When Erik ten Hag took charge of Utrecht in 2015, he was inheriting a club sleepwalking behind its rivals and showing few signs of waking up.
Despite being the club of Holland’s fourth-largest city, the club were perennial underachievers who were torn apart by financial troubles in the 1990s. But they spotted some potential in Erik ten Hag, who spent a single season as a player for the club in 1995-96, and opted to hand him his first big break in top flight management.
Ten Hag also spotted the potential in Utrecht, leaving Bayern Munich II to return to his homeland. He arrived with grand ambitions at the Stadion Galgenwaard and an urgency for change which meant he got off to a rocky start.
“Utrecht was talking with him in Munich for a long time, and when he came here he wanted to do everything differently,” explains Rene van den Berg, chief sports editor of regional outlet RTV Utrecht, who has covered Utrecht for more than two decades.
“He wanted to make everything more professional here in Utrecht. It was a small club then, only in the top 10 in the standings five or 10 times as a team. When he came here, he wanted to change everything in one week so that was very tough for him. A lot of people were very disappointed in things.”
Amongst those he rubbed up the wrong way were the youth team, who he stopped playing on the pitch he required for first-team training. His first-team players were also put out as he installed two-hour training sessions in a bid to convey his philosophy.
“He tried to change everything,” Van den Berg says. “But after some results, they started to believe in his way of playing football. He was able to show every player on the pitch what they should do to play in his tactics.”
Rumour has it that, when he moved into an unfurnished apartment in the city, he decorated his living room with two TVs on the wall, a sofa and a desk behind. Nothing else apart from what he needed to study games. He brought with him clear ideas he wanted to get across, formed over his many years as a coach, but recognised that initially he needed a more pragmatic approach. It is a results business, after all.
“When he first came here he was very defensive - five defenders, three midfielders and two players up front,” Van den Berg explains. “But after a while he changed it, because he thought any team should play three or more different playing styles, then he trained, trained and trained.”
His blueprint was thrown onto players from the very first session, when he ensured the pitch was split into squares to demonstrate his ideas to his bemused players.
“What was completely new for us was in the first training when he arrived, there were more lines on the pitch,” captain Willem Janssen recalls. “Nowadays it’s more common, but we had the two boxes, the middle line and sidelines. Then he had some vertical lines from the box to the other box that went the length of the pitch and horizontal.
“There were many more lines and everyone was asking: “Eh? What’s this?” And then he talked about half spaces, to learn how to be more compact as a team. It was a moment where we didn’t know what was going on, but he explained and we used it a lot in training sessions. [It was] completely different from before.”
Janssen was amongst the existing players to thrive under Ten Hag after he inherited a young team. But, whilst his obsession with tactics was vital, it was his precise, careful construction of the squad with the introduction of more experienced players which also proved key.
Edson Braahfeid broke through at Utrecht as a teenager in 2003 before leaving in 2007. With Ten Hag as his assistant manager at FC Twente, he developed into a star player snapped up by Bayern Munich and who became a Netherlands international. In 2016, after leaving Lazio, he contacted Utrecht to train with the club to maintain his fitness. Then, after just two days, Ten Hag pulled him over for a chat.
“He said, ‘hey, I would love you to come to Utrecht, with your quality and as an older player in a younger team, we would love to have that leadership in our team’,” Braahfeid recalled.
He promptly put pen to paper, and was stunned by the transformation he had seen in both Utrecht and Ten Hag.
“What I saw was the way of playing,” he says. “Utrecht was always playing with heart, always aggressive and he brought a lot of football into the team. A lot of organisation, a specific philosophy and a way of playing.
“That surprised me a lot about him. I’d met him when I was younger at FC Twente and got to know him for the first time. He was an assistant coach under Fred Rutten and he was always a bit in the background in that role.
“But being the main coach now, he really impressed me and surprised me with how he led the team, how he organised everything. I was really impressed when I saw him again.
“In training and in the games, he has a philosophy of playing and a philosophy of approaching the game, and he’s very good at sharing that philosophy and showing players that as well as developing players.”
Much is made of Ten Hag’s obsession with tactics, but Braahfeid believes his obsession with people and characters which is just as important.
“He’s also a people’s man,” he declares. “He’ll invest in characters, in the players. What kind of player are you, but what kind of character, what kind of person are you? How are you going to fit into the team as a person?
“I was impressed by all these things, and obviously I worked with him before but he was following Fred Rutten. He was kind of similar, but with his own way of doing things as well. How can I bring the potential of this player and this person out of him so he can perform at his best?
“I saw that a lot with Ten Hag, but I feel like he also evolved. He evolved his philosophy, his way of diving into the human being and seeing what they’re like.
“Everyone knows the talent and the quality of their players, but really diving into the person to see what they are about and how to bring the best out of that person? That’s hard, and that’s what Ten Hag does.
“He’s really dedicated in every single aspect of the game, and that’s really what I took away from working under him as a manager.”
Before Ten Hag arrived at Utrecht, the club had finished in the top six just three times in 15 seasons since the dawn of the new millennium. Ten Hag duly guided the club to fifth place followed by fourth place, as well as a KNVB Cup final.
Since his exit, they have never dropped below sixth and are currently seventh in the table with three games remaining. Whilst his departure to Ajax, the big boys just 20 minutes down the road, upset some sections of fans, few could have any hard feelings.
“They accepted it because, in Utrecht, everybody knew what a good coach he was,” Van den Berg admits.
“He was a hero here. He took them to a cup final, to European football, we played a very good game here against Zenit St Petersburg. Fans really enjoyed the way he played here.
“There are three teams in Holland every coach wants to train. When Ajax came, it was never going to be possible to hold him for Utrecht.”
There is little doubt Ten Hag left Utrecht in a far better place, and his transformation of a club in desperate need of reform after years of underachievement serves as a cause of optimism for Manchester United.
