Interview: Meet the 'personal tactics coach' powering Cody Gakpo's World Cup dream
Loran Vrielink is the founder of Tactalyse, and has been working individually with the Netherlands star on a weekly basis since January
Ahead of the Netherlands’ World Cup quarter-final with Argentina later today, I had the pleasure of chatting with Loran Vrielink about the rise and rise of Cody Gakpo, the Oranje’s talisman and star player.
Vrielink is a Dutchman, a former PE teacher and professional basketball player. He is also the founder of Tactalyse, a company which offers bespoke, individual tactical coaching for professional footballers, and which has been working with Gakpo since January.
I found him fascinating, and the full transcript of our interview can be found below. A feature piece was published on GOAL earlier today.
I hope you enjoy both!
So Loran, let’s start by asking about Cody specifically. How did that relationship come about and when did it start?
We started in January with his plan. He was performing decently. He was scoring, he was making assists. For his age, he was developing well. He’d been at PSV Eindhoven all his life, and step by step he was developing, making good steps.
But the question was ‘what is the next step?’ so when we started working with him we began to set goals. It was all about preparing him for game situations.
With some players it’s simple, a couple of months before a transfer window, you need to score goals! With him, I still had time basically to change his behaviours a lot, change some good fundamentals, and then he can be more long-term sufficient in his game actions. That’s what you see now, the results of that
I’m happy now that the whole world sees his development, but the process started nearly a year ago. And it’s amazing to see. In the [summer] window, clubs still doubted him. When Antony went to United, many clubs in the Premier League looked at Cody. But now in the last three months, you see that he has become more stable. And in my opinion to be at the top level, you need to have that. You need to perform every week.
It doesn’t mean you have to score every week, but you need to create chances, you need to be there in the box to influence the game. That’s so important. That is the difference between big players and small players; consistency in your game actions.
When I’ve watched Cody, in particular at this World Cup, the word I’d use to describe him is ‘efficient’….
Yes, I agree. Related to PSV, Louis [van Gaal] asks some different things from him, and he has needed to adapt to that. But that’s what you need to do as a player.
In my opinion, the Dutch team is performing better with every game and that is what I want to see. Consistency is key.
Cody has tried to do that as a No.10 and as a striker in the national team, but he’s had to adapt. He played pretty much his whole life as a left winger, maybe sometimes a striker, sometimes a 10. But now a whole tournament as a striker or a 10? That’s different, and you need to adapt. We think it’s easy, but it’s not. It’s like going from a worker to being a director. It’s a completely different function, and it takes time.
What were the strengths you identified in his game when you started working together?
I think his strong point definitely was finishing. You see that when he has space, he can get the ball where he wants it for the finish. His actions in finishing are really precise, so I was like ‘OK, I don’t want to touch that!’
What I want to do is to get him more in the situations where he can use his strengths multiple times. The cross, for example, he is amazing on crossing. His signature cross, we call it. It’s insane how he does that. I don’t need to teach him how to do that. But if he does a headcheck more before he does that cross, there is a bigger chance that the cross will arrive to his teammate.
So positional play and awareness, then?
100%. In total, you have the ball 1.3% of the time. So my question has always been, why in the world do we have so many football technical schools? Yes, until 16 you should definitely develop technical skills. But we have players of 12 years old now, who we coach on the tactical side. When to do an overlap, when to create a 2v1, where to dribble, how to orientate your body when asking for the ball. Basic things, you know?
That, for me, is what is missing in the world. Physical coaching there is a lot, mental side is increasing, technical there is shitloads!
But all the top coaches - Pep, Jürgen, Louis - they all say the same, that the game is more in here (the head). So then we focus on the mental side, but the mental side of the game is about understanding what to do in a certain moment, and so we have to talk about tactics. Tactics and the mental side are very close together. If you tactically understand what is going on in the game, then you get more confident and that’s where the mental side comes in.
We are tactical coaches, but we always discuss the mental side of the game. We show a player what he is doing, good and bad, so that he understands that even if he misses a chance or makes a mistake in a game, there are many more opportunities to make a positive impact.
