The making of Ruud van Nistelrooy: The early years in the Netherlands

Ruud van Nistelrooy played under Sir Bobby Robson and Sir Alex Ferguson, but while both had a huge influence on the Dutchman, some lesser-known coaches helped mould the player he would become.

Growing up in southern Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s, Van Nistelrooy worked with inspiring and committed youth coaches who guided the youngster before moves to Heerevenen and PSV eventually led to his £19million ($23.9m in today’s exchange) British record transfer move to Manchester United in 2001.

The Athletic spoke to coaches, friends and team-mates who helped develop a young Van Nistelrooy — now the Leicester City manager — from his early years to his senior debut and being converted into a striker.

This is the making of Rutgerus Johannes Martinus van Nistelrooij.

Starting out

In July 1976, Van Nistelrooy was born in Oss, a small city in the southern province of Noord Brabant in the Netherlands, the eldest of three children. His father, Tiny, played football locally and Ruud, his oldest son, would often be seen playing with a ball pitchside while his father was in action for Nooit Gedacht in Geffen.

Aged five, Van Nistelrooy also joined Nooit Gedacht, where he was coached by Henk van Griensven. His little brother, Ron, would also play for the club, and later Den Bosch.

“When I think of my youth, I just remember having a ball at my feet,” Van Nistelrooy said in the documentary Dribbels and Dromen, by ING Nederland. “Geffen wasn’t exactly overflowing with other activities so it was just playing football on the streets or at school, with jackets marking the goals.”

By the age of 14, Van Nistelrooy was already starting to show ambition and he decided to move to RKSV Margriet in Oss, a 20-minute bike ride from Geffen, because of their close links to local professional club Den Bosch and his desire to be spotted.

It was at Margriet where he met Hasje Ruijs, a coach who would have a big influence on his development. “I could play football but I didn’t have that belief,” Van Nistelrooy said in the documentary. “He conveyed to me that I could really play football. Because of his enthusiasm and confidence, I could make several steps and after a year, I was ready to join Den Bosch.”

Hans van der Pluijm was manager of Den Bosch, who were in the Eerste Divisie (the second tier of Dutch football), and remembers an awkward-looking young boy.

“When he came to our club, he was just 14 and was growing very fast,” Van der Pluijm tells The Athletic. “When you saw his movements as a player, it was not very coordinated but later on, when he got some more power, he soon grew as a player.

“He was an attacking midfielder, No 10, and he was a boy with a fantastic attitude and a fantastic mentality.”

It was at Den Bosch that Van Nistelrooy met friend and future Den Bosch and PSV team-mate Theo Lucius.

“I was 13 when I first met Ruud and I played with him in the youth team at Den Bosch,” Lucius, who is now the assistant coach at PSV, tells The Athletic. “I lived about 10km from him and we used to share a bus ride to training. I played with him for many years.

Theo Lucius, second from right in front row, with PSV in 1998; Van Nistelrooy, second from right, back row (Gero Breloer/picture alliance via Getty Images)

“I played as a striker then and he played as the No 10 behind me. He had excellent technique and always wanted to score. He was a winner. The only thing he wanted was to win and score every game. When he got one, he wanted two. When he got two, he wanted the hat-trick. He lived for scoring goals.”

Van der Pluijm had seen enough of Van Nistelrooy by the age of 17 to convince him he was ready for the first team.

“He was playing on Saturday with the youth team, and on Sunday, I let him come in the first team and that was his promotion at that time,” he says. “He trained with the first team and his movements were great. In that time, he was smart and intelligent in reading game situations.”

Conversion from No 10 to the main striker

Van Nistelrooy made his professional debut in an away match against ADO Den Haag and Van der Pluijm says it was not just his ability that stood out.

“If you are an ambitious player and you want to achieve something, then you can adapt,” he says of Van Nistelrooy’s step up into the senior ranks. “He was an achiever and he could read game situations early. He had the instinctive mind of a striker and scoring ability.”

Van Nistelrooy had four seasons with Den Bosch, scoring 20 goals in 71 appearances before joining Eredivisie side Heerenveen for the equivalent of €360,000 in 1997. It was during his one season with Heerenveen that Van Nistelrooy was converted from a No 10 into a main striker, although he was a little reluctant at first.

“He was 20 when he came to us, and we looked at him and we didn’t know really what type of player he was,” says Foppe de Haan, who managed Heerenveen for 20 years, with Van Nistelrooy playing under him in the 1997-98 season.

“He was playing in the midfield at Den Bosch, but I looked at him at training and in the friendly games and I thought that he was better as a striker.

“But he said: ‘No, no, Coach, I’m a midfielder. I’m No 10′. I said: ‘But we need you as a striker, and I think you can be very good at it’.”

“I thought that was because he was eager to shoot. Most players are not shooting at the goal and when they do, they are hoping it’s a goal, but he knew where the ‘keeper was and where the space was. There was a big discussion about (the position switch).”

Van Nistelrooy, middle row, fourth from the right, in the Heerenveen team photo, 1997; Head coach De Haan in middle of the front row (VI Images via Getty Images

Van Nistelrooy, speaking in a press conference before Leicester’s Premier League clash against Wolverhampton Wanderers this month, admitted he took some convincing to make the switch. “I was a No 10 for three seasons, but he said, ‘Give it a go at No 9. I think you can score a couple of goals’,” Van Nistelrooy said.

