Before Stefan de Vrij’s free-agent transfer from Lazio to fellow Italians Inter Milan in the summer of 2018, he had privately enlisted the help of an independent tactics coach based in a Dutch business park.
De Vrij was by then an established Netherlands international centre-half, with over 30 caps to his name and a CV that included a place in FIFA’s team of the World Cup in 2014, an Italian Super Cup and two Italian Cup runners-up medals. Yet the then 26-year-old was still curious about which areas of his game could improve, figuring a source separated from the emotions of his employers’ training ground might be able to provide some guidance.
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It was that curiosity which led him to seek out Loran Vrielink.
Vrielink had been a professional basketball player in the Netherlands but his first love was football, a sport he had coached since his teenage years, when he dreamt of becoming the next Louis van Gaal.
After a period as a school physical education teacher, he saw a series of applications for coaching internships at Dutch professional clubs ignored, so he decided to start his own company, Tactalyse, which aims to help players “change the game”.
Mark Diemers, captain of Dutch second-tier club De Graafschap, had been his first significant client. Wout Brama, an industrious midfielder with FC Twente in the Eredivisie, followed. Then there were Swansea City’s Netherlands international Leroy Fer, now playing in Turkey, and Atalanta’s Marten de Roon, another to play for their mutual homeland.
Vrielink had identified a gap in the market. Football was becoming individualised in almost every area, with players employing their own fitness gurus, mental-health coaches, nutritionists and social-media experts. Yet tactical guidance was largely left to the managers and their assistants. He concluded instruction was largely offered on a collective basis — that coaches were usually overworked, and did not have the time to offer one-to-one counsel due to the pressures of the season.
At Rome-based Lazio, De Vrij developed into a ball-playing defender, whose pass completion rate increased by five per cent. This, according to De Vrij, was because of improved positioning, in part after discussions with Vrielink. He also started to launch into fewer tackles because of a new level of vision, aided by the way he orientated his body.
Vrielink made him realise he was too quick to try to organise those around him, sometimes when the ball was already in play. This had led to mistakes by himself and by team-mates.
De Vrij spoke to Vrielink by video call twice a week. Sometimes, De Virj would be on his bed in a hotel room waiting for a game to start, while Vrielink operated on a laptop from an office in Groningen, in the northern Netherlands.
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Quietly, Vrielink’s operation was growing. Among footballers, interest in his business was “normalising”. Yet the nature of his service divided opinion within the game.
He initially approached clubs, who tended to think they offered the players everything they needed. External help would be an admittance, to some degree, of an internal shortcoming. Fitness coaches employed by clubs, for example, are regularly frustrated by the influence of those hired independently by players due to the potential for conflicting advice.
The same can be said for managers, who want their instructions followed to the letter. Tactics, particularly, are sacrosanct, and often treated as if they were state secrets. Some have viewed Vrielink suspiciously and on at least one occasion, a manager told a potential new signing he would not sanction the deal if he continued working with Vrielink. Once the player was at his new club, the arrangement with Vrielink was terminated.
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A couple of years ago, Vrielink was approached by Sidney Gakpo about working with his brother Cody — then of Dutch top-flight side PSV Eindhoven, and now at Liverpool.
At PSV, Vrielink says he helped Gakpo with his appreciation of space. Most players want as much involvement in the game as possible because of the belief that touches of the ball translate into the sort of data that contributes towards new contracts being awarded, or potentially lucrative deals elsewhere.
“There’s an obsession with expected goals and expected assists,” says Vrielink, who thinks there is a fundamental misunderstanding about which sort of movement contributes towards healthy numbers. Erling Haaland has scored more goals, for example, since he started having less involvement in the build-up of Manchester City attacks.
Gakpo, meanwhile, used to come towards the ball too often. Instead, he needed to move away from it and create space for himself, opening up the pitch. With that, Gakpo scored the goals that earned him last January’s transfer to Liverpool, where he has been used as a centre-forward, a left-winger and in midfield.
Session with Cody Gakpo done✅
Amazing to see Cody's development since we are working together. We do weekly online @Tactalyse sessions to analyse all his games. Hard work is paying off, he already made history during this World Cup. But this is just the beginning… pic.twitter.com/KmwLP5QZCr
— Loran (@LoranVrielink) December 2, 2022
Vrielink believes Gakpo’s versatility stems from his appreciation of the challenges around him. “He can see two circles away. He might not always get the assist but instead, the pre-assist.”
As with De Vrij, Vrielink’s relationship with Gakpo developed online. He has used hundreds of video clips sourced from WyScout, the online platform which banks thousands of matches across the world for analysts to pore over, to focus on the improvement of a player’s “behaviour”, particularly in one-v-one situations. This refers to their body shape and head rotation in relation to the positioning of the ball, team-mates and opponents.
For someone such as Gakpo, who as stated has performed in several positions since arriving at Anfield, all of these details change depending on the area of the pitch in which he is operating. “Being flexible isn’t as easy as people think,” Vrielink says.
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For professional-footballer clients, Vrielink studies every match. In basic terms, the aim is to improve a player’s decision-making. “What is the moment of a head check?,” he explains, when asked what he is looking for specifically. “Which direction do we need to run? What is the moment of the run?”
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Vrielink has completed a coaching course in Barcelona, but says his background in basketball has formed a crucial part of his understanding on a football pitch. He says tactical expectations in the two sports are similar. “The player is expected to follow the manager’s instructions and if he doesn’t he risks deselection,” he points out.
Yet in basketball, the coach distributes a playbook at the start of every season and the players are expected to study the choreographed patterns, to the point where carrying them out becomes instinctive. Football managers do not expect such discipline: most of the tactical understanding comes from training pitch work. “You absorb it, or you forget it,” Vrielink says.
This, he says, is where he can really help. Vrielink suggests the impact of any decision on a football pitch can prove to be more crucial than on a basketball court, where the shorter distances and constant ebb-and-flow of any game means points are scored at regular intervals and there are more opportunities for redemption if things go wrong.
“A split-second tactical call on a football pitch can cost a club millions,” Vrielink says. “Sometimes it can simply come down to a player in the centre of the pitch raising his head and looking a few inches in a certain direction. The clubs hope the players get this right without really investing in it.”
Increasingly, elite-level coaches are learning more about disciplines from other sports.
A key member of Pep Guardiola’s technical staff at City is Manuel Estiarte, Spain’s most famous water polo player, while Sir Dave Brailsford is shortly expected to start applying the lessons he learned leading cycling’s Team Sky (now INEOS) at Manchester United.
Vrielink says he now has a stable of 30 coaches working with him across the world, who have taken out franchise agreements to access his database. Rather than being based in Groningen, he now splits his time between countries, getting closer to the people he is working with.
With clients in the Netherlands and England, he wants to work with sports stars in the United States, where he thinks there is more of an openness to the minute details that can determine results.
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“Times have changed,” he says. “Gone are the days where the coach leant on his experience, expecting those listening to him to absorb his greatness.
“The players now enter the first team well-coached. They expect information and they are able to process it. Too much, and you cloud their minds; too little, and they feel underprepared.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
