As a player, my mantra was: practice makes perfect. It’s the same now I’m a coach, but I’m not looking for the next Dennis Bergkamp. I want to improve players and it wouldn’t be a challenge to coach my younger self.
By that I mean I was a player who could solve problems myself – I didn’t really need a manager or coach for that. I did my own thing but I was always professional about it. I was respectful enough to the manager to play in his philosophy, in his system. None of them had to ask me to change the way I played or trained.
Of course, with some of them – Johan Cruyff or Arsene Wenger, for instance – it was my philosophy as well, and that helped. But when I work with players now, I always prefer a challenge – like someone who is upset with me for any reason or, technically or tactically, doesn’t know what to do. I feel that I can help.
I’ve not worked full-time since leaving Ajax in 2017 and I am not actively looking for a job in football at the moment. But, more and more, I am thinking about getting back on the training pitch again, because that is what I love the most.
Whatever I do next, though, I don’t want to be a head coach. It’s not my ambition and I like my freedom too much. I like to spend time with my family and have a life outside football, and I don’t think you can be a fully committed manager if you want to play golf sometimes as well.
Seriously, though, I know certain clubs work with strikers’ coaches, just like the old goalkeeper specialists who came in two or three times a week and as soon as the session was finished they were gone. But, for me, it would be too restrictive to be limited to that side of it. If someone is not doing well, I’d want to talk about the rest of his game – whether it be something tactical or a personal issue.
What I have in mind is a role that worked for me at Ajax, which was a lot like the one I had as a player – a little bit in between the lines. I wasn’t really a striker or a midfielder, but in between.
That’s how I see myself as a coach as well. I like to be involved with the first team but I think my power, my strength, is to bring players from the youth to the first team.
Sometimes the youth team and first team can be like two islands. What I am talking about doing is like a bridging role between them, but I realise I’d have to have results as well. I wouldn’t be working for the sake of it; just to go to work and come home again. I’d like a challenge and to be really responsible for developing players and bringing them through.
I like that pressure. I had success doing it at Ajax – where I wasn’t an assistant or a second assistant, I was on the training pitch – and I am a big believer that it would work with the other big clubs in Europe as well. I am actually surprised more of them don’t do it already. You can see a lot of them have got strong youth systems and everything good is in place. It’s just about what happens next.
It is such a big advantage if you can develop your own players because, unlike most players you buy, they don’t have to adjust to a new club or new country. They are already comfortable and they are available whenever you need them.
Maybe in the future there will be a rule for it, like the ‘six and five’ rule that Fifa once discussed, where you had to have five homegrown players in your team. I guess when you have a lot of money, though, the first option is always to buy – and buy big – rather than invest in the youth, which is a shame.
That’s one of the differences between being a player and a coach. My philosophy as a coach is based on my whole career and my life, but the decisions I wanted to be made when I was at Arsenal were…
Read More: Dennis Bergkamp: Ex-Arsenal forward on his football philosophy and future in the