“His heart stopped… he was dead.”
Matt Jones, a former goalkeeper at Belenenses and now a coach in the United States, is recalling the terrifying moment Mitchell van der Gaag, Erik ten Hag’s assistant at Manchester UnitedSeptember 2013: In the home dugout, he fell.
Jones, as well as the rest on the Portuguese team, didn’t know that their manager had a pacemaker due to previous complications.
Van der Gaag’s collapse was a natural disaster. His players were right to be worried.
“He collapsed on the bench 30 minutes into the game against Maritimo and it got stopped for a while,” adds Jones. “It was only at half-time we realised what had happened because it was so quick and sudden. A defibrillator was located in the dugout, which was used to bring him back into life.
“From there, we learnt that he had had heart issues in the past and we realised the gravity of it.
“It was scary for us as players. He had a pacemaker installed and it worked as it was supposed. It was something he hoped would never happen, but he was aware it could happen.”
Before his health scare, Van der Gaag had led Belenenses into the Primeira Liga — Portugal’s highest league — in his first season in charge at the club.
The Dutchman, who had played in the 1990s as a Motherwell centre-back, stopped playing football. He then focused on his health. Jones claims that this was the same advice that he was given by his doctors.
Van der Gaag at Motherwell (Photo by Allsport UK).
“He was the one that everyone on the team idolised because of what he had done for the club and the squad. He is the most important coach I have ever had,” says Jones.
“It was such a big thing that happened to him and his doctors were telling him he couldn’t come back to football. It was still a major part of his life. Only at the end, he decided to take a more permanent break and decide what he wanted to pursue.
“It was a scary moment for us and his family but, thank God, everything resolved itself.”
A decade has passed since Jones was recruited by Van der Gaag, but the lasting impact the Dutchman had on the club and the goalkeeper’s career has survived the test of time.
“From day one, one of his biggest strengths was his communication and the way he carried himself,” the 36-year-old explains. “He was a coach you wanted to play for and he filled me with positivity, outlined what he expected from me in my position, and he was fantastic.
“He was that way with the whole group in terms of being able to manage different characters and personalities. He set the tone from day one of what we were about and we stuck to that DNA and his philosophy.”
People who played with or knew Van der Gaag often cite his communication as one his greatest strengths.
Mitchell van der Gaag in training at Manchester United (Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images
Fluent in six languages — Dutch, English, Portuguese, German, French and Spanish — the 51-year-old is multicultural and uses it to his advantage to get players and staff onside.
“If I wanted to have a conversation with him, I could have done it in English or Portuguese,” adds Jones. “In front of the team, he would always speak Portuguese and his Portuguese was excellent. We had players on the team from different places and he would always adapt.”
One source, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationship with the United assistant, described him as a “backpacker”, citing his love of experiencing different cultures and immersing himself in his surroundings.
Van der Gaag was a Dutch citizen who was born in Zutphen. He also spent more than a decade in Portugal in his later years. People who know Van der Gaag say that his diverse background helps him understand how players from different backgrounds train, live and play.
“He was in Portugal and loved it,” the source said. “He was in Madeira and loved the island. He brought his backpack with him to Amsterdam and everyone was curious about who he was. He was loved by them three weeks later. He has a feel for a player’s culture.”
Despite his multi-lingual tongue and eagerness to envelope himself into new cities, it is his coaching abilities that have seen him go from working in Portugal’s second tier — followed by a succession of clubs in the Netherlands — to sitting alongside Ten Hag at Manchester United.
After playing, he began his post-playing career at Maritimo B 2008, before moving to Belenenses 2012 After a two year absence, he returned in 2015 to the dugout with Ermis, a Cypriot team. His next managerial roles were at FC Eindhoven, Excelsior, NAC and Jong Ajax (Ajax’s reserve team).
It was at Ajax where he was promoted to be Ten Hag’s assistant before the 2021-22 campaign, having previously been spotted by Marc Overmars, their previous director of football, as a coach worth investing in.
Van der Gaag originally worked under Ten Hag for Ajax’s reserve team (Photo: Erwin Spek/Soccrates/Getty Images)
“He wants to set the bar higher every day,” Pascal Maas, Van der Gaag’s assistant at Eindhoven, tells The Athletic. “The bar is set on the players and staff and it goes up every day. He encouraged us to strive to raise the bar and be more ambitious.
“When we reached a high standard, it had to be better again. That is his way of working.”
A constant in Van der Gaag’s training methods is getting his players to run, but it would normally be with the ball.
This is something he carries with him throughout the past decade, and it has been noticed by every squad he has coached.
“If you are a player, and I had a lot of coaches, sometimes you have to do a 40-metre sprint and then wait 30 seconds before you do another sprint,” Ryan Koolwijk, his former captain at Excelsior, told The Athletic. “But Mitchell would make you sprint 40 metres and then after that, you needed to shoot.
“That way we weren’t thinking about all the running we were doing, we thought about shooting. What I liked about his training was that everything was with the ball.”
However, there was never a ball at the end.
