Ruud Gullit was a dreadlocked magician whose legacy grows

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Ruud Gullit was crucial in helping challenge perceptions at a delicate time in football. He was also just bloody lovely to watch and enjoy.

 

Who’s this then?
Ruud Gullit is now 58 years old. He was a 6ft 3ins Dutchman from Amsterdam who played in a few different positions, from sweeper to striker. Fabulously creative and dynamic, he is still regarded as one of the most thrilling players of his or any other generation.

He played for a total of six clubs: HFC Haarlem, Feyenoord, PSV, Milan, Sampdoria and finally Chelsea, where he later said he felt happiest.

An impressive player from an early age, he was the youngest Dutch boy ever to play professionally at just 16 when he turned out in 1978 for Haarlem, who at the time were managed by a former West Brom player called Barry Hughes. Barry, greatly impressed by Ruud, called him a “Dutch Duncan Edwards”. Hardly a contemporary reference, even in 1978, by which time Edwards had been dead for 20 years. Even so, he enjoyed three seasons at the club, was relegated in his first, promoted in his second and finished in a European position for the first and only time in the club’s history in his third. He scored 36 times in his 100 appearances.

He was mostly used as a sweeper in this period but even so, his flair attracted a lot of attention despite him still being a teenager. Available for the grand sum of £30,000, he was rejected by English clubs like Arsenal and Ipswich and ended up at Feyenoord, an important move for the young Ruud as Johan Cruyff, as I documented in my piece about the great man a few weeks ago, had joined for a season and was a huge influence on him.

In Ruud’s second year at the club they did a league and cup double and he got the Dutch Footballer of the Year award. He played 104 games in total for Feyenoord and scored 41 times in a more progressive midfield role.

This earned him a move to PSV for 1.2 million guilders. It would be here that the Gullit we came to know and love would really come into his own. He became a dreadlocked magician, his unusual appearance for a footballer only adding to his exotic mystique at the time.

He won Footballer of the Year again in 1986 and helped PSV to two consecutive Eredivisie wins. Now making an impression on an international stage, it was inevitable he’d move to one of Europe’s big clubs. So it was that Silvio Berlusconi signed him for Milan in 1987, paying the then-world-record fee of 18 million guilders. Notionally he was supposed to replace Ray Wilkins but played an entirely different role.

He joined other orangebooms, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard who, along with Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi made a brilliant Milan team that swept to a Serie A title in 1988 and consecutive European Cups in 1989 and 1990.

Our Milan man won the Ballon d’Or in 1987 which he dedicated to Nelson Mandela. In 1988 he was part of the fantastic Dutch side who won the European Championship. Everything was coming up Ruud.

He had seven great years at Milan, playing 171 games and scoring 56 goals. However, these numbers don’t do justice to the impact he had on the game.

As he fell out of favour in 1993, he went to work under Sven Goran Eriksson at Sampdoria on loan for two years, playing 63 games and scoring 26 times.

His final move was, of course, to Chelsea in 1995. While his three seasons, 63 games and seven goals were far from the best form of his career, he was an important addition to the Premier League which was looking to move away from being parochial and into buying the best players from elsewhere.

Now in his mid-30s when manager Glenn Hoddle got the England call in 1996, Ruud was offered the player-manager job, winning the FA Cup in his first season in charge with a lucky win over Middlesbrough to go with a sixth-placed finish. He was the league’s first black manager.

But success wasn’t to last. The next campaign saw him fall out with Ken Bates and the Chelsea hierarchy and even though they were in second in the league he was sacked and replaced by the glassy-eyed guru that is Gianluca Vialli.

There followed an infamous gig at Newcastle which lasted one season and five games. They did well, getting to the 1999 FA Cup final but after an infamously wet night game defeat to Sunderland and benching Alan Shearer, he was given the old tin tack.

Then came brief and unsuccessful stints managing Feyenoord, LA Galaxy and Russian Premier League side Terek Grozny before he finally gave up the idea that he was any good at being a manager and went into punditry instead, being a regular and popular presence on UK telly. He’s always been loved over here.

At times he has been criticised for being arrogant or difficult and of having a party lifestyle, all of which may or may not be true, but there’s no doubt that as a player he was one of the late 20th century’s most important, crucial in changing previous perceptions of black players as lacking skill and being all about physicality – racial stereotypes that we still hear to this day.

 

Why the love?
In the modern era, we’re used to highly-skilled creative magicians being of the smaller variety: wee nippy types with a low centre of gravity. But Ruud was the exact opposite. A big, imposing presence, he was always elegant and grateful, moving around the pitch in a way which made lesser players look lumpy and awkward. In his pomp he was a mightily impressive sight.

