Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 3:39 PM• Jeroen van Poppel • Last update: 16:56

Louis van Gaal came back to his statement about ‘a glorified bunch of stars’ from July at the the Dutch press conference. The new national coach of the Dutch national team denies that he meant the Dutch and indicates that he previously had countries such as France and Portugal in mind.

Van Gaal was at the goodbye moment of the the Dutch Lionesses for the Olympic Games at the beginning of July. “Now look at the Men’s European Championship. Then you see that a glorified bunch of stars can’t do it. And I have always seen under Sarina Wiegman that there was a team where people would go through fire for each other,” he referred to the national coach of the the Dutch Lionesses.

According to him, the fact that almost everyone assumed that Van Gaal was referring to the Dutch is mainly due to the media. “The media thought: oh, he means the Dutch national team. But I didn’t say ‘the Dutch’ or ‘the Dutch national team’, I said ‘the European Championship’. I have mentioned an example where an assembled bunch of individual players do not become champions. Then I had in my head: France, Portugal. Not the Dutch national team. Of course you had that in your head. Check it out. I said it to the ladies, then I wanted to make it clear that you can perform much better as a team than as a bunch of individuals.”

Louis van Gaal explains his statement about the “glorified bunch of stars” ?? pic.twitter.com/c6zZr97gqF

— ESPN NL (@ESPNnl) August 17, 2021