Rafael van der Vaart returns as a football columnist at De Telegraaf. The former footballer currently works as an assistant coach for Esbjerg fB in Denmark, combines that with his role as an analyst on television and has several commercial contracts. The question is whether Van der Vaart sees his future as an analyst or as a football coach. In his own words, he has to ‘discover it a bit’. “But when I see how terribly much a head coach comes up with, I don’t know if I find it all that attractive.”
Van der Vaart finds working as an analyst and columnist at least as interesting. The former the Dutch international says he is ‘extremely grateful’ that he was allowed to be part of ‘an incredibly beautiful generation’. “Guys like Robin van Persie, Wesley Sneijder, Arjen Robben and I have been ‘playing balls’ since we were four years old, we were all very early in the training. We’ve been doing that for almost 35 years,” Van der Vaart told the newspaper on Saturday. “So what do we understand? Only one thing, right? From football. So why would you go out of football?”
Van der Vaart will wish his former teammates all the luck in their career as a coach. As a footballer he always gave everyone everything and after his career he has that much more. He also wishes Robin van Persie a bright future in a possible coaching career. “Everyone knows that we didn’t have a warm relationship in the past. People always saw me as one with Wesley. At a certain point, a warm bond was formed at Oranje. That was due to Bert van Marwijk. During a training camp in Austria for the World Cup in South Africa, he invited all the women and children of the players.”
As a result, the the Dutch internationals all saw a different side of each other. Playing with teammates was exchanged for evenings with the families together and that brought the players closer together. “A side of Robin that I have come to really appreciate.” Van der Vaart thoroughly enjoyed his time with the Dutch. “The level of training in our generation was so insanely high. (…) When I left Real Madrid, which everyone thought had the best players in the world, for a few international matches I was intensely happy. The level at the Dutch then was a lot higher than at Madrid.”
Nevertheless, the egos always played a role in those days. “Everyone was always angry when the trainer took you out or chose someone else in the Dutch. He immediately found so-and-so an asshole or was insulted. You were all busy with your own career. And there were men walking around, eh. Now we don’t have that anymore. I was just talking about it with Ibi (Afellay, ed.). We now all see each other as human beings and no longer as the footballer. If we had put that aside earlier, we would have become world champions three times…”
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