have the ball you must make the field as big as possible, and if you don’t have the ball you must make it as small as possible.
At that time, this was seminal thought. Today it’s considered as a fundamental of football strategy. The modern game is predicated on the paradigm of space. The concepts of “attacking shape”, “defending shape”, “playing off the ball” etc. all of which relate to spatial awareness, are now part of core football vocabulary. They’ve become commonplace in commentary even!
There has been only one real tactical revolution and it happened when football shifted from an individual to a collective game. It happened with Ajax first and then the Holland national team at the beginning of the 1970s. — Arrigo Sacchi
Paradigm Shift
In his classic text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn identifies a paradigm shift as a fundamental shift in basic concepts and experimental practices of a (scientific) discipline.
Football thought has matured “organically” through a series of experiments, observations and external factors. It’s hard to pinpoint cause and effect as often the answer to a question posed was not found until later. Deriving an answer required a series of experiments by coaches. New coaches learned from their predecessors and refined their approaches. The next generation built on their work. Gradually, using Kuhn’s parlance, puzzles were solved and football thought progressed.
Until TotalFootball, strategy revolved around stationing and mobilizing finite resources (players). TotalFootball changed the game forever by interpreting football in terms of using and moving into spaces.
For the first time, football was defined in terms of its most fundamental variable — space.
By conceptualizing football as a challenge of versatile players using space flexibly and in a fluid system, Michels’ could rise beyond traditional concepts like defence, attack, man-marking etc. He could then innovate in ways no one had foreseen. Since his approach was so fundamentally new, his tactical innovations were re-defining football. Some ideas like position switching to confuse man-markers were not entirely new. They had been developing gradually over time. The magnificent Magyars (Hungary) in 1954 and the peerless Selecao (Brazil) in 1970, had both used them to telling effect. However, the paradigm to naturally and truly explain these tactics, did not appear until Michels’ TotaalVoetbal. Before that, they were tactics to confuse the opposition. When interpreted using the paradigm of space enunciated by TotalFootball, they became part of a holistic, or total system. Parallels can be made to Newton and Einstein whose questioning of laws of motion led to new paradigms which formed the basis of classical and quantum physics.
Through TotalFootball, Michels, who co-developed and refined his ideas at Ajax and Barcelona, frequently with Cruyff, “solved football” from a tactical perspective. All tactical innovations since then (e.g. pressing, tiki-taka etc.) have been within the broad paradigm enunciated by TotalFootball.
Both as a player and as a trainer there is nobody who taught me as much as him. I will miss Rinus Michels. I always greatly admired his leadership — Johan Cruyff
Influence
With Ajax’s European Cup triumph in 1971, Michels would pass the all-important “field-test” of his concepts. Three years later, with Michels at the helm and an Ajax core spearheaded by thinker-player-superstar Cruyff, the Netherlands would reach the World Cup Final. Germany would win the Cup. Het Oranje would win something much bigger — hearts and minds.
Honed by Michels and executed on-field by poster boy Cruyff, TotalFootball became a synonym of beautiful football. The compendium of revolutionary concepts and tactics that Michels had perfected at Ajax (and Barcelona), was exhibited at the world stage in 1974, to unprecedented acclaim. The moniker TotalFootball was coined and would forever be associated with the Netherlands, Cruyff, Michels and Ajax. This is remarkable because four years earlier, Pele’s Brazil had beaten Italy in what is regarded as the best Final ever. The stylistic influence of the best team to never win the World Cup (Dutch ’74) put them on par with the best ever team to win the World Cup (Brazil ‘70).
The concepts of TotalFootball such as versatility, fluidity, dynamism, space, pressing, a high defensive line (offside trap) etc. would later infuse into the philosophies of Guardiola and Sacchi, whose Barcelona and AC Milan sides are the only teams to ever come close to emulating Ajax’s utopian blend of elegant, technically proficient, and winning football.
Philosophy-based sides who won trophies are the rarest delight in football. Only Inter, Ajax, AC Milan and Barcelona have been able to achieve this Holy Grail, the latter three for a longer period than Inter. The latter three remain enduring benchmarks of style substantiated with winning returns — and — traceback clearly to Michels’ ideals of TotalFootball.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Steve Jobs
The greatest leaders can view challenges from innovative angles. They can synthesize their ideas into a coherent framework that is elegant and works in the real world.
The TotalVoetbal that Michels’ Dutch side exhibited to the world in 1974 had the charm of Einstein’s equation of relativity. It was beautiful, complex, technically sound, and most importantly, marked an enduring paradigm shift in football.
Fifty years on, Michels’ TotaalVoetbal remains the benchmark of utopian football and Michels remains the giant from whose vision others have seen further. While other coaches influenced teams, Michels’ influenced football.
Michels was voted as FIFA Coach of the Century in 1999. Twenty years later, FranceFootball (which gives the Ballon d’Or), reiterated this in ranking the 50 greatest managers of all time. Michels (still) topped the list.
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