Just signed for Fulham as a coach. Not particularly interesting news, but I did see this article on a Fulham forum which might interest some.
http://russianfootballnews.com/inside-meulensteens-time-at-brondby/
Meulensteen was appointed Anzhi coach yesterday to much surprise and fanfare. His last head coaching position was a fairly unsuccessful stint at Danish club Brøndby IF. We get to know a little more about Meulensteen as a head coach through his former player at Brøndby, Per Nielsen, from Nielsen’s recent autobiography.
BACKGROUND:
Per Nielsen played his first match for Brøndby IF in June 1993 and between his debut and 2008 he played 548, only eight less than Bjarne Jensen, who holds the club record for most matches played with 556. Nielsen played as a center defender. Per Nielsen has never played for any clubs other than Brøndby, where he won the Danish championship in 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2005 and the Danish cup in 1993, 1998, 2003, 2005 and 2008. He also played 10 matches for the Danish national team, earning his first cap in 2004. After he resigned as a player in 2008, he stayed at Brøndby – first as a scout and later as assistant manager for the U-19 team, until 2011, when he left for First Division (Denmark’s second tier) club Hvidovre to take over as manager. He ranks among the greatest legends in Brøndby, where he is still very popular with the fans.
In the beginning of May this year he wrote the book “4 Per Nielsen – Brøndby for evigt?” which means “4 (his shirt number) Per Nielsen – Brøndby forever?” In this book he tells a lot of different stories about his time in the club. Both the good times in the 90’s and until 2005, when the club won its last championship, but also the tough years that followed.
With Danish legend Michael Laudrup (former Spartak manager) Brøndby won the double in 2005. The team that played the 04/05 season is ranked as one of the best, if not the best, teams that have ever played in the Danish league. The biggest stars on the team were Daniel Agger (Liverpool now), Johan Elmander (later Toulouse, Bolton and now Galatasaray), Morten Skoubo (later Real Sociedad and several Dutch clubs) and Thomas Kahlenberg (later Auxerre, Wolfsburg and Evian) and then Per Nielsen, who was the captain. The next season Brøndby finished second after FC Copenhagen. After this season, Brøndby and Michael Laudrup couldn’t find common ground for the renewal of the managers’ contract and he left the club, together with his chief scout and assistant manager. This put Brøndby in a difficult situation because they only had two months to find a new manager before the 06/07 season would start.
It was in the middle of the summer break that the club announced that they had signed former Manchester United reserve team manager Rene Meulensteen as new manager. In Per Nielsen’s book, he tells about the brief period of time when Rene Meulensteen was his manager.
After Brøndby won the championship, Nielsen was offered a lucrative contract with Norwegian champions Rosenborg, but Meulensteen convinced him to stay with Brøndby since he was an important culture bearer at the club and therefore vital for the club’s future. Nielsen refused the offer from Rosenborg and stayed at Brøndby, a decision he doesn’t regret according to the book.
At the beginning of the stay Meulensteen signed two young Englishmen (Mark Howard and Adam Eckersley), whom he knew from Manchester United’s reserve squad.
Meulensteen immediately changed the daily routines around the squad. At first, a lot of small things like when the club had to train and when they had to leave for matches. Later he decided to change the colour of the hallway leading to the team’s locker room at the stadium from yellow (which is Brøndby’s shirt colour) to green. This was intended to give the player’s hope and calm them down when they went from the pitch to the locker room after the first half. He explained to the squad that since they were excited after the first half they needed to calm down a bit. Nielsen, and the rest of the squad, were wondering why this was important because they needed to be ready and excited for the second half a moment later anyway. And most of the other managers Nielsen had played under used the half time to put a light under their players to make them perform (even) better in the second half.
