It has been a whirlwind few months in the fledgling managerial career of Ruud van Nistelrooy.
After a year off following a late-season departure from his first season in first-team coaching at PSV, Van Nistelrooy indicated he was ready to return to football. The former Manchester United and Real Madrid striker ended up back at Old Trafford, as one of Erik ten Hag’s assistants.
Just four months later, he was asked to hold the fort as interim head coach at one of the world’s biggest clubs following Ten Hag’s dismissal. Van Nistelrooy was gone himself after four more games, bidding an emotional goodbye to United fans for a second time, as Ruben Amorim arrived to take up the reins.
Now, Van Nistelrooy is back at Old Trafford again, in tonight’s FA Cup fourth-round tie as manager of Leicester City, but working in circumstances that are very different from those of his illustrious playing career.
Instead of fighting for titles and trophies, the 70-time Netherlands international is facing his previous English club with just one objective — keep Leicester in the Premier League for next season.
There are no points to play for in this cup tie and third-bottom Leicester have bigger priorities than progress to the FA Cup’s last 16 after eight defeats in nine league games, but Van Nistelrooy will want a response after his side’s first-half capitulation at Everton, conceding three times en route to a 4-0 loss.
Here, The Athletic looks back at his rollercoaster seven months, speaking to those who know Van Nistelrooy for an insight into how he will handle one of the biggest challenges of his career.
As soon as Van Nistelrooy left PSV, one game before the end of their 2022-23 season, he was preparing for his next managerial role.
His stock seemed high after winning the Johan Cruyff Shield and the KNVB Cup (the Dutch versions of the Community Shield and FA Cup) and just missing out on the Eredivisie title to Feyenoord. He had plans to manage a big club in the leagues where he had been such a prominent player: the Premier League, La Liga in Spain or Germany’s Bundesliga.
Rene Meulensteen, who worked under Sir Alex Ferguson on the coaching staff at United when Van Nistelrooy was one of the best strikers in English football, visited him at the PSV training ground before that KNVB Cup final against Ajax in April 2023 (PSV won on penalties after a 1-1 draw). “I think he was sounding me out if I wanted to become part of his backroom staff the following season,” Meulensteen tells The Athletic.
“I was coaching with Australia’s national team at the time, but I told him if you win the cup and you get into the Champions League, you’re in a very strong position to negotiate what you want. He then walked out (less than a month later) with a game to go. He probably thought he didn’t get the backing of the club, but he should never have walked out.
“He should have stayed, because you know how changeable the world of football is. When you’re winning, you have all the board members onside, but when you’re losing…you’re the worst manager in the world. So you have to strike while the iron is hot. You need to make sure you capitalise on it, but he thought it was the right thing to do.”
Van Nistelrooy on the touchline at PSV in May 2023 (Olaf Kraak/ANP via Getty Images)
After a working sabbatical in which he visited Buenos Aires to speak to former team-mate Martin Demichelis and Marcelo Gallardo at top Argentine club River Plate and Spain to see his former Malaga boss Manuel Pellegrini at Real Betis and his Real Madrid mentor Carlo Ancelotti with the Bernabeu giants, Van Nistelrooy was looking for his next opportunity.
He told the media how keen he was to get back into the game, but it was still a surprise when he resurfaced last July as an assistant to Ten Hag at United rather than as a manager in his own right.
“In my opinion, he is not an assistant anymore,” says Foppe de Haan, who coached Van Nistelrooy as a young player at Heerenveen in the Netherlands. “He must be the first coach.”
But the lure of United, where he scored 150 goals in 219 appearances across five seasons, proved too enticing. “The only job I would have taken as an assistant manager was at United because of the bond I have with the people in the club and the fans,” Van Nistelrooy reflected at his first press conference as Leicester manager in December.
Sources at United, granted anonymity to protect relationships, have told The Athletic that Van Nistelrooy made a positive impression in his role. He had an aura — and not just because of his previous endeavours for the club, although his pedigree did lend him a quiet authority around their Carrington training complex.
“The most important thing that I took from Sir Bobby Robson (who managed him at PSV) and Sir Alex Ferguson is the relationship with the individual,” he said in a piece for The Coaches’ Voice. “This is a human being. Not a football player, a person. When you reach that connection, you get the best out of people, and from then on you can build on their careers.”
The United players liked his communication and personality, and so did some executives. As Ten Hag’s tenure ended and the board discussed their options, Van Nistelrooy emerged as the perfect interim appointment, even if doubts persisted about whether he was ready to lead a club of United’s stature after just one season in charge of a senior team at PSV. The long-term plan was always to bring Amorim in from Portugal’s Sporting CP.
Van Nistelrooy offers Ten Hag his thoughts on the Manchester United bench (James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Still, he had four home games as their interim manager, recording three wins — two of them against Leicester, 5-2 in the Carabao Cup and 3-0 in the Premier League 10 days later. The strength of Van Nistelrooy’s relationship with United’s players was evident in how they celebrated goals in his games and those wins, with midfielder Casemiro particularly displaying his respect.
There clearly could have been more challenging games to face than the four he was given — there was also a 1-1 draw with Chelsea in the Premier League and a 2-0 win against PAOK in the Europa League — but when Van Nistelrooy reluctantly left United again after Amorim’s arrival, there was no shortage of clubs interested in taking him on as their No 1.