How would it work logistically with someone like Cody? What is the process?
We get around 400 clips from each game, and that’s what we use to prepare each session. We look at some data, but we never share the data with the player. The reason for that is because I’m an ex pro basketball player, and I know that if the data says I hit one out of seven shots, in the next game I’m not going to shoot! But if they are all completely open shots, then shoot the fucking ball, right? Your confidence level sees 1/7, but it doesn’t see the game situation. We get related data and we add it to the video clips for our session.
The sessions are usually an hour, sometimes 45 minutes, sometimes 90. It depends on the player. It’s just an online meeting, and we go through the clips. I always have two or three screens, so that the player can see it on his own iPad or Macbook, at home, on the bus, in the hotel. They watch and we interact. I don’t tell him what to do, he needs to understand himself, I coach him so that he can understand what to do in situations better.
Forgive me if I’m generalising here, but it feels like Dutch players may be more receptive or open to something like this, considering the focus on tactics in the Dutch game down the years?
No, that definitely is a generalisation! I’m from the Netherlands and now we have 175 players from all over the world. In February I’ll have been doing this for seven years, and for the first three years nobody took me seriously. It really took a long time for the agents and the clubs to realise.
We have one club now (Cambuur) in the Netherlands, but we have more outside. We have 50-60 players in the Netherlands because I’m from there and my biggest network is there, so it makes sense. But are they the most open kinds of players? I would not say so.
Because Dutch people think they understand tactics to start with, so they think ‘well we already do tactics’. The technical directors at clubs think that the clubs should provide the service. And they think they do it, but they don’t. It’s football culture.
We have English coaches working with English players, German coaches with German players. It’s just about awareness. I am the first in the world who is teaching tactics, but is external from a pro club. That’s a big stage already, to go over there and explain.
Every player we offer a free session, to show them what we are doing and what we can offer. That needs to be in my business model, so we can show that what we are doing is completely different from what they are getting at clubs.
Does that bring you into conflict with clubs and managers at times? They might think you are undermining or adversely affecting their work…
Of course. But I mean, in the past when technical and physical coaches were introduced, managers had their opinions about them, so of course they have their opinion about me!
The one thing I always say is that I am completely open. Trainers, coaches, agents, I invite them to see our sessions so they can see how we work. We have some contact with some coaches in the Netherlands now too.
And we don’t touch the team tactics. If a player needs to press in a certain way, we help him to do it better on an individual level - when to do a head check, understanding the surroundings, when to slow down before you press, after the press what do you do? Did you do a head check again? All of these details are crucial on an individual level. The quicker an attacker does a head check after a duel, the more likely he is to be ready to attack again. The coaches don’t have the time to do this with every individual player in the squad.
I’ve been doing this for seven years in February, and our methodology is developed so in-depth. We have all the countries covered by showing insight into what are the optimal responses in game situations. And that is what we show the players. Some people say we are doing the work of the head coach, but we don’t. We support the work of the head coach with individual video analysis, so that the players can perform better. Some coaches understand that, some don’t.
Of course, some coaches demand different things from players. Van Gaal, for example, may want a player to work in a different way to Guardiola or Klopp…
We improve the fundamentals and we try to adapt. The first thing we ask a player is ‘what does the coach expect from you?’ That’s basic. What we find out often is that not all the coaches expect a lot on an individual level. It’s always in terms of the team, so it gives us a bit of freedom in terms of what we can work on.
At the end of the day, the club wants to perform, the coach wants to perform, the player wants to perform. Everyone has the same goal, so it makes sense to do it together so everyone can benefit from it.
But honestly, a lot of players tell us that the things we say to them, they have never heard at a pro club. The club does not have time to focus on such detail, on an individual level.
Does that surprise you?
If you look at an NBA playbook, it’s 150 to 200 pages purely on set-plays. In football, on a tactical level, you need to innovate and develop.