Nielsen also spoke about training sessions where the players were juggling with the ball and Meulensteen would suddenly would jump in front of them and yell “BOOOH” in their faces. This was meant to prepare them for the noise there would be at the stadium when they played in front of 10.000-15.000 people, he explained to them. This confused the players even more because average attendance during the 04/05 season was almost 16.000 and in both the 04/05 and 05/06 season they had played before 40.000 people against FC Copenhagen away and in front of 28.000 (the maximum capacity of Brøndby Stadion) at home. Therefore, the players knew what it was like to play in front of a big crowd and simply didn’t need these strange lessons. At this point Per Nielsen began to think that Meulensteen hadn’t done his homework about the history of Brøndby IF. Nielsen says:
“I think he was surprised how many spectators went to Danish league games, and that he had players in the squad who were used to playing big games with their national teams and in the European club tournaments.”
At this point Per Nielsen was starting to wonder exactly how important Meulensteen’s role was at Manchester United before he went to Brøndby.
The drills the first team squad did during Meulensteen’s time in Brøndby were very weak according to Nielsen. He calls them “childish,” and says that a lot of the drills reminded him of the drills he did when he was a small child. Suddenly the level at the practices was terrible and way below the level that a Danish Superliga squad should be at. This proved Per Nielsen’s theory of Meulensteen not knowing the level of the players he was controlling. He was simply unprepared.
Meulensteen was always running the same drills at the training and this annoyed the players. He had big ambitions, but Nielsen didn’t think he had the skills to turn the ambitions into reality. To this day, Nielsen still doesn’t know how Meulensteen wanted the players to act on the field and what exactly he wanted them to do. Meulensteen had a hard time explaining his ideas to the players. He talked a lot, but the things he said simply didn’t make sense.
The tactical changes Meulensteen made between the matches were always proposed by the players. Probably, because he never managed to tell them what he wanted them to do.
Because of the bad practices the players got very frustrated and suddenly it was normal for fights to occur during the training. It’s normal for squads to have some disagreements, but since Meulensteen couldn’t control the squad these arguments evolved into actual fistfights. Meulensteen didn’t manage to solve the different disagreements and since they remained unsolved it created a lot of tension between the players.
Per Nielsen told about an episode at training where one of the older Danes (Thomas Rytter) made a rough tackle on one of the new Englishmen. Shortly the two Englishmen were fighting two of the older Danes (Thomas Rytter and Thomas Rasmussen) in the squad. While this was happening, Meulensteen was paralyzed and just watching without doing anything. The players themselves had to solve the problems and didn’t manage to, and therefore the tensions stayed in the squad. At this moment, the team was in chaos because Meulensteen couldn’t control the players.
From his time in England, Meulensteen had learned about the Prozone system, where you sew small sensors in the players’ shirts to map their running patterns. To make this system work he demanded that a lot of cameras be installed at the stadium. But Brøndby wasn’t ready to make this kind of an investment in a system that had never been used in Denmark before. According to Per Nielsen, this was the only idea Meulensteen had and it never went through.
In the first couple of matches, Brøndby did fine and they had 10 points after the first 4 games. But during this period the players were still remembering what Laudrup had taught them, and they used his tactics and structures on the field. Of course, they couldn’t keep on doing this and shortly after they started losing.
Brøndby was facing Frankfurt in the UEFA Cup. Before the match started, Meulensteen gathered the players in the locker room together in front of a white blackboard. He then started pointing at the players and made them tell what kind of animal they wanted to be on the field. The players found this very weird and no one answered. As the captain Nielsen felt like he had to step up, and says he wants to be a snake. Meulensteen then replies:
“No no, Per, goddammit. That won’t work. Snakes are slow animals, we cannot have snakes in our defense, the Germans will outrun us then.”
Nielsen replies:
“Then I’m a tiger. Is that okay?”
Meulensteen:
“That’s perfect! Tigers are brave, fast and strong. That is exactly what we need from a captain.”
After this, the other players responded and Meulensteen then drew the starting lineup containing a tiger, a fox, an elephant, a giraffe and a lot of other animals.
