The making of Erik ten Hag: 'Only one coach could analyse games like him - and that was Fergie'

With the Ajax manager expected to take over at Manchester United, Sam Wallace goes in search of his roots in rural Holland

Erik ten Hag
Erik ten Hag's story began at the SV Bon Boys club (bottom right) Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK / PA / HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

This story was originally published on March 31

In the little town of Haaksbergen, two hours’ drive from Amsterdam deep in the east Netherlands, the name of Ten Hag adorns shop windows and apartments in the main street, although in this case it is not a direct reference to the area’s most famous son, Erik.

His brothers, Michel and Rico, run the biggest estate agents and financial services business in the region, founded by their father, Hennie, in 1967 and now in the second generation of Ten Hags, albeit with one notable omission from the board. In Amsterdam, their brother Erik has established himself at Ajax as one of the leading managers in European football and is now set to take over at Old Trafford. In Haaksbergen, nestled within a largely rural region which prizes a strong ethic of community and mutual support, they are proud of their famous son.

What kind of Manchester United manager might Ten Hag be? Steve McClaren, for whom Ten Hag was once an assistant, says that he would not have survived in the Eredivisie without the help of the young coach. The two were thrown together in the Englishman’s first year, 2008/2009, at the region’s biggest club, FC Twente, from the city of Enschede. It was not just Ten Hag’s meticulous planning, McClaren notes, it was his ability to analyse games in real-time and recommend changes that affected matches. “The only other one I would have seen do that?” McClaren reflects. “That would have been the gaffer”.

One does not have to ask which gaffer that might be to any coach who worked under Sir Alex Ferguson, especially one who was there for some of his best years in charge of United. At Ajax, Ten Hag has won two league and cup doubles, last season and in 2018/2019. In 2019 he also led the club to its first Champions League semi-final since 1997, an achievement that belied the Dutch game’s meagre financial resources. He is the manager of the moment, albeit with just a modest playing career behind him as a right-footed midfielder who played 13 seasons as a professional at Dutch clubs outside the elite. He retired 20 years ago with one second division title and a KNVB Cup in 2001 in his third spell at FC Twente.

His story began at the SV Bon Boys club just south of Haaksbergen. On a mild Wednesday night this week the boys and girls begin to turn up before 6pm and within 20 minutes the all-weather pitch is full of aspiring footballers and attentive coaches. This is the club that you wish your children played at. Grass and artificial pitches. A clubhouse, bar, big changing rooms and even a boardroom in which we meet one of the directors, Peter Sluik, 51, an account manager, who played with Ten Hag when the two were children.

The Bon Boys football club in Haaksbergen
The Bon Boys football club in Haaksbergen Credit: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

Sluik says they have 1,000 members at Bon Boys, around 800 of which are active players, across 54 teams for men, women, girls and boys of all ages. The club, created 90 years ago and named after Saint Boniface - Sint Bonafatius to the Dutch - is a local institution. Bon Boys has a strong set of alumni who made it as professionals in the Dutch game but none as famous as Ten Hag. Under a framed Ajax shirt in the bar is a picture of him with his Bon Boys team-mates from the early 1980s, around the age of 10 or 11. “I played in the same side as him when we were kids,” Sluik says, “but he was far too good to stay in our team for long.”

The Bon Boys team with Erik ten Hag (back row, third from the right)
The Bon Boys team with Ten Hag (back row, third from the right) Credit: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

Around the age of 12, Ten Hag joined the academy of FC Twente 11 miles away, but he never lost his connection to his old club. “He was here five weeks ago,” Sluik says. “Everywhere he goes he’s just happy to watch football. He’s a Bon Boy man.” The region’s inhabitants self-identify as “Tukkers”. What does Tukker mean? “A strong sense of society,” says Sluik, “the neighbourhood, being a good neighbour. That’s important here. People are there for each other.”

Ten Hag played for the team known as “the Tukkers”, FC Twente, on three separate occasions, interspersed with periods at De Graafschap in Doetinchem, 40 miles from his hometown, as well as FC Utrecht and RKC Waalwijk.

Erik Ten Hag during his FC Twente playing days
Ten Hag during his FC Twente playing days Credit: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

In a café in the heart of Enschede is a familiar face from 1980s and 1990s Scottish football. The goalkeeper Theo Snelders, 58, was five times a Scottish Premier Division runner-up with Aberdeen and Scottish PFA player of the year in 1989, later joining Rangers. He was also, before he came to Pittodrie in 1986, an institution at FC Twente. He met Ten Hag when the latter was a youth player at Twente and then again when the both of them studied for their Uefa A-license.

Snelders knows British football well. He was the replacement for Jim Leighton at Aberdeen when the then Scotland goalkeeper moved south to join Ferguson at United. “He’s ready,” Snelders says of Ten Hag. “Look at his management career and how he has built his way up from an assistant to a coach.” On the Uefa course, alongside Michel Vorm and Wim Jonk, Snelders says that Ten Hag was “two steps ahead of everyone else, the best in the class”.

“You ask his players what he is like. Everywhere he has been people have started moaning when he got there. They got taken out of their comfort zone. It was the same at Utrecht, the same at Ajax, and then they start to see it works.” Snelders has a theory too about modern coaches like Ten Hag. “A lot of them were players who played in midfield and like Erik were not that quick but quick in the head. Same with Arne Slot at Feyenoord.

“Erik has got a small ego, not a fancy guy. His presence is not that big in front of the camera. But what do you want, someone who is more about the outside [perception] or the inside? We see a lot of coaches on TV but not Erik, he is always working. He doesn’t need to drive to Amsterdam to be in a studio to promote himself. He cares a lot about his players and always protects them. In the dressing room, he will be really hard on them.”

