Van Gaal is always on the lookout for new knowledge about football. ‘Louis values innovation a great deal’, Max Reckers says in Visie. ‘The amount of time he puts into this is unbelievable. You don’t see that anywhere else in football.’
In 1993, Van Gaal was the first manager in The Netherlands to kill the endurance run as a tool to make players physically fit during pre-season training. He cut the tradition as soon as his physiologist Jos Geijsel told him that endurance runs make players slower, something Van Gaal had suspected during his career as a player.
When a daughter of an old friend wrote her master’s thesis at VU University about the optimum time a football team should take to prepare for the next match – three days, not four as Van Gaal used to do – Van Gaal immediately implemented her advice. (Four days was judged to be too long for players to keep their focus on a specific opponent.)