When Meulensteen was done drawing the starting lineup, he said:
“That’s great, boys. We are smart, fast and clever animals on the field today. We cannot lose today.”
While this was going on Nielsen was looking at the blackboard and thinking:
“We are sending an entire zoo on the field today.”
Then Meulensteen said a few words about the tactics, but no one was listening anymore because everyone was shocked about what they had just witnessed. They were all looking at the blackboard to keep track of the animals and simply thinking “What is going on?” Then Meulensteen left the locker room and all of the players started laughing, and asking each other “What the hell was he doing?”
Brøndby lost the match, 4-0, and got two red cards. One of Meulensteen’s Englishmen (Mark Howard) got one of them after headbutting a Frankfurt player. The leftback Thomas Rasmussen afterwards told the press that he thinks Howard is a clown for letting the team down with his red card. At the next practice, Meulensteen made Rasmussen sit in a chair in front of the entire squad and yelled at him, telling him he is a bad teammate and friend. Meulensteen was extremely unhappy with Rasmussen and didn’t say anything to Howard.
Thomas Rasmussen, capped 8 times for Denmark.
After this episode and the animal starting lineup, everything turned into anarchy and the players lost their faith in him.
But already – even from the beginning of his stay at Brøndby – the players were surprised and disappointed in him. Because of his past at Manchester United they had expected him to sign some big names on the transfer market – players who had the abilities to make Brøndby champions again and raise the level in the squad. Instead he called Per Nielsen to his office and said:
“Per, listen to me. I have found a striker who can score 25-30 goals for us in a season. Just the striker the squad needs.”
Nielsen was impressed, but when Meulensteen told him the name he started laughing. The striker was the unknown Hannes Sigurdsson from Stoke City’s reserve team who ended up scoring 2 goals in 9 matches that season, and is now known as one of the worst players who have ever played at Brøndby. But that wasn’t the only bad signing. Mark Howard was bought to replace Daniel Agger who went to Liverpool, but wasn’t even close to his level and had a terrible season. He is now without a contract. The worst signing Meulensteen made was a South African striker called Giovanni Rector, whom he knew through former Man Utd player Quinton Fortune. Rector came from the Belgian second division. Meulensteen called him the perfect teammate for Sigurdsson, and said that the two new strikers would dominate Danish football. Rector played 5 games for Brøndby and scored 0 goals. At the end of the season Brøndby released him.
During Meulensteen’s stay at Brøndby, the winning attitude the club have always been known for started to disappear. Nielsen says it’s because he didn’t understand the mechanics in the squad of a big club like Brøndby. He also didn’t understand the traditions and expectations that follow a big club.
During Meulensteen’s stay at Brøndby, his wife got very sick, and he had to travel a lot between Denmark and Holland. During these travels to Holland he always called Nielsen to keep in touch with the squad. Just before the winter break (in Denmark there is a break between mid-December and March because of the bad weather) he had a talk with Nielsen. Meulensteen said:
“Even though the results are bad at the moment, we are in this together. No one is leaving. We are staying and we take the fight.” This impressed Nielsen during a terrible season. Even though Nielsen had lost most of his respect for Meulensteen, they still had a good and constant dialogue.
In the beginning of January, Brøndby announced that Meulensteen had resigned as manager because of his wife’s illness. Nielsen was surprised since not long before Meulensteen had told him that she was almost cured. Nielsen is sure that Meulensteen was using the illness as an excuse to leave the club. Because of Meulensteen’s bad transfers, Brøndby decided to sign new players without his acquiescence, and that was probably why he quit.