I think in the football world, what is happening is that you are having ex-players coming back into the game as coaches, and remembering what they did. You have some great ex-players who become great coaches, but you also have a lot who don’t develop enough and believe that the game is the same as 20-30 years ago. But it’s proven that the game goes so much faster now. A player 20 years ago who was really good, put him in a game now and he would not perform on that level any more. It would be too quick. It’s science.
The question is, is the football world open for development? And what we see at the moment is data. We spend a shitload on collecting data. But the biggest thing missing in the football world now, in my opinion, is how do we transfer that data to create behaviour change? And we put too much emphasis on the data and not enough on behaviour change. If you change the behaviours of a player, you can earn millions. Yet we spend millions just on getting the data. But data doesn’t make a player better, it just gives an insight into what they are doing. It doesn’t develop the player.
You have a head coach, an assistant coach, maybe another coach and a GK coach, for 30-40 people’s development? You have all the data in the world, yet you still ask three or four people to do that.
In NFL, you have a coach for every position. There are maybe 10 people for 30 players, as opposed to 3 or 4.
I think in the Premier League now, you see that some have individual performance coaches to help the biggest young talents in academies, and that’s a step in the right direction, but there can be more. If I was an owner of a club now, I would get 10 great coaches to develop all my players!
That’s your money. The money is on field, so if you put all your money into developing the players, then it can only benefit. But instead, all the money goes to the data, and they think that makes a player better. It doesn’t. A lot of players we speak to don’t even see most of their own data, because the staff keep it away from the players.
The game-changer in football is turning data into behaviour change. The best coaches in the world understand this.
Back to Gakpo, then. What kind of student is he? Open minded?
It always comes down to the motivation of the player, and the cognitive side of the player. Cody is smart. Most of the players we work with are smart, because they understand that they need to develop away from clubs in order to be the best they can be.
The best specialists cannot be in all 200 top clubs in Europe, right? That’s impossible. So they have to search external to become a better player.
Cody has a good understanding of what he needs to go to a higher level, and to become a more consistent player. He’s amazing to work with.
I read a quote from one of your first clients, Mark Diemers, about how something would happen in a game and he’d be thinking ‘shit, this is going to come up in my session on Monday’….
Yes, and he was right! We’ve grown a lot in recent years. We are trusted by the players. They can tell us what they think, if they don’t like a coach or a teammate or whatever, but they know we are only there to help them.
We are just a service, but we communicate three or four times a week with our players. The relationship is really deep, and what we usually find is that after our first session, the players will think about what we’ve discussed. They will be in training or games and they will recognise situations we talked about, and how they can react to them. They have seen the game situations.
And yes, they know that if they react wrong in a game situation, and don’t do things we have spoken about, it will come up in our sessions, for sure!
How many players do you work with now?
We have 23 coaches in 14 countries, in different languages. 175 players have a session with us every week. We have a lot of collaboration with agents, but not so many clubs. We do Cambuur’s U21 team in the Netherlands, and at another club we do the top academy talents.
There must be a huge sense of pride watching someone like Gakpo performing on the highest stage, after all the work that has gone in…
What I like about this job is that the responsibility ultimately rests with the player. He has to perform, so when you see him perform and know the work that has gone in, it’s satisfying, because you have such an intense, great relationship with these players.
With Cody, it’s amazing to work with him and if he is successful and scoring these goals, you are of course proud because you know the work that has gone in. And yes of course, for Tactalyse, getting the recognition for our work, seven years work, 23 coaches, six analysts working their asses off to prepare sessions, is great. To get that fulfilment from seeing one of our players on the biggest stage of all, the World Cup, is amazing. We do it together, and we have a mission to give every player a tactical understanding that can make them better.
A player of 18, 19 who is hoping to go to the first team. The ones who understand the game tactically, they’re the ones who make that step. The ones who don’t, they will never do it.
When will you talk to Cody about the Argentina game, then?
I will speak to him tomorrow [Thursday] about Friday’s game. Usually we speak two days before a game, but with the World Cup it’s been the day before.
Then if he wins, we will discuss this game before the next game…
You can find out more about Tactalyse here and can follow Loran on Instagram here