Over the past three decades, no position on the football pitch has undergone such a rapid transformation as the goalkeeper role. Back in the early 1990s, the world’s best goalkeepers were physically imposing brutes like Oliver Kahn and Peter Schmeichel who were solely tasked with keeping the ball out of the back of the net; they didn’t have the technical acuity and knowhow to advance the ball in possession apart from simply lumping it up the pitch. Fast forward to today, and these players are now occupied with a litany of different jobs from dribbling out of pressure to breaking the lines with a carefully weighted pass to charging off their line and intercepting danger.
The biggest reason for this metamorphosis has been the back-pass rule, which prohibits goalkeepers from handling the ball after it was deliberately kicked to them by a teammate or sent to them via a throw-in from a teammate. This rule was introduced in the summer of 1992 to discourage time-wasting and overly defensive tactics after the 1990 FIFA World Cup was widely condemned as excessively monotonous and rife with back-passing, with goalkeepers holding onto the ball to waste time. During this tournament, Irish goalkeeper Packie Bonner held the ball for nearly six minutes in their match against Egypt. Suddenly, goalkeepers had a new set of rules to comply with: if they somehow forgot and handled the ball to pick up a ball, they would concede an indirect free kick.
“I remember when teams used to just score a goal and then turn around from the halfway line and whack it back to their goalkeeper,” stated Mark Bosnich, who was 20 years old when the rule was enforced and making the move from Australia to England. Over the next decade, he would emerge as a key figure in goal for Aston Villa, Manchester United and the Australian national team.
“It’s definitely improved the game’s entertainment value,” said Bosnich of the back pass rule. “It’s definitely changed the game for the better and sped things up.”
Apart from the back pass rule, the biggest reason for the goalkeeper’s transformation has been the advent of the goalkeeper coach. Today, every single football club has at least one goalkeeper coach – in fact, many of them have three or four. However, back in 1986, the goalkeeper coach didn’t even exist. Enter: Frans Hoek.
Born in Hoorn, the Netherlands, Hoek started his development with amateur club SV Always Forward, where he played from 1966 to 1973, before departing for Volendam, who agreed to pay for his studies as long as he played for them. While he was originally not making a salary, this changed after a handful of games, with Hoek enjoying a fruitful 12-year professional career with Palingboeren.
Hoek was one of the 90 applicants who were chosen to undergo one of the nation’s most exhaustive sports graduate programs and decided to focus on the goalkeeper position. Unfortunately for him, there were no instructional or tactical books to help guide him through his research, so he asked the Dutch Football Federation to contact their English counterparts and send them literature, who submitted books about the lives of the most famous goalkeepers of the time.
“I went back to my teacher, who was also a professional coach, and said, ‘I want to give up because I can’t find anything’,” stated Hoek. “He said, “No, you chose it, so you’re going to make a thesis on it.’ He knew, of course, that there was nothing available. That was the start for me, the basis of my motivation and the base of why I think differently from most people.”
“I had to think ‘How do I get information for my thesis?’ I went to the local newspaper and asked for all kinds of pictures of goalkeepers, and they gave me a whole package and allowed me to keep it because it was so old.” “It was New Year’s Eve 1973, my parents were away, and I started to put all of these pictures on the ground of goalkeepers catching, punching, falling, diving, throwing and kicking, and the next step was searching for all kinds of interviews with goalkeepers and reading them. There was nothing at first, so I had to investigate, ‘How can I get something to make something?’ That has been the base for everything I do nowadays.”
Eventually, he cobbled together a thesis which amazed his teacher so much that he convinced Hoek to convert it into a book: “Alles over de doelverdediger,” or “So You Want to be a Goalkeeper.” One day, as Hoek was getting ready to play a match against Feyenoord,, he was approached by Johan Cruyff, the greatest Dutch player of all time, who told him that his book was fantastic. A few years later, as both Hoek and Cruyff were transitioning from their playing days into a new career, the ‘Flying Dutchman’ asked Hoek if he wanted to join his technical staff at Ajax.
“Cruyff called me and that was basically a miracle. I first thought it was a joke, but it was really him. He said, ‘I know goalkeeper specialists don’t exist, but can we have a chat?’ It was a magical meeting, and for me, it was completely new because I never actually coached a team, I had only done demonstrations and camps before.”
Back in the mid-80s, goalkeeper coaching solely consisted of an assistant firing shots at a goalkeeper or sending up crosses for him to collect. In fact, they’d often be training on an entirely different pitch from their teammates. This changed with Hoek; two weeks into his Ajax tenure, Hoek complained to Cruyff that Ajax’s goalkeeper Stanley Menzo would leave his line when he should be staying put and that he stays on his line when he should be coming off it to sweep up danger. He said that he didn’t have the players to practice covering huge spaces, and as such, Menzo’s only training would come during actual football matches. Cruyff agreed, and, much to Hoek’s bewilderment, decided to send him the entire squad to work with on Thursday. Hoek barely slept that entire week, knowing that if he failed to engineer the perfect training session, his career would be over before it began. Nevertheless, he managed to convince the players and Cruyff, who agreed to give him access to the entire squad every Thursday from that point onwards.
Over the next four decades, Hoek has worked as an assistant coach at Manchester United, Ajax, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, as well as other national teams like the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Poland. He has worked with goalkeepers including Edwin van der Sar, Víctor Valdés, Vítor Baía, Pepe Reina, and David de Gea and helped usher in a new form of goalkeeper training with his ‘Goalplayer’ program, which helps develop goalkeepers who could then be integrated into the team’s build-up play, offering masterclasses, courses, and lectures to coaches, teams, and goalkeepers. And today, he’s got a new challenge on the horizon: joining Robin van Persie as the new assistant coach at Feyenoord.