Burnley had interviewed him last summer following their relegation from the Premier League, while the club he’d played for in Germany, Hamburg, were also reportedly interested. But Leicester convinced him that, despite their lowly position in the table when Steve Cooper was relieved of his duties in late November, theirs was a project that could help him further his managerial aspirations.
Yet it has been a tough first couple of months in England’s East Midlands for Van Nistelrooy.
Leicester have lost eight of his first 12 games in charge and he could only bring in one player, defender Woyo Coulibaly from Parma of Italy’s Serie A, during the winter transfer window due to the club’s tricky profit and sustainability rules (PSR) situation. He needed more reinforcements to bolster their hopes of top-flight survival.
“Everybody knew it (the Leicester job) was going to be a handful,” Meulensteen says. “There’s a lack of backing in the transfer window as well, which doesn’t help. One or two new faces can sometimes make a hell of a difference within the dressing room. If you don’t get that and you are in a negative spiral, you need to find a way to turn it around.”
Van Nistelrooy cuts a lonely figure following Leicester’s loss to Crystal Palace last month (Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
That is the challenge that Van Nistelrooy now faces, the biggest of his career.
And of course, all this is unfamiliar territory for a man who spent most of his playing days fighting to win trophies, not to avoid relegation. “But it was not easy at PSV as he had 13 players sold in the winter window, including Cody Gakpo and Noni Madueke,” Darije Kalezic, a former team-mate and later coaching colleague at PSV, reminds The Athletic. “He still won two cups. He never complained and just focused on getting the most of the players on his roster.
“Leicester’s squad is not so good that they can easily stay in the league. He will bring youth players into the team. At PSV, he played Johan Bakayoko on the wing instead (after Gakpo and Madueke were sold to Liverpool and Chelsea in January 2023).”
Van Nistelrooy is already striving to find solutions internally. He has included Jeremy Monga, 15, and Jake Evans, 16, in his squad for the trip to Old Trafford, though promoting academy kids alone will not be the answer. He will have to find a tactical solution, too.
The Dutchman admitted in his first Leicester press conference that he was not “a romantic type of manager” wedded to one approach, although he clearly has a philosophy on how he wants his teams to play. “I know Ruud, if he believes in something, he stays with that,” says Adil Ramzi, the former Morocco midfielder who played alongside Van Nistelrooy and later coached with him, both at PSV. “OK, but that’s not always good. You must see what you have and what the reality is.
“The plan and the quality of the group (at Leicester) is not working. They don’t have the quality to play the way you really want, so it is important to have a plan to save the team and the club.”
Van Nistelrooy and Ramzi coaching PSV’s under-23s in 2021 (Photo Prestige/Soccrates/Getty Images)
With Leicester keeping just one clean sheet in the league all season, Meulensteen says the priority for Van Nistelrooy is clear: solidify his defence.
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“They are vulnerable at the back the way they play, with (centre-backs) Wout Faes and Jannik Vestergaard,” he says. “Vestergaard has got great international experience (with Denmark), but he has no change of pace. He’s got no agility — and Faes is an accident waiting to happen. There’s a lack of solidity, and that is what you need to base your performances around.
“When you are struggling, you need to try to keep clean sheets and make yourselves very difficult to beat, and then find a way to release players forward, still have great chances and score goals.”
Changing personnel and even the formation may help, but changing a club’s mindset could be the really tricky part for Van Nistelrooy.
“When fighting relegation, fear kicks in: ‘Are we actually good enough to stay up?’,” says Meulensteen. “You can either face fear and run, or face it and rise. That needs to get across to his players — how do they rise?”.
Leicester sank without trace at Everton on Saturday (Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)
The pressure may be mounting but Van Nistelrooy is not showing it.
“He was a player of the highest level,” says Ramzi. “He knows what is required to be a success and he knows how to handle the pressure. But it is obviously different to be a coach from being a player. You have everything on your shoulders as a coach. He’s still a human. The pressure is going to do something to everybody, and with Ruud also.
“If he’s calm, that’s because the coach is the mirror of everything to the players.
“The players may not have much quality and they might not have much experience and the capacity to handle the pressure, so if you see the coach also disturbed, then it is finished. Maybe he tries to stay calm, but really it is a fire inside.”
Van Nistelrooy was renowned for his meticulous preparation as a player, the standards he set himself propelling him to the heights as one of the top strikers in Europe. He is trying to instil those same standards as a manager.
“The difference is that, when you’re a player, you manage your own performance to the maximum,” Meulensteen adds. “You train, you prepare yourself, and you make sure your performance is on par. But as a coach, you need to manage every player’s performance, and every substitute, and every member of staff around you, and everything.
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“In terms of man-management, there are so many more variables that you need to try to influence and make sure all the boxes are ticked and everything goes forward.”
It has been a surreal and breathless seven months for him, and now Van Nistelrooy heads back to familiar surroundings where he achieved so much as a player and then, briefly, tasted life as the manager.
“A lot has happened, yeah, but in the football world there’s never a dull moment,” he said on Thursday ahead of that Old Trafford return.
“But a lot will continue happening because it’s the world we live in.”
(Top photo: Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)
