Leo Beenhakker obituary: football manager who revived Real Madrid

Times

23-04-2025

When Bobby Robson took England to the World Cup semi-final in 1990, he first had to outwit his charismatic Dutch counterpart Leo Beenhakker. Stalking the touchline and smoking a cheroot, Beenhakker had a face like thunder as a Paul Gascoigne-inspired England had the better of a 0-0 draw and went on to top the group. Holland were the European champions with a glittering array of talent, including Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten and Ronald Koeman, but they were soon dumped out of the World Cup in the second round after a bad-tempered defeat to West Germany.
When Beenhakker had agreed to become coach before the tournament, players were already bickering about who would play in which position and reportedly wanted Johan Cruyff to be appointed coach. Not even Beenhakker's famed motivational skills could bring harmony. Yet his pedigree as a coach was not in doubt.
Between 1987 and 1989 Beenhakker had won three consecutive La Liga titles for Real Madrid, doing so in a style and swagger that earned him the sobriquet 'Don Leo' in the Spanish press. A slightly professorial figure with long fair hair, he studiously built a team around the five young homegrown players Emilio Butragueño, Manolo Sanchís, Rafael Martín Vázquez, Míchel and Miguel Pardeza, who became known as the 'La Quinta del Buitre' (the Vulture's Cohort). They were augmented by the Mexican goal machine Hugo Sánchez, and Beenhakker added the temperamental but gifted German midfielder Bernd Schuster to create a team good enough to win the European Cup (now the Champions League) for the first time in two decades. Yet in each of his seasons there the club was knocked out in the semi-final.
In his final year at the club he dropped the talismanic Butragueño (nicknamed 'the Vulture'). 'Will the Madrid public and the press accept this from me, a foreigner?' asked Beenhakker, a man of dry, knowing humour. 'Emilio is one of the untouchables here yet what I did was the best for the team. It was my risk.' The gamble did not pay off. Beenhakker left the club in April 1989 after Real lost 6-1 on aggregate to AC Milan.
As a young coach in Holland, Beenhakker had been a student of Rinus Michels, the father of 'Total Football', characterised by fluid movement and interchanging of positions and perfected by the great Ajax side of the early Seventies and the Holland team that reached the final of the World Cup in 1974 and 1978. Beenhakker would go on to manage Ajax and win the Dutch title in 1980. Despite success he had to deal with sniping from Cruyff, Holland's most celebrated player, who was critical of the fact that Beenhakker had never been a top-level player. Beenhakker produced one of his characteristic aphorisms in response, 'You can be a very good milkman without having ever been a cow.'
Leo Beenhakker was born in Rotterdam in 1942 after the city had been all but obliterated by German bombs, and what was left of it was under Nazi occupation. After the early death of his father Hendrik from leukaemia, Leo trained as an electrician to support his mother Neeltje. His playing career as a right winger at amateur level in the Netherlands ended when he was forced to retire aged 26 because of a knee injury.
Beenhakker would manage smaller Dutch clubs. After a spell as the youth coach at Feyenoord, he was surprisingly given his chance at Ajax in 1979. He would go on to manage Real Zaragoza in Spain for three years before being appointed coach of a faltering Holland side in 1985, failing to steer them to qualification for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
In his second spell at Ajax from 1989, he nurtured a young Dennis Bergkamp, who would go on to become a Premier League legend at Arsenal. Ajax won the title again under Beenhakker in 1990.
For much of the Nineties he coached around the world, and was notably sacked as the coach of Saudi Arabia before the World Cup in 1994 after the players rejected his demand that they train every day. That year he nearly realised his dream of managing in Premier League. He was reportedly close to agreeing to take charge at Tottenham Hotspur, but unable to commit himself to the club immediately.
Beenhakker, who was divorced and is survived by a son, Erwin, and a daughter, Mariska, went on to win his third Dutch title, this time with Feyenoord, in 1999. In 2000 he returned to Ajax as technical director and signed a young striker called Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Of all his 30 or so managerial posts, arguably his greatest achievement was with Trinidad and Tobago. When he arrived in April 2005, the small Caribbean nation of 1.3 million people sat last in the North American, Central American and Caribbean qualifying group. By giving a squad of mostly modest talents belief in themselves, Beenhakker moulded them into a competitive team that became the smallest nation to qualify for the Fifa World Cup when they beat Bahrain 1-0 in November 2005, prompting wild celebrations in the capital, Port of Spain.
At the finals in Germany in 2006, the 'Soca Warriors' held Sweden to a 0-0 draw. They then prevented England from scoring for 83 minutes until Peter Crouch scored a contentious goal and Steven Gerrard added a second in the last minute to make the result seem more comfortable than it was. Trinidad and Tobago exited the tournament with honour; Beenhakker was awarded the Chaconia Medal (Gold Class), the second highest state decoration of Trinidad and Tobago.
Asked if it had taken a miracle to get Trinidad and Tobago to the World Cup, he replied: 'No, we just came by plane.'