A couple of weeks after his resignation, Meulensteen gave an interview where he told the press that one of his last wishes was to sell Per Nielsen and three other players and spend the money on new players. This was a month after he had told Nielsen to trust him as a coach and told him to stay at the club and fight with him. Meulensteen told the press that Nielsen and the three other players were the reason why there were cliques in the squad, and that’s why he wanted to sell them.
http://russianfootballnews.com/inside-meulensteens-time-at-brondby/
Meulensteen was appointed Anzhi coach yesterday to much surprise and fanfare. His last head coaching position was a fairly unsuccessful stint at Danish club Brøndby IF. We get to know a little more about Meulensteen as a head coach through his former player at Brøndby, Per Nielsen, from Nielsen’s recent autobiography.
BACKGROUND:
Per Nielsen played his first match for Brøndby IF in June 1993 and between his debut and 2008 he played 548, only eight less than Bjarne Jensen, who holds the club record for most matches played with 556. Nielsen played as a center defender. Per Nielsen has never played for any clubs other than Brøndby, where he won the Danish championship in 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2005 and the Danish cup in 1993, 1998, 2003, 2005 and 2008. He also played 10 matches for the Danish national team, earning his first cap in 2004. After he resigned as a player in 2008, he stayed at Brøndby – first as a scout and later as assistant manager for the U-19 team, until 2011, when he left for First Division (Denmark’s second tier) club Hvidovre to take over as manager. He ranks among the greatest legends in Brøndby, where he is still very popular with the fans.
In the beginning of May this year he wrote the book “4 Per Nielsen – Brøndby for evigt?” which means “4 (his shirt number) Per Nielsen – Brøndby forever?” In this book he tells a lot of different stories about his time in the club. Both the good times in the 90’s and until 2005, when the club won its last championship, but also the tough years that followed.
With Danish legend Michael Laudrup (former Spartak manager) Brøndby won the double in 2005. The team that played the 04/05 season is ranked as one of the best, if not the best, teams that have ever played in the Danish league. The biggest stars on the team were Daniel Agger (Liverpool now), Johan Elmander (later Toulouse, Bolton and now Galatasaray), Morten Skoubo (later Real Sociedad and several Dutch clubs) and Thomas Kahlenberg (later Auxerre, Wolfsburg and Evian) and then Per Nielsen, who was the captain. The next season Brøndby finished second after FC Copenhagen. After this season, Brøndby and Michael Laudrup couldn’t find common ground for the renewal of the managers’ contract and he left the club, together with his chief scout and assistant manager. This put Brøndby in a difficult situation because they only had two months to find a new manager before the 06/07 season would start.
It was in the middle of the summer break that the club announced that they had signed former Manchester United reserve team manager Rene Meulensteen as new manager. In Per Nielsen’s book, he tells about the brief period of time when Rene Meulensteen was his manager.
After Brøndby won the championship, Nielsen was offered a lucrative contract with Norwegian champions Rosenborg, but Meulensteen convinced him to stay with Brøndby since he was an important culture bearer at the club and therefore vital for the club’s future. Nielsen refused the offer from Rosenborg and stayed at Brøndby, a decision he doesn’t regret according to the book.
At the beginning of the stay Meulensteen signed two young Englishmen (Mark Howard and Adam Eckersley), whom he knew from Manchester United’s reserve squad.
Meulensteen immediately changed the daily routines around the squad. At first, a lot of small things like when the club had to train and when they had to leave for matches. Later he decided to change the colour of the hallway leading to the team’s locker room at the stadium from yellow (which is Brøndby’s shirt colour) to green. This was intended to give the player’s hope and calm them down when they went from the pitch to the locker room after the first half. He explained to the squad that since they were excited after the first half they needed to calm down a bit. Nielsen, and the rest of the squad, were wondering why this was important because they needed to be ready and excited for the second half a moment later anyway. And most of the other managers Nielsen had played under used the half time to put a light under their players to make them perform (even) better in the second half.