The time at De Graasfchap was instructive for Ten Hag who joined them in 1990 at the age of 20 after a first season at FC Twente. That 1990/1991 season is so famous at De Graafschap that the players have a reunion every March to remember their second tier Eerste Divisie title which they secured having not lost a single game. Frank Lukassen, 54, was the right-back in the side, with Ten Hag a central midfielder. “Erik was a very technically sound player,” Lukassen says. “He had a lot of knowledge about the game. He was also very confident even then.”

The coach of that De Graafschap team, Simon Kistemaker, who died last year aged 80, was a profound influence on his players. He simply got more out of them than anyone else had. “From the moment he woke up to the moment he slept, I’m pretty sure he thought about De Graafschap,” Lukassen says of Kistemaker, “and if he ever woke up in the middle of the night he would have had De Graafschap on his mind.” Life in the Eerste Divisie then was not glamorous. Most of the players had full-time jobs and trained in the evenings. Lukassen worked in a bank. Ten Hag had one advantage in that respect. The family business was flourishing and he could concentrate on just playing football with a bit of financial support from his father.

“We were crazy about football, and the money took second place,” Lukassen says. “Nowadays it’s a bit different. Then the most important thing for the players was the football and the memories we have of that time money cannot buy.” Although for all the success of 1990/1991, and just two defeats all season after the title was secured, Ten Hag’s first taste of the Eredivisie was sobering. De Graafschap finished 17th out of 18 and were relegated.

By the time McClaren met Ten Hag in the summer of 2008, the young midfielder with flaxen blond hair was a shaven headed former footballer making his way in coaching. He had retired in 2002 and worked at FC Twente as an assistant under the coach Fred Rutten who had led the club to a fourth-place finish in 2007/2008 before taking the manager’s job at Schalke. McClaren recalls the day he agreed to take over at FC Twente, as he sought to rebuild his career post-England. “The chairman said, ‘We’d like you to speak to the press’,” he recalls, “‘but before you do, come and have a chat with your assistant’.”

Steve McClaren with his then assistant, Erik Ten Hag, while at FC Twente
Steve McClaren with his then assistant, Ten Hag, while at FC Twente Credit: PA

McClaren had come to the Netherlands without any staff of his own. “I knew that pre-season was due to start the next day and I said to Erik, ‘Have you got our first day organised?’ Over the next two hours he talked me through six weeks of pre-season work. Every last detail was accounted for. Every document ready. Every drinks break planned. He would say, ‘There is 20 minutes here for you to do your specific session and then we do this’. I had never seen anything like it before or since.

“For both individuals and for the team the work was the best I had seen. The detail was logged even down to what the coaches would be wearing on each day, and that we would all come out together. He had planned what equipment had to be carried out and when it had to be brought back in. I would occasionally say to Erik during a session, ‘We just need that goal moving to the halfway line’, and he would ask every player in the squad to do it. All 22 players. Everyone goes. That’s the way he likes it.”

McClaren is unequivocal in his praise of Ten Hag and acknowledges that without him, and the work previously done by Rutten, FC Twente would never have won that Eredivisie title under their English manager the following season, 2009/2010. In the summer of 2009, Ten Hag left to team up again with Rutten at PSV Eindhoven and missed out on what is still the only Eredivisie title in the history of FC Twente. The two men have remained firm friends. McClaren was a guest of Ten Hag’s at Ajax in October when they beat PSV 5-0 and there is no-one better suited to assess the latter’s readiness for United.

“His great strength lies not just in his attention to detail and organisation,” McClaren says. “He has a clear philosophy of how he wants to play football; the environment he wants to create. The player progression programme was a key part of Twente. He has done that at Ajax too, for each player from the academy to the first team. You look at Hakim Ziyech and now the [Brazilian] striker Antony, a very good player who will be the next one to go. I have seen this Ajax team and it’s very good.

Ajax boss Erik ten Hag chats with Ryan Gravenberch and Daley Blind on the touchline
Ten Hag has worked wonders at Ajax Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK

“Erik is very disciplined and people have to buy into that and have that work ethic. Tactically he’s outstanding. He worked with Pep [Guardiola] at Bayern Munich and took in his philosophy too. They called him ‘Mini Pep’ out there. He’s ready. A lot of top clubs in Germany and England will be out to get him.”

Between 2013 and 2015, Ten Hag was manager of Bayern Munich II, the reserve side of the German giant, and finished first and then second in the Bavarian regional league in which they played those two seasons. The point that McClaren returns to more than once is Ten Hag’s ability to analyse games from the sideline. “I would have to sit in the stand to analyse games that way but he can do it from the touchline and initiate changes,” McClaren says. “He was invaluable in my first year. I would not have survived if it hadn’t been for his work and his understanding of the game.”

Before Bayern there was a promotion at Go Ahead Eagles in Ten Hag’s first season as a manager in 2012/2013. From there he went to Bayern and then spent two years at FC Utrecht, finishing fifth and then fourth in the Eredivisie. This is his fifth season at Ajax and his 10th in management. “He’s proved he can do it at the top level at Ajax,” McClaren says. “In terms of changing games he is second to none. He had carried on with that work ethic and he’s a far better coach and manager now. He was way ahead of his time. Even in Holland.”

McClaren recalled that, try as he might, at Twente in the 2008/2009 season, no matter how early he got to the training ground, Ten Hag was already there before him. “I thought I worked hard until I met Erik,” he says. Of course, McClaren has seen the best that United can do. Ten Hag may seem like the next bright new thing, but it is a coaching career 20 years in the making and the foundations to it are solid indeed.


Gain exclusive insights into the best UK betting sites for Premier League betting with our experts’ rankings

License this content