“I didn’t really like the idea. I said, ‘I have to play with my back to goal. I’m a 10, I need the ball, I need to play’, but I said, ‘OK, let’s develop it on the training pitch and bring it into games’.

“The way he designed drills to make everyone better, it’s something I try to do as well with my teams. In the end, I felt, ‘Hey, this could be a position where I can do pretty well’, and I never looked back.”

With De Haan’s meticulous planning and training, Van Nistelrooy began to flourish as a striker and it was through his training programme that Van Nistelrooy honed the skills and style of play that would serve him so well in later years.

“When we played four against four or five against five, he was always the striker, and we had a good stopper,” De Haan says. “You have to make it like it is in a game. So for each small game, it was a game between the stopper and Ruud.

“I told him, ‘You know where the space is. You can feel it when the ball comes back off the ‘keeper or the post, you’re always there and you are fast. If we play against a midline defence, there’s a lot of space, then the ball in that area, you are always better and faster than the stopper or the defenders’.

“And we succeeded.”

Taking notes and studying Bergkamp

De Haan recalls a studious Van Nistelrooy who recorded every training session in a notebook and travelled to watch Dennis Bergkamp at Ajax to help his development.

“After training, he wrote down what he had done and what has to be better the next day in his book,” De Haan says. “He would come to me the next day or a week later and ask what I meant by certain things I asked him to do. He was always thinking and asking questions. He was very coachable.

“He came early to the stadium to train and after training, we would talk about what we looked at on video tapes from the sessions.

“I was also going with him to watch Bergkamp to study how he was playing, where he was running and where is the space he’s moving into. He was curious to learn.”

De Haan was a huge influence on Van Nistelrooy, who after one season earned a £4.7million move to PSV in 1998 — a record fee paid by a Dutch club at the time.

Van Nistelrooy and De Haan in 2022 (Pieter van der Woude/Orange Pictures/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

“Foppe is not really known in England, but in Holland, he has a big name with a big status,” Van Nistelrooy says. “His methodology combined with the strength and conditioning at that time, was way ahead of his time.

“I was 20 years old when I signed. I enjoyed playing but I wasn’t aware of what it takes to be a professional, how you can take your development in your own hands — he taught me that. I noticed in one season I improved so much that I earned myself a transfer to PSV for the highest-ever fee in the Netherlands.”

The record-breaking transfer that paid for a stadium

De Haan’s hard work did not just benefit Van Nistelrooy, but Heerenveen, too, who could reinvest the money from his fee.

“With the money we received, we built our stadium,” De Haan says. “I was sad when he went to PSV, but for the club, it was good business because after that we had money to invest not just in the stadium but also in the squad. We qualified for the Champions League in 2000.”

Sir Bobby Robson was manager of PSV in Van Nistelrooy’s first season as they finished third in the Eredivisie to qualify for the Champions League. Van Nistelrooy scored 31 goals in 34 matches — the highest tally in the league and second-highest in Europe overall. He also earned the Dutch Player of the Year award.

Van Nistelrooy scored 31 goals in 34 league matches in 1998-99, the second-best haul in Europe (John Marsh/EMPICS via Getty Images)

“Some people may have thought the fee was a little bit high,” says Ernest Faber, who was a team-mate of Van Nistelrooy’s at PSV, played for them from 1992-2004 and would go on to become academy director (2018-19) when Van Nistelrooy was there as a coach.

“But he scored goals at every level. He had planned his development meticulously and had worked with good coaches. The fee was normal when compared to nowadays and was very cheap for a striker at that time.

“He was a passionate player. He always trained with high intensity and a lot of energy. Always trying to win the games, he did everything for the wins.

“He had this sixth sense, an ability to be in the right place at the right time. A typical striker, always going for the goal and even in his early days in Eindhoven, he had some big performances.”

Lucius was also part of that PSV squad and was surprised when he was reunited with his childhood friend just how much he had developed.

“He had gone from a youth player to a top professional player,” he says. “I saw a strong player with great confidence. He was very successful at PSV.”

A lasting presence in Eindhoven

The next season, 1999-2000, PSV won Eredivisie and Van Nistelrooy scored 29 goals in just 23 league games.

This attracted the attention of Manchester United, although he was already on their radar, thanks to Robson, who recalled in his autobiography Farewell but not Goodbye how he had run into Alex Ferguson’s brother Martin at an airport after he had left PSV.

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“Tell your brother to buy him,” he wrote. “I worked with him for a year and the boy will be great. He loves training, great character and he will do very well in English football. Tell your brother — buy him!”

But first, there would be an anterior cruciate ligament injury in training in April 2000. He underwent surgery in the United States and completed the move to Old Trafford a year later after United and Ferguson had pushed ahead with the deal despite the injury. His journey outside the Netherlands would go on to reach even greater heights.

That injury in training, his move to Old Trafford and the rest of his playing career is another story for another day. But back in the Netherlands, where it all began, there remains a Van Nistelrooy presence at PSV.

“His son (Liam) is playing here at PSV in the under-17s,” Lucius says. “He is a tall striker — like his dad — and a good finisher, a good player.

“I see his parents every week because they come to watch his games. They are a great family, just normal people. They haven’t changed.”

(Top photo: EMPICS via Getty Images; Pro Shots/Sipa USA via AP Images; design by Demetrius Robinson)