From Simon Kuper’s Financial Times piece about Dutch football, that brilliant orange, a brief history of how a coach and player drove the Netherlands to become an unlikely powerhouse:

“Dutch football wasn’t any good until 1965, when the semi-professional Amsterdam club Ajax hired a coach named Rinus Michels. Together with Ajax’s teenage prodigy Johan Cruijff, he cracked the secret of football. It’s no coincidence they did this in 1960s Amsterdam, a place where everything was being reinvented. Meanwhile a neighbourhood kid named Louis van Gaal (Holland’s coach today) watched their training sessions.

Football, Cruijff and Michels decided, was about the pass. Dribbles, warrior spirit, fitness and so on were mere details. A team has to pass fast, into space, with players constantly changing position, and everyone thinking like a playmaker. As Cruijff said, ‘Football is a game you play with your head.’

That means you need to talk about football, and sometimes quarrel about it. When Cruijff became a coach, he complained, “The moment you open your mouth to breathe, Dutch footballers say, ‘Yes but …’’ However, that was his own fault. He had turned Dutch football into a debating society. Holland’s great captain Ruud Gullit told me, ‘In a Dutch changing room, everyone thinks he knows best. In an Italian changing room, everybody probably also thinks he knows best, but nobody dares tell the manager.’ And in England, I asked? ‘In an English changing room, they just have a laugh.’

Because the Dutch think about football, they keep developing. They always used to want the ball. But here in Brazil they prefer the opposition to have it. Then, the second the Dutch win it, they break en masse. ‘Omschakeling’ – ‘changeover’ – they call it. ‘We’ve been playing reaction football all tournament,’ says Van Gaal.”