Meet Sarina Wiegman - the coach who changed the face of Dutch women's football

The Boulevard de Strasbourg is among the longest streets in Le Havre but on this day it is silent. There are no cars and the trams have stopped, but the air hums with anticipation.

It is June 11, 2019, the day of the Netherlands’ opening World Cup group game against New Zealand, and the police have closed the road in preparation for the parade that is to follow. Under Sarina Wiegman, announced on Friday as Phil Neville’s successor as England Women head coach, the Oranje Leeuwinnen have enjoyed unprecedented growth in popularity. Since winning the European Championships on home soil in 2017, Wiegman’s team have become some of the country’s most recognisable sportspeople. The forward Vivienne Miedema suddenly finds her face on everything from children’s books to school year planners and Lieke Martens shares the Uefa Player of the Year crown with Cristiano Ronaldo.

An orange double-decker bus rounds the corner; from a distance it could be a cruise liner, riding on the sea of orange around it. Decked in orange, the Netherlands fans — more than 10,000 of them — surge and bounce to the beat of the DJ on the top deck, pumping house music into the rows of flares and flags. Fans break from the line to high-five the policemen, faces indiscernible beneath shaggy neon-orange wigs and comic oversized sunglasses.

From the balcony of her rented apartment, Dutch journalist Annemarie Postma tweets: “You can call this a fair, or just a victory for (Dutch) women's football.”

Imagine the London Marathon, seen from the air, but with no breakaway runners and more singing. The scenes from the fanzone could be from Glastonbury — if everyone wore matching T-shirts to watch Coldplay instead of Primark kagools and flower headbands.

Postma, the author of two books on the Netherlands Women’s national team, has to stop herself from crying. “This is amazing,” she recalls thinking. “This is so huge. You can give Wiegman full credit for it; on the other hand, it was just the moment everything came together. You see them winning, and you see them grow. If she becomes the new coach of the England team, it will be all over the newspapers here. It will be on television, all over the news. Five years ago, that was unthinkable.”

The Netherlands would go on to finish second to the US at that World Cup. It was not their finest showing — more on that later — but what is beyond doubt is that Wiegman transformed the status of women’s football in the country. How keenly they feel her loss is not England’s problem: what matters to the FA’s head of women’s football Sue Campbell and her captain Steph Houghton is how the Netherlands reached the point where the previously uninterested trekked more than 400 miles to France and lined the streets in orange tutus.

In many ways, Wiegman has not changed from the manager who, in 2007, convinced ADO Den Haag in the new Eredivisie Vrouwen to take her on a full-time basis instead of a semi-professional one because she always drove for more. There, she coached Leonne Stentler, a former Netherlands defender who is now a pundit for Fox and NOS Sport, the latter one of the largest TV networks in the country.

Stentler remembers a manager who, on away trips, would sit at the front of the coach “reading everything — all the manager books” and who introduced sports psychologists to an unfancied semi-professional side, who were without contracts and paid only travel expenses. Like Phil Neville, whose England side collaborated with his sister’s Red Roses netball squad, Wiegman’s team-building days focussed on learning from other sports; her season in America, where she played for North Carolina Tar Heels, had given her not only a taste of professionalism but a vision for what women’s football could be, if backed financially, in her own country.

“[She has] that cocktail of knowledge and experience and she keeps developing herself,” says Stentler. “She tries new things, tries to be innovative — but she also talks to the squad members, asks us what we need and how we think about certain tactical aspects. She’s above the team but also a part of the team.

“I always had the feeling that I could come with whatever’s on my mind. When there were problems in my family or with my friends, and I wouldn’t be able to focus 100 per cent on my training, I always felt the freedom to go to her and say: ‘Sarina, this isn’t my day. I have this s**t going on in my mind, can we talk about this?’ That didn’t have any consequences for being in the squad or not. ‘If you want to tell me this, you know where I am.’ That comfortable feeling, that feeling of trust, made a good person to work with.”

