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Why Louis van Gaal fell out of favor at Manchester United

Louis van Gaal never stopped being a gym teacher.

Somehow, somewhere between his 15-year playing career as a midfielder in the Netherlands and Belgium and the coaching career that immediately followed it – overlapped with it, in fact – starting in 1986, van Gaal found the time to also spend 11 years as a gym teacher. He worked at a technical high school in Amsterdam, attended almost exclusively by immigrant and minority teenagers. He instilled discipline, insisted on order and politeness.

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He never did change.

In his first job as assistant manager at AZ, he was run out of the club when the players rebelled against him. But at Ajax, he rose to the manager position in 1991 and summarily won the league three times, reached the Champions League final twice – winning it once and losing it on penalties the other time – and won the UEFA Cup. He drilled a young team in his methods.

His style was cemented then. It was didactic, before anything else, and it shackled his players to a set of parameters and protocols. Wingers faced with two defenders were to return the ball to a teammate sideways or backwards. Only in one-on-one situations were they allowed to take on their man. He was fiery, berating his players like schoolchildren when a short-sided team won in practice.

If Rinus Michels had forged Oranje's famous Total Football on positional freedom and self-expression, van Gaal invented something opposite to it. A kind of soccer machinery, painstakingly programmed to follow strict algorithms. And with young players, it worked very well.

It worked at Barcelona, too, where he built a young team with academy players – Xavi, Carles Puyol – and imported as many of his former Ajax players as he could get his hands on. But he fell out with Rivaldo, who was utterly dominant in those years. The Brazilian superstar didn't want to play on the left wing, where van Gaal had deemed him at his best, and was accustomed to having total freedom on the field, which ”The Iron Tulip” was never going to give him.

When it all ended in tears in Catalonia after van Gaal's third season – the first in which he didn't win La Liga – he became Netherlands manager in 2000. By then, his golden generation at Ajax had become big stars all around Europe. And they were in no mood to be treated like teenagers any longer. Holland didn't qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1986.

He returned to Barca and was fired by January, although he did bring Andres Iniesta into the senior team. Then Ajax again, as technical director. But manager Ronald Koeman felt micromanaged and eventually forced van Gaal out.

After three straight failed jobs, van Gaal finally found more success at AZ, where he'd ended his career as a player-coach. The previously pedestrian club came close to winning the Eredivisie twice and won it the last of his four seasons. Young and unknown players took to his methods and they played like a purring engine.

The pattern, by now, was clear. In subsequent jobs at Bayern Munich and Manchester United, van Gaal quickly wore out his welcome among the team's established stars, even if he did initially win the league and reached the Champions League final in Bavaria. Yes, he promoted Holger Badstuber and Thomas Muller to the Bayern senior team, and at United, bright futures seem to await Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard and Anthony Martial, who flourished under van Gaal in spite of towering expectations. But soon enough, the manager became more of a nuisance than a unifier in Manchester as well.

In a second spell with the Netherlands between those club jobs, however, he got three veteran star players – Wesley Sneijder, Arjen Robben and Robin van Persie – to buy in and complemented them with young newcomers to the international scene. The Dutch placed third at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

It's always the same. Van Gaal thrives with hungry, young players who don't know enough to be annoyed by his persnickety ways. Older ones don't put up with him for long.

Following his dismissal at United on Monday, the same stories about van Gaal driving his players nuts with his fussiness and obsession with details were published all over the English press – an apparently convenient leak. They spoke of all the emails he sent his players with video breakdowns, which they stopped opening – whereupon he began tracking their email accounts for their interaction with his messages.

Classic van Gaal. He'll make young players better and grate on the older, established ones. He laid the foundations for future champions at Barcelona and Bayern – and maybe at United – but he was long gone by the time those teams reached the summit. Van Gaal is a builder. Of teams. Of systems. Of champions.

Louis van Gaal is also a difficult man. He is socially awkward and a tad egomaniacal and, by many accounts, he has trouble connecting with a lot of his players. That attention to detail is his genius. But it's also his downfall. The very thing that triggers his success also causes him to fall out with people.

Because discipline and form come first. Like the gym teacher he's always been.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.

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