In 1998, Louis van Gaal approached Sir Alex Ferguson with a request for advice on how best to deal with the press. Well known for the breezy bonhomie that characterised his own relations with the media, the then Manchester United manager’s curt response of “Don’t read it,” appears to have gone resolutely ignored in the intervening 17 years.  Despite revealing last summer that British reporters “are nicer than the Dutch, nicer than the Spanish” - but curiously not as nice as the Germans - Van Gaal’s relationship with the British press pack has since deteriorated to an alarming, but often comically entertaining, degree.
Like Ebenezer Scrooge railing against the poor and destitute, the Dutchman spent Christmas griping about the football writers with whom he is forced, increasingly under sufferance, to deal with on a weekly basis. His grumbles about media-perpetrated “ lies “ will have come as little surprise to anyone familiar with a career-long relationship with the Fourth Estate that has always been fractious.
 “So much of what’s written about me has nothing to do with the truth or the facts,” he once told a group of Dutch hacks during his time as the manager of Ajax. “All I ever read about myself is how arrogant I am. I’m self-assured, I have an opinion, I walk tall. With my bearing and my personality, it’s all too easy to be dismissed as arrogant.”
In a spectacularly furious press conference tirade following an Ajax match against NAC Breda in 1996, Van Gaal rounded on Voetbal International journalist Ted van Leeuwen, who had asked a question about the manager’s relationship with his players to which he took exception. “Am I so smart or are you so stupid?!” he roared, his query instantly becoming the stuff of Dutch football legend, while perhaps suggesting it might not be his bearing and personality alone that prompt some folk to dismiss him as arrogant.
More recently, under pressure following United’s defeat at the hands of Stoke City , talk turned to the likelihood of him keeping his job at United and Van Gaal suggested that as an alternative to having his P45 forced upon him, he could always resign. When reporters quite reasonably interpreted these comments to mean that he might seriously be considering his position, he responded with the kind of haughty disdain for which his name, fairly or unfairly, has long been a byword.
“They are lies, not based on facts,” he fumed. “Will I resign? On the contrary. When the players can give such a performance with a lot of pressure, there is not any pressure to resign for me. Maybe the media wants me to but I shall not resign.” Just before Christmas, Van Gaal had been in equally spiky form , asking for an apology from journalists he felt were prematurely reporting a demise that was anything but imminent. “I think I was already sacked, I have read,” he harrumphed at his weekly briefing , before wishing his interrogators a merry Christmas in a tone that suggested his own festive enjoyment would be greatly enhanced if they all choked on their wine and mince pies.
Part savage hatchet job, part endearing homage, O Louis was one of the more entertaining football tomes to be published in recent times. It was written by the Dutch football journalist and television pundit Hugo Borst, who once knew Van Gaal well enough to take golf tips from the great man but subsequently fell out with him when the manager accused Borst of passing on his phone number to another journalist without permission. By his own admission, totally obsessed with Van Gaal, Borst wrote an often brutal book that is nothing if not an entertaining read.  At times quite disturbing, it contains often harrowing and downright cruel assessments of the manager and his relationship with various players, his wife Truus, the media and alcohol.
Putting aside the dubious ethics of a wheeze that involved Borst sitting down with a psychiatrist best known for appearing on a reality TV show called Holland’s Worst Husband in a bid to analyse Van Gaal’s character, what Bram Bakker had to say about the United manager’s ongoing battles with assorted journalists made for interesting reading.  Despite never having met the subject of his analysis, Bakker had studied his official biography and arrived at the rather damning conclusion that Van Gaal is a deeply suspicious man with an inferiority complex who tends towards paranoia and needs immediate psychiatric help.
“Try to imagine that people who are aggressive are always fearful at heart,” he explained to Borst. “Because you only need to be aggressive when you feel threatened. So ultimately all aggression is triggered by some kind of fear. Look at Louis van Gaal that way and what you see is a frightened little boy.” Reporters on the Manchester football beat could be forgiven for taking Bakker’s analysis with a pinch of salt, not least those who have been subjected to Van Gaal’s death stare followed by a series of mocking questions about the apparent stupidity of their own particular lines of interrogation.
Van Gaal is by no means the first football manager to make little secret of his contempt for those tasked with chronicling the day-to-day activities of his team but few have ever gone about it in a more consistently entertaining way. We should be grateful that Manchester United’s weekend victory over Swansea City looks certain to keep him in a job; United’s performances on the football field this season may have been characterised by a lack of entertainment but their manager’s press briefings remain compulsive viewing.