Nielsen also spoke about training sessions where the players were juggling with the ball and Meulensteen would suddenly would jump in front of them and yell “BOOOH” in their faces. This was meant to prepare them for the noise there would be at the stadium when they played in front of 10.000-15.000 people, he explained to them. This confused the players even more because average attendance during the 04/05 season was almost 16.000 and in both the 04/05 and 05/06 season they had played before 40.000 people against FC Copenhagen away and in front of 28.000 (the maximum capacity of Brøndby Stadion) at home. Therefore, the players knew what it was like to play in front of a big crowd and simply didn’t need these strange lessons. At this point Per Nielsen began to think that Meulensteen hadn’t done his homework about the history of Brøndby IF. Nielsen says:
“I think he was surprised how many spectators went to Danish league games, and that he had players in the squad who were used to playing big games with their national teams and in the European club tournaments.”
At this point Per Nielsen was starting to wonder exactly how important Meulensteen’s role was at Manchester United before he went to Brøndby.
The drills the first team squad did during Meulensteen’s time in Brøndby were very weak according to Nielsen. He calls them “childish,” and says that a lot of the drills reminded him of the drills he did when he was a small child. Suddenly the level at the practices was terrible and way below the level that a Danish Superliga squad should be at. This proved Per Nielsen’s theory of Meulensteen not knowing the level of the players he was controlling. He was simply unprepared.
Meulensteen was always running the same drills at the training and this annoyed the players. He had big ambitions, but Nielsen didn’t think he had the skills to turn the ambitions into reality. To this day, Nielsen still doesn’t know how Meulensteen wanted the players to act on the field and what exactly he wanted them to do. Meulensteen had a hard time explaining his ideas to the players. He talked a lot, but the things he said simply didn’t make sense.
The tactical changes Meulensteen made between the matches were always proposed by the players. Probably, because he never managed to tell them what he wanted them to do.
Because of the bad practices the players got very frustrated and suddenly it was normal for fights to occur during the training. It’s normal for squads to have some disagreements, but since Meulensteen couldn’t control the squad these arguments evolved into actual fistfights. Meulensteen didn’t manage to solve the different disagreements and since they remained unsolved it created a lot of tension between the players.
Per Nielsen told about an episode at training where one of the older Danes (Thomas Rytter) made a rough tackle on one of the new Englishmen. Shortly the two Englishmen were fighting two of the older Danes (Thomas Rytter and Thomas Rasmussen) in the squad. While this was happening, Meulensteen was paralyzed and just watching without doing anything. The players themselves had to solve the problems and didn’t manage to, and therefore the tensions stayed in the squad. At this moment, the team was in chaos because Meulensteen couldn’t control the players.
From his time in England, Meulensteen had learned about the Prozone system, where you sew small sensors in the players’ shirts to map their running patterns. To make this system work he demanded that a lot of cameras be installed at the stadium. But Brøndby wasn’t ready to make this kind of an investment in a system that had never been used in Denmark before. According to Per Nielsen, this was the only idea Meulensteen had and it never went through.
In the first couple of matches, Brøndby did fine and they had 10 points after the first 4 games. But during this period the players were still remembering what Laudrup had taught them, and they used his tactics and structures on the field. Of course, they couldn’t keep on doing this and shortly after they started losing.
Brøndby was facing Frankfurt in the UEFA Cup. Before the match started, Meulensteen gathered the players in the locker room together in front of a white blackboard. He then started pointing at the players and made them tell what kind of animal they wanted to be on the field. The players found this very weird and no one answered. As the captain Nielsen felt like he had to step up, and says he wants to be a snake. Meulensteen then replies:
“No no, Per, goddammit. That won’t work. Snakes are slow animals, we cannot have snakes in our defense, the Germans will outrun us then.”
Nielsen replies:
“Then I’m a tiger. Is that okay?”
Meulensteen:
“That’s perfect! Tigers are brave, fast and strong. That is exactly what we need from a captain.”
After this, the other players responded and Meulensteen then drew the starting lineup containing a tiger, a fox, an elephant, a giraffe and a lot of other animals.
