Ruud Gullit

Ruud Gullit: The Dreadlocks and the Dedication

In 1987 a twenty-five-year-old Dutchman won the Ballon d'Or and dedicated it to a man who had then been in a South African prison for twenty-three years and whose face most Italians would not have recognised. Years later, visiting Robben Island, he met former cellmates of Nelson Mandela who remembered the gesture, and who told him they had been astonished the award was not simply taken back — apartheid had taught them that injustice was normal. "It started a conversation in Italy," is how Gullit describes what he did. It remains the most consequential thing any footballer has done with a trophy.

Rudi Dil of the Jordaan

He was born Rudi Dil in Amsterdam on 1 September 1962, to George Gullit, who was Surinamese, and Ria Dil, who was Dutch. He took his father's surname as a boy for a simple reason: he thought it sounded more like a footballer's name. He grew up in the Jordaan.

Haarlem, Feyenoord, PSV

He signed professionally with HFC Haarlem on 22 September 1978, and on 19 August 1979, aged sixteen years and eleven months, became the youngest player ever to appear in the Eredivisie. Ninety-one league games later he joined Feyenoord, where in 1983–84 he played alongside the ageing Johan Cruyff and won a league-and-cup double; he was Dutch Footballer of the Year that season. He was also racially abused: his manager Thijs Libregts allegedly called him "blackie," and in September 1983 at St Mirren he was abused and spat on by supporters. He called it the saddest night of his life.

PSV followed, and with it two more Eredivisie titles and a second Footballer of the Year award in 1986. In 1987 AC Milan paid eighteen million guilders for him — a world record.

Milan, and the Best Team in the World

At Milan he became the central figure of what is still widely regarded as the greatest club side ever assembled, alongside Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard under Arrigo Sacchi. He won three Serie A titles and back-to-back European Cups in 1989 and 1990, scoring in the 4–0 destruction of Steaua Bucharest in the 1989 final. He also began to accumulate the knee ligament injuries that would define the second half of his career. He later won the Coppa Italia with Sampdoria in 1993–94.

Euro 1988

The Netherlands had produced the most admired football of the 1970s and won nothing with it. Gullit ended that. Captaining the side under Rinus Michels at the 1988 European Championship, he headed the opening goal of the final against the Soviet Union; van Basten then scored the volley that everybody remembers. Gullit became the first Dutch captain to lift an international trophy.

The international story ended badly. A dispute with the manager Dick Advocaat in 1993 over where he was being asked to play, and over being substituted at Wembley, curdled into a standing feud. He briefly returned, then walked out of the Netherlands' pre-tournament camp shortly before the 1994 World Cup and never played for his country again.

Mandela

The 1987 dedication was not an isolated gesture. Gullit was active in the Dutch anti-apartheid movement, formed in a culture of protest songs about Steve Biko and the "Free Nelson Mandela" campaign, and in 1988 he recorded an anti-apartheid single, "South Africa," with the reggae band Revelation Time; it reached number three in the Netherlands. He insists the dedication was a human statement rather than a political one, and is clear-eyed about why it mattered: in Italy, most people simply did not know Mandela's story. It led to repeated meetings with Mandela himself — who told him he had been afraid the award would be confiscated — and eventually to Gullit's work with the Laureus academy, built on Mandela's principle that sport has the power to change the world.

Chelsea, and the Manager Years

He joined Chelsea on a free transfer in July 1995, played first at sweeper and then in midfield, and was made player-manager in 1996 when Glenn Hoddle left for England. In 1997 he took Chelsea to the FA Cup — the club's first major trophy in twenty-six years, and a double first: he was the first manager from outside the British Isles, and the first black manager, to win a major English trophy. He was sacked in February 1998 with the team second in the Premiership. Chairman Ken Bates was blunt about it: "I didn't like his arrogance — in fact I never liked him."

What followed did not go well. At Newcastle United from August 1998 he reached the 1999 FA Cup final, then destroyed his dressing room — feuding publicly with Alan Shearer, refusing to give Rob Lee a squad number and handing his No. 7 to Kieron Dyer — and resigned five games into the next season after losing to Sunderland. He left Feyenoord after one trophyless season in 2004–05. At LA Galaxy from November 2007, on the highest salary any MLS head coach had then been paid, he arrived without a working understanding of the league's salary cap or draft, lost his opening game 4–0, clashed with Landon Donovan and Abel Xavier, and resigned in August 2008 after seven games without a win. A brief 2011 spell at Terek Grozny ended after five months; he had told a Russian newspaper he hoped to bring joy to Chechens through football, and did not deny that the money was excellent.

Why Ruud Is Called a Genius

The case is specific and it is about intelligence, not athleticism — though he had height, power and exceptional spring as well. What made Gullit exceptional was spatial: an ability to read a whole pitch and occupy whichever part of it the game required. He played attacking midfielder, second striker, both wings, central midfield and sweeper, at the highest level, and later reinvented himself as a deep-lying playmaker when his knees stopped letting him run past people. Total Football was a system that demanded players who could think positionally in real time; Gullit was arguably its purest late expression. The consensus assessment lists mental acuity, creativity, vision and spatial ability alongside balance, poise and technique. In 1990 Garth Crooks wrote that Gullit was "a great player by any standards," singling out his balance as the quality found in all the best players, and placing him in the company of Maradona, Pelé, Beckenbauer and Cruyff.

The counter-case is unusually clean, because the same intelligence conspicuously failed to transfer. A man that good at reading eleven moving players proved repeatedly unable to read a dressing room. He won a major trophy in his first full managerial season and then never won another anywhere, alienating Shearer, Lee, Donovan and Xavier — the last of whom said flatly that Gullit lacked respect for most of his players. He took a job in a league whose basic rules he had not learned. He walked out on his national team over a substitution. Ken Bates's word for it was arrogance. And the playing career itself, for all its peaks, was materially shortened by injury: the total is two European Cups and one international tournament, not a decade of dominance. Genius on the pitch is the defensible claim. Genius as a general property of the man is not.

Legacy

He was named in Pelé's FIFA 100 in 2004 and won World Soccer Player of the Year twice. As a broadcaster he gave the English language one of its more durable football phrases, coining "sexy football" as a BBC pundit at Euro 96 to describe Portugal's pass-and-move game, and he has worked as a television pundit ever since. But the image that has outlasted the goals is a young man with dreadlocks holding Europe's highest individual football honour and using the microphone to name a prisoner.

Achievements

• Ballon d'Or — 1987
• Italian Football Hall of Fame — 2017
• Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau
• Educated at Mendelcollege
• Worked as association football player and association football coach