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"That is private" Those were the words of Ronald Koeman and Louis Van Gaal when asked about their bitter feud ahead of Monday night's game between Southampton and Manchester United. When the two sides line up, the battle will not just be on the pitch but off it as well as it pits together two managers for whom this clash is not just for points, but very personal indeed.
Although the relationship between the pair has grown distant since 2004, it was always that way. In fact, their wives were good friends not too long ago and they live just 100 yards apart in Vale de Lobo. When Van Gaal was appointed as Barcelona manager in 1997, he gave Koeman his first coaching job when he added him as an assistant alongside a certain Jose Mourinho the following year.
After Barcelona, Koeman started out his managerial career at Vitesse before he was given the Ajax job in 2001. It was after this that tempers started to flare up and cracks started to emerge in the pair's relationship. Koeman was running a fine ship at Ajax, where he had won the double in his first season and everything was going along well for the Dutchman up until Van Gaal was appointed as the club's Technical Director in 2003.
Although the arrangement looked straight forward, it couldn't be farther from the truth. Especially, given the fact that Van Gaal is a control freak. It didn't take too long for the man in charge of the transfers to mess about with the man who was in charge of picking the team and training them. Things got especially tricky when the Technical director of Ajax, the man in charge of buying and selling players was on the sidelines in training, watching over like a hawk just before it goes into hunt.
It all became very clear on a particular training session where Van Gaal took matters into his own hands and instructed Zlatan Ibrahimovic to attack the front post more. This came after specific instructions that he wouldn't speak to the players in training and also his desire to not manage. After this incident, Koeman was absolutely livid with Van Gaal and his fears that his compatriot wanted to do more than just buy and sell players became very apparent to him.
Things went from bad to worse, when Van Gaal sold Ibrahimovic on deadline day in the summer of 2004 to Juventus leaving Koeman without not just his top goal scorer but also without a ready-made replacement as the deal was done so late in the day. The sale of the Swede was the final straw for Koeman, who had not only seen his authority undermined on the pitch but also saw claims that Ajax weren't staying true to their philosophy.
Koeman put pressure on the board, going, according to some reports as far as to issue an ultimatum of choosing between him or Van Gaal. The club chose to stick with the manager as Van Gaal was promptly sacked in October 2004. And it was after that the pair's relationship beyond the realms of repair.
Unfortunately for Koeman, he didn't last too long after that. It was a move that hurt the club the most, as it meant that they had lost their coach, their best player and their technical director all in the same season. Ajax struggled to recover from that and it wasn't until Frank de Boer took over in 2010 that the club got back to winning ways in the League.
Soon after his resignation as Technical Director, a move which he said was "in Ajax's best interests", Van Gaal went onto say that Koeman engineered his departure from Ajax. He said: "With support from within the club and help from the media. I asked him whether he had deliberately used the media and his answer was yes." Things have never been the same for the pair ever since although they have crossed paths more than once since then.
The 2008/09 campaign in which AZ Alkmaar won the League for the first time in 28 years was Van Gaal at the helm. When the Dutch club replaced him with Koeman, the former manager wasn't best pleased. And it was the other way around, when Van Gaal was offered the Dutch national team coaching job in 2012, when many thought that Koeman was one of the favourites to get it.
Although the current Manchester United manager has heaped on Southampton ahead of their clash on Monday, you can be sure that he will want his side to get all three points not just to leapfrog the Saints into third place, but also to put one over his former protégé who has so far outshone him in England.