“Sometimes he would always create punishments if we lost,” adds Koolwijk. “You would be thinking, ‘Ah, I don’t want to do this!’, but it was always really good. They normally involved heavy running!”
Koolwijk noticed that Van der Gaag was not only sprinting but also the intricate details involved in situations like two-vs.-three, threev-two, and threev-four.
He wanted his players to make quick — and correct — decisions in defensive and attacking scenarios.
“Everything that he got us to do was with a plan,” Koolwikj recalls. “Tactically, he is a very good coach.”
“It was very Dutch in terms of playing style,” says Jones when asked to reflect on Van der Gaag’s methodology. “Everything was possession based and played on the ground through the midfield.
“It was about transitions and once you’d broken the press about how quickly you can go forward. He wanted us all to play positive and attacking football. He allowed players to play and allowed for flexibility in positions.
“Teams couldn’t deal with our movement off the ball and they couldn’t deal with our speed of play once we’d broken through midfield. It wasn’t like Pep (Guardiola) reinventing football, but we could do it so consistently on any surface and in any game. He made opponents constantly change to us.”
Van der Gaag’s demands were often unreasonable, but many people who have worked with him stated that it wasn’t always so serious. He would sometimes switch off and laugh with the squad.
Koolwijk recalls his second preseason at Excelsior, when he was with his manager. The team had to run five kilometers in under 20 minutes. They’d have to try again if they didn’t meet the time.
Koolwijk was running when he saw two police officers. He asked them to continue driving them so that they wouldn’t have to run again. They agreed and helped the squad.
Van der Gaag with United’s players before the match against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge (Photo: Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)
“Mitchell never knew we did this,” Koolwijk said while laughing. “We were in Ibiza after the season and he told us we were stupid for always listening to the coaches but then we told him he was also stupid because he didn’t know the police brought us further during the run!
“He is a great person and knows how the players are feeling. He knows when to get mad and when to relax. His feeling for that was always good.”
He also mentioned that Van der Gaag didn’t speak to him more often than a few times during his first months at the Dutch club.
Koolwijk was left confused and debated with his teammates whether he had done anything wrong. As time passed, he confronted Van der Gaag and — in another sign of the Dutchman’s smart leadership and clever communication — his fears were immediately alleviated.
“We had a meeting about it and he said, ‘OK, I have 25 players and I know you are doing your thing and I am happy about that… I have 10 other people I need to speak every day with, so I trust you to do your thing’.”
United didn’t know who Ten Hag, the former Ajax manager, wanted to bring along as a coach when he was appointed in April.
Ten Hag continued to discuss his manifesto with the club and it became apparent that he wanted Van der Gaag join him.
In the Netherlands, there were rumors that Ajax was willing to offer him the role of head coach in an effort to keep him there. However, it is understood that he was not offered such a promotion.
Despite impressing Overmars and Edwin van der Sar, the plan was to keep the assistant coach as an integral part of the new manager’s dugout.
United approached Ten Hag, and Van der Gaag asked him if he would like to join him at Old Trafford. Those close to Van der Gaag, the former Belenenses manager, said that it was an easy decision.
Ten Hag is so in love with his assistant that he knows he will spend every hour working on the squad and reviewing video footage.
One source joked how the only movie Van der Gaag would view is United’s training sessions or the club’s latest match. Ten Hag is also confident in his fellow countryman because he knows he’s not out to get him.
“He was always open to the staff and he was reliable,” Maas explained. “He was the head of a small group, but we were a team. He was very professional, but he was a human being.”
“You can trust him to work in your shop and not be worried about him taking cash,” the source quipped.
Van der Gaag, at United, is the link person between Ten Hag, the wider coaching team and the analysts. He makes sure the “nuts and bolts” of the operation work, covering daily sessions, training schedules and players’ fitness.
Van der Gaag and Ten Hag worked together during the summer to create a complete six-week preseason plan. This was presented at Carrington on their first day.
Ten Hag is heavily involved in supervising sessions. However, they are normally conducted by Steve McClaren (a Dutch assistant) who has extensive knowledge and experience in English and United football. Van der Gaag, McClaren are both equally important and there is no hierarchy.
Van der Gaag’s family — he is married with two sons and a daughter — have remained in Lisbon just as they did when he started working as a coach in the Netherlands.
“The year he was in Eindhoven he would go back to his family when he could,” Maas said. “But he was always at the training ground.”
Jones, Koolwijk, and Maas said they were all surprised Van der Gaag decided to become an assistant coach instead of staying as a head coach. They regard his ability to inspire, communicate and motivate a team as well as his ability to outthink opposing managers in high regard.
Van der Gaag is happy to take each day as it comes. His experience with death helps him see what is important. Staying healthy comes first.
For now, he is satisfied being present in the moment and is all-in on developing United’s players and, along with Ten Hag and McClaren, guiding the club back to where their history suggests they should be.
There is no denying a coach of Van der Gaag’s calibre is ambitious and working for United will bring added attention, but the club’s recent results have shown their work at Carrington beginning to translate into results on the pitch, and that is all he is focused on.
(Top photos by Getty Images; design by Eamonn Dlton