By her own admission, Stentler could be an angry player, frustrated if she did not start. “She really taught me to take responsibility for my own development,” Stentler says. She really made me believe that I had it in my own hands. That made me focus on the things I could change, and not things out of my circle of influence.

“[She was] critical, but always fair. She could tell me: ‘You’re doing OK, but you’re not in the squad because I choose the other girl. I can’t make it any prettier, but I wanted you to know that.’ I believed her. She made you believe that the people on the field were the right people, even though you were on the bench. That’s her process of building a team that believes in each other and understands their part of the journey. In her honesty, she would make sure that everyone was on that train and going on with the process.”

In August 2014, Wiegman became assistant coach of the Netherlands national team, undertaking an internship at Sparta Rotterdam the following year as part of her study for her A-licence. She took over as interim for two months following the dismissal of Roger Reijner, then became assistant to Arjan van der Laan. When he was sacked in December 2016, Van Wiegman was again made interim and became the permanent head coach the following month, six months from the Euro 2017 tournament for which they had automatically qualified as hosts.

The team was fractured, Postma says. “When we went to [the World Cup] in 2015, it was a horrible tournament, traumatic for some of the players because some were young and some were older. You could see the struggle with Sarina because she really wanted to do things differently than that manager, and you could see the team struggle with each other because of this generation gap. She put a lot of effort in team challenges, in bonding: games, challenges, pub quizzes.”

Wiegman devised competitions — table tennis, penalty shoot-outs — by which players could collect points to win a grand prize. She collected items with symbolic value: a picture frame that would one day house an image of the team as European champions. The last item was her red bra, a symbol for holding it together and staying strong as a team. Everton’s Kika van Es was the recipient.

“Everyone was happy that Wiegman was there and she stood up, because we saw her struggling as an assistant for years and we were like, ‘Come on! Go for it!’” says Postma, whose books De Oranje Leeuwinnen (The Orange Lionesses) and Samen Sterk (Together Strong) chart the Netherlands’ development under Wiegman. “In 2017, the team was pretty unknown. They had an awful lot of team meetings. A few of the girls thought it was too much, but she’s a perfectionist and she wanted to steal the heart of the Dutch fans. That’s how she came up with the system.

“She made sure everything was prepped to perfection: attractive, the typical Dutch style, 4-3-3 with fast wingers and a striker like Miedema not too involved in the game but waiting for the right moment to pop up and score. Wiegman wanted Miedema to create space for a creative midfielder like [Manchester United’s] Jackie Groenen. She wants the midfielders to play close to the box. If you look at all the Euro matches, you'll see the touch of Wiegman: players with self confidence instead of focussing on the opponent. From what I know from the English squad, she would be a great match. You have the same diversity if you look at the type of players.”

The Dutch team won every match at the 2017 Euros, beating Denmark 4-2 in the final to gain their first major honour in women's football. Next came a flurry of awards for Wiegman: the Best Women's Coach title from Fifa and being made a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau, a civil honour for special achievements.

The caveat was that their strengths — and weaknesses — were now well-known. The route to the 2019 World Cup final saw the first criticism of Wiegman’s reign. “She turned her focus more to the full backs,” says Postma. “She wants them to play forward more for a surprising effect. You saw that during the World Cup, because they were not fun to watch but they kept on winning. She said: ‘We need to change and surprise our opponents.’ She’s very stubborn, kept holding onto the same team. When they win, she says: ‘Why are you criticising me because we’re winning?” But that’s also the Dutch mentality. It’s never good enough.”

Wiegman credits her previous career as a PE teacher with breeding her sense of empathy and the influence of her two teenage daughters, both of whom play football, is clear. “You can see the mother in her,” Postma says. “You can see it in a look, a touch, how she joins in the warming up sometimes.

“She never puts her ego before others in the managing team. She lets other people think, as well. She is the head coach, but she never considered someone an assistant or someone a video person. She always says: ‘We all do it together.’ It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s absolutely true.”