When Meulensteen was done drawing the starting lineup, he said:
“That’s great, boys. We are smart, fast and clever animals on the field today. We cannot lose today.”
While this was going on Nielsen was looking at the blackboard and thinking:
“We are sending an entire zoo on the field today.”
Then Meulensteen said a few words about the tactics, but no one was listening anymore because everyone was shocked about what they had just witnessed. They were all looking at the blackboard to keep track of the animals and simply thinking “What is going on?” Then Meulensteen left the locker room and all of the players started laughing, and asking each other “What the hell was he doing?”
Brøndby lost the match, 4-0, and got two red cards. One of Meulensteen’s Englishmen (Mark Howard) got one of them after headbutting a Frankfurt player. The leftback Thomas Rasmussen afterwards told the press that he thinks Howard is a clown for letting the team down with his red card. At the next practice, Meulensteen made Rasmussen sit in a chair in front of the entire squad and yelled at him, telling him he is a bad teammate and friend. Meulensteen was extremely unhappy with Rasmussen and didn’t say anything to Howard.
Thomas Rasmussen, capped 8 times for Denmark.
After this episode and the animal starting lineup, everything turned into anarchy and the players lost their faith in him.
But already – even from the beginning of his stay at Brøndby – the players were surprised and disappointed in him. Because of his past at Manchester United they had expected him to sign some big names on the transfer market – players who had the abilities to make Brøndby champions again and raise the level in the squad. Instead he called Per Nielsen to his office and said:
“Per, listen to me. I have found a striker who can score 25-30 goals for us in a season. Just the striker the squad needs.”
Nielsen was impressed, but when Meulensteen told him the name he started laughing. The striker was the unknown Hannes Sigurdsson from Stoke City’s reserve team who ended up scoring 2 goals in 9 matches that season, and is now known as one of the worst players who have ever played at Brøndby. But that wasn’t the only bad signing. Mark Howard was bought to replace Daniel Agger who went to Liverpool, but wasn’t even close to his level and had a terrible season. He is now without a contract. The worst signing Meulensteen made was a South African striker called Giovanni Rector, whom he knew through former Man Utd player Quinton Fortune. Rector came from the Belgian second division. Meulensteen called him the perfect teammate for Sigurdsson, and said that the two new strikers would dominate Danish football. Rector played 5 games for Brøndby and scored 0 goals. At the end of the season Brøndby released him.
During Meulensteen’s stay at Brøndby, the winning attitude the club have always been known for started to disappear. Nielsen says it’s because he didn’t understand the mechanics in the squad of a big club like Brøndby. He also didn’t understand the traditions and expectations that follow a big club.
During Meulensteen’s stay at Brøndby, his wife got very sick, and he had to travel a lot between Denmark and Holland. During these travels to Holland he always called Nielsen to keep in touch with the squad. Just before the winter break (in Denmark there is a break between mid-December and March because of the bad weather) he had a talk with Nielsen. Meulensteen said:
“Even though the results are bad at the moment, we are in this together. No one is leaving. We are staying and we take the fight.” This impressed Nielsen during a terrible season. Even though Nielsen had lost most of his respect for Meulensteen, they still had a good and constant dialogue.
In the beginning of January, Brøndby announced that Meulensteen had resigned as manager because of his wife’s illness. Nielsen was surprised since not long before Meulensteen had told him that she was almost cured. Nielsen is sure that Meulensteen was using the illness as an excuse to leave the club. Because of Meulensteen’s bad transfers, Brøndby decided to sign new players without his acquiescence, and that was probably why he quit.
A couple of weeks after his resignation, Meulensteen gave an interview where he told the press that one of his last wishes was to sell Per Nielsen and three other players and spend the money on new players. This was a month after he had told Nielsen to trust him as a coach and told him to stay at the club and fight with him. Meulensteen told the press that Nielsen and the three other players were the reason why there were cliques in the squad, and that’s why he wanted to sell them.
