Louis van Gaal, Head Coach of Netherlands, looks on with assistant coaches Edgar Davids, Danny Blind and goalkeeper coach Frans Hoek prior to the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Round of 16 (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
Out of the 11 positions that make up a football team, none have undergone such a dramatic shift over the past three decades as the goalkeeper. Prior to 1992, a goalkeeper’s job was solely to keep the ball out of the back of the net. This changed with the introduction of the back pass rule: players could no longer kick the ball back to their goalkeeper for him to pick up with his hands. Gone are the days of pure shot-stoppers – we are now living in the era of the ball-playing goalkeeper.
Modern goalkeepers need to be assured in possession, capable of handling a heavy pass with a measured first touch and escaping pressure with a deft turn or swivel before working the ball to safety. It no longer suffices to simply whack the ball forward and hope that their teammate wins the aerial duel; goalkeepers need to be able to fulfill certain tasks like playing short passes and retaining possession whilst being closed down, as well as dropping in between the center backs and offering an extra passing option. In essence, they are no longer a completely different player – they’re the 11th outfielder.
It’s why, upon joining Manchester City, Pep Guardiola decided to jettison club icon Joe Hart and sign Claudio Bravo from Barcelona before eventually settling on Ederson, who has proven instrumental in their domestic dynasty. It’s why Manchester United chose to move on from David De Gea in the summer of 2023 and bring in André Onana from Inter. And it’s why goalkeepers are being integrated into training sessions and participating in many of the same drills as their teammates, as opposed to training apart from them.
Apart from the back pass rule, perhaps no singular entity has played a bigger role in the goalkeeper’s transformation than Frans Hoek.
Earning his Stripes in the Netherlands
Born in Hoorn, Netherlands, Hoek’s sports journey started not with football, but with judo. He achieved a black belt and became a regional youth champion, before shifting over to volleyball and football around the age of 13. Whilst he mainly played as an outfield player for the amateur side Always Forward, he was occasionally used in goal due to his judo experience, which enabled him fearlessly put his body on the line and dive without injuring himself in the process.
When he was just 14, Hoek made his first-team debut. Always Forward’s starting goalkeeper was accompanying his wife in the hospital as she prepared to give birth, and Hoek was the only option available. Even though he ‘couldn’t even touch the crossbar,’ Hoek was given the start in front of 3,000 spectators, prompting the interest of various media outlets as well as Dutch football clubs.
“I wanted to pursue a degree in sports education, but my parents couldn't afford it,” revealed Hoek in an exclusive RG interview. “However, there was one team – Volendam – that agreed to pay for my studies in return for me playing for them. I signed a three-year contract, but I never imagined I would play professionally or that my passion would develop the way it has over time.”
At the time, Hoek was under the impression that he’d be making his living as a physical education teacher and an amateur football coach – he had no idea that he’d soon be changing the course of goalkeeping coaching forever. After joining Het Andere Oranje in 1973, Hoek wasn’t initially given a salary, but that would change after a handful of matches. Over the next 12 years, Hoek would enjoy a fulfilling career as a goalkeeper with Volendam, leading them to two promotions to the Eredivisie and even scoring a goal. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that his biggest accomplishments would come off the pitch, not on it.
Whilst commencing his footballing career, Hoek was also chasing a degree. Out of the 1,000 applicants, Hoek was one of the 90 selected to undergo one of the Netherlands’ most rigorous sports graduate programs. Naturally, he chose to write about the goalkeeper position, but it wasn’t long before he had seemingly reached an impasse. Hoek couldn’t find any books or information to help him navigate his studies, so he turned to the Dutch Football Federation and asked them to contact their English counterparts and send them literature. They didn’t send instructional or tactical books, but instead, 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.’
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.”
Writing the Book on Goalkeeping
When Hoek finally submitted his thesis, his teacher was so amazed at the quality of the research that he told him to convert it into a book. Hoek turned to his friend, a journalist, who helped him publish: “Alles over de doelverdediger.” This was translated into English in 1985 by the legendary American soccer player, coach and broadcaster Joe Machnik: “So You Want to be a Goalkeeper.”
One day, in 1979, Volendam were getting ready to play Feyenoord when an opposition player approached Hoek and told him that his book was ‘fantastic.’ That player happened to be Johan Cruyff, the greatest Dutch footballer of all time. After a legendary career that saw him win three Ballon d’Or awards and reach a World Cup Final, Cruyff quickly moved into coaching and became Ajax’s manager in 1985. At that same time, Hoek was getting ready to hang up his boots after suffering a meniscus injury that forced him to undergo a total reconstruction of his knee. Cruyff went about finding the best specialists and inviting them onto Ajax’s technical staff, and he had no doubts about who the goalkeeping specialist should be.
Today, every single top-level football club has at least one goalkeeper coach, and in some cases, they might even have three or four. However, when Hoek joined Ajax’s coaching staff in 1986, goalkeeping coaches didn’t exist – goalkeeper training consistently of a coach firing shots or crosses at the goalkeeper and fine-tuning their reflexes, and it often took place on a different pitch from the other players. Hoek was forced to build the plane in mid-air, but thankfully for him, his boss was an open-minded visionary who was always looking to absorb new ideas and adapt them to fit his game model.
Ajax not only dominated Dutch football during Hoek’s time in Amsterdam, but they also made inroads into international football by winning the 1986/87 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup, the 1991/92 UEFA Cup (now known as the Europa League), and the 1994/95 UEFA Champions League. However, Hoek’s achievements cannot simply be summarized by looking at a trophy cabinet: he has written the book on goalkeeper coaching, both in a literal and figurative sense.