He had the full super-skill toolkit in his feet, could dribble past four players and slot it home any time you like, but while most would be happy with that in their armoury, Ruud was incredibly flexible and versatile. I always thought he would have been a great ball-playing centre half, capable of spraying it out of defence. There are few positions on the pitch he didn’t play in at one time or another and he brought the same qualities to all of them: tremendous vision, incisive passing and the kind of spacial awareness that only the finest players seem to possess. He could lash a volley in, could head the ball ferociously and if you wanted to knock the ball into the top corner from a free-kick, he could do that as well.

In that legendary 1988 Euros, which was the first time most of us had been exposed to Ruud for any length of time, my outstanding memory is of a player who moved in a time and space which was different to everyone else. That existential notion that somehow the best have more time on the ball than anyone else was so true of Ruud. In 1988 he was on a different planet to England when the Dutch won 3-1 and really it could’ve been 8-1. Along with last week’s hero Van Basten, Gullit ruined England’s defence and shredded Tony Adams in particular, making one of our best defenders look like he was playing in lead boots.

He was never hurried or hassled and the game seemed to come so easily to him. As a master of totaalvoetbal he wasn’t a specialist; he could play anywhere and any fan of any age loves to see that.

Chelsea player Ruud Gullit

It’s also important to understand just what a colourful character he seemed to us too. I don’t think I saw anyone outside of Bob Marley and the Wailers with dreadlocks before Ruud. To see him make his prodigious leap and head the ball with the dreads flowing was an impressive and exciting sight.

Here was a player who made records (although not very good records) and was part of that 1980s trend of good time players who enjoyed life. It’s important to understand this was a time before uber professionalism spoiled football and turned it from being a sport which celebrated the 10/10 player but understood they could throw in the odd 3/10 to being one which lauded the 7/10 consistency monster. The robotically consistent performer with high-performance metrics indistinguishable from a robot is the dream player in 2021. In 1988 it was a maverick like Ruud. There’s a big difference.

Like many players who are hyper-brilliant, he did not make a special manager. Indeed, the sort of personality with enough balls to be a visionary on the pitch often seems to lack the man-management qualities needed to make them a good coach for the lesser-skilled mortal.

He also has that Dutch accent which is impossible to resist. There is always something slightly comical and endearing about it. This has done his punditry career no harm at all.

 

What the people love
It is amazing to think it is now 24 years since Ruud retired. The fact he’s still a big player in the eyes of many who never saw him in his prime is a marker for greatness. We start with our 4_4_haiku:

‘As a Newcastle fan, he’s not a popular man. Had the chance to meet him at an event to commemorate football shirts in Manchester a couple of years ago. I’d been on the ales all day at the football so was a little worse for wear. I grabbed him as he came off stage, introduced myself as a Newcastle fan and expected frosty reception. He said he loved the club and fans and wasn’t as negative about it as people assume. He said the right club but wrong time following Dalglish. He’d have loved to take Keegan’s team. And he confirmed the white sock story is true! Had a lot of time for me considering my state and the fact I was a Newcastle fan. I was surprised but it was a great moment for me since he was such a player.’

‘Two words: ‘sexy football’. In a Dutch accent. Everyone knows who you mean.’

‘Marvellous player, I supported Holland and AC Milan as a youngster because of him.’

‘That header in ’88 is every bit as iconic as MVB’s volley.’

‘Scoring the winner against Milan for Sampdoria in 93/94. He quite enjoyed that one I think.’

‘I remember (oddly) when he resigned from Newcastle thanking the restaurants he ate in whilst he was there. Hated Shearer, loved fine dining.’

‘A complicated memory within Ireland – in our first World Cup in 1990 with about 20 minutes to go, the story goes that Mick McCarthy approached him to try to agree that they should stop playing for the last 20 mins and accept a 1-1, as both sides would go through. We look back on that WC with pride, but that incident leaves a little sour taste.’

‘I’ve never seen a player SO much better than the rest of his team mates. Ridiculously good.’

‘Discussion on RTE years ago, Gullit managing Newcastle.”How about Gullit winning the Championship?”, compere said. “Gullit?,” said Eamon Dunphy. “Gullit is only interested in throwing shapes!”.’

‘Turning up at Chelsea, deciding he wanted to play sweeper. But his idea of passing the ball out from the back was 20 years too early for the Premier League. So he just decided to be a box-to-box midfielder instead. So good he could have done absolutely anything he wanted.’

 

Three great moments
A bullet header with dreads flowing. What a sight:

An exquisite chip:

A goals highlights reel. No tap-ins here. The first two are exceptional:

 

Future days
You get the impression that Ruud lives a very fine life indeed. Often to be seen at UEFA and FIFA events glad-handing and drawing balls out of a pot whilst grinning that grin. When not picking up presumably large fees for doing that, he’s on our TVs being an occasionally outspoken pundit but also bringing some good vibes and an ability to laugh at the absurdities of the game, all the while dressed in the sort of high quality, understated, unstructured tailoring that looks fabulously expensive. And if that’s how he wants to spend the next 30 years, then good on him.

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