Dutch soccer guru Wiel Coerver dies (86)

Legendary Dutch coach Wiel Coerver – the man who gave his name to one of the world's most successful football coaching programmes – has died at the age of 86. 
Coerver started his professional career in 1954 playing for Rapid JC, now Roda JC, helping his team become Dutch league champions in 1956. As a coach, he was even more successful, steering many clubs (including Feyenoord in 1974) to major championship titles with attractive football based on individual skills and collective attacking patterns. 
 
He was also head coach of the Indonesian national team and served as technical advisor to the Swedish, Dutch, English and other national federations. Some of the young players he developed now play for top European clubs.
 
Star play
In the 1970s, Coerver developed an extremely successful coaching programme which has since become a global coaching standard. It is based on painstaking studies of videotapes of world soccer stars, including Brazilian legend Pelé. This approach led Coerver to the conviction that excellent skills are not just inborn, but can be taught.
 
He developed a set of basic training techniques designed to hone individual passing skills and dribbling moves, as well as to improve group play. The programme was further developed by Alfred Galustian and former Chelsea player Charlie Cooke.
 
Unpredictable
Many players, including Ruud van Nistelrooy, Arjen Robben and even Cristiano Ronaldo, have benefited from Coerver’s teachings, says René Meulensteen, who is Skills Development Coach at Manchester United.
 
“Of course, Ronaldo is an extremely gifted player, but our training techniques have made him more effective. Every player in the first team has been trained using the Coerver method, which is basically about small things that can be improved to make a player more unpredictable."
 
German World Cup winner Jürgen Klinsmann regrets the fact that the Coerver Coaching Programme wasn’t available when he was young: “It would certainly have made me a better player."