Pioneering a New Coaching Field
Two weeks into his Ajax tenure, Hoek approached Cruyff and complained that Ajax’s goalkeeper Stanley Menzo comes off his line when he should be staying put, and that he stays on his line when he should be coming off his line 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. Rather than sending him a couple of players to execute his training session, Cruyff told him that he’d have the entire squad to work with on Thursday.
Hoek barely slept that week; all he could do was think about making the perfect training session that would not only elevate his goalkeeper’s abilities, but keep the other outfield players interested and energized. If he messed up, it would be the end of his coaching career. Fortunately, he was able to formulate an innovative drill that impressed both the players and Cruyff, who agreed to give him access to the entire squad every Thursday from that point onwards.
“The game is the starting point, and it’s also your teacher.
If you want to teach and improve, you have to be as close as possible to the game. You need to be in constant discussion, you need to be clear in what you do, you need to test it out. You need to reflect on it, and then you need to evaluate it. Every new thing you do, there will be resistance because people are afraid to go out of their comfort zone. But the only way to grow and become better is to get out of the comfort zone and create a new one.”
After leaving Ajax in 1997, Hoek has been able to implement his unique, avant-garde methods with some of the biggest clubs in the world like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Galatasaray, He’s also worked with national teams like Poland, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands and played an active role in several FIFA World Cups, and he’s also learned alongside some of the greatest Dutch minds in football history – Cruyff, Rinus Michels, and Louis van Gaal. He’s scouted and mentored some of the game’s greatest goalkeepers like Manuel Neuer, Edwin van der Sar and Victor Valdés, and he’s also worked as an advisor and technical director for USL Championship side Orange County as well as other teams like the Danish national team and MLS side LA Galaxy.
Today, he’s employed as an assistant coach and a goalkeeping coach to Robin van Persie. Having previously coached Van Persie at Manchester United and the Netherlands, as well as in a 2021 coaching course, he’s now working alongside Van Persie as an auxiliary coach for Eredivisie side Heerenveen. He balances that with his work with UEFA, where he oversees the coaching programs in Italy, Belgium, Spain and Andorra and ensures that they follow all the requirements in terms of their licenses and diplomas, and his globetrotting career which has seen him traverse the world and explain his concepts to a number of coaching conventions and teams – last June, the reigning Italian champions Inter invited him to hold a workshop at the club’s headquarters.
Paving the Way for Goalplayers
Widely considered to be the godfather of goalkeeper coaching, Hoek has blazed a trail and helped transform the position for the better. Goalkeepers are no longer asked to be reactive, but proactive: they need to be able to intercept through balls, make themselves as big as possible in 1v1 situations, and launch counter-attacks with pinpoint passing.
They need to be the last line of defense AND the first line of attack. It’s why Hoek doesn’t call them goalkeepers, but ‘goalplayers.’
Hoek founded the educational program ‘Goalplayer’ to help develop goalkeepers who could then be integrated into the team’s build-up play, offering masterclasses, courses, and lectures to coaches, teams, and goalkeepers. The ‘Goalplayer’ clients are provided with the instruments to analyze in-game scenarios and undergo situations that would otherwise only be witnessed in an actual match, be that Virtual Reality training or state-of-the-art practice drills.
He hasn’t just been on the forefront of goalkeeper training, but set-piece analysis as well, combining data and tactics to help his teams tighten up when defending dead-ball situations whilst also making them a threat in attacking set-pieces. With Hoek conjuring up the tactics, the Netherlands managed to avoid conceding a single set-piece goal (excluding penalties) in the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2022 World Cup.
Throughout his storied career, Hoek has never been afraid to take calculated risks. We saw this in 2014 when, after a goalless 120 minutes, starting goalkeeper Jasper Cillessen was subbed off for Tim Krul. The result? Krul would save two penalties during the shootout, and the Netherlands would end up prevailing 4-3 to secure their spot in the World Cup semifinals. Eight years later, the Netherlands were facing Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinal when they won a free kick outside the area. As is customary, a right-footed player (Cody Gakpo) and a left-footed player (Teun Koopmeiners) stood over the ball, waiting patiently to fire a rocket into the back of the net; instead, Koopmeiners took everyone by surprise by rolling a pass underneath the opposing wall and into the path of Wout Weghorst, who equalized at the last second.
Argentina would go on to win on penalties and proceed to win the entire tournament, but that goal will remain forever as one of the most ingenious and daring set-piece plays that has ever been attempted on a football pitch. It was something that could only be envisioned by a man who, after four decades in the coaching industry, continues to push the boundaries and set the standard for modern football.
“If you don't develop yourself, then you will never be better. I'm 68 years of age and I still learn every day. I know everything about the digital world, I can make my own clips and analyze my game with all kinds of tools. I take myself as an example in everything I do and always go out of my comfort zone to continue to grow.”
Stay tuned for Part Two.
Zach Lowy is a freelance football journalist who has written for leading outlets like FotMob, BetUS, Apuestas Deportivas, and who has appeared as a radio and television guest for BBC, SiriusXMFC, and various other platforms. After pursuing a global sports journalism degree at George Washington University, Zach has been able to tap into his multilingual background and interview major footballing figures in Spanish and Portuguese as well as operate the weekly podcast 'Zach Lowy's European Football Show' on BET Central.
