Why has Frank Rijkaard disappeared from football?| All Football

Sometime an iconic football figure simply drops off the radar.

For every Pele pushing Mastercard and for each David Beckham swanning around in underpants, there are plenty of great players who simply exit the stage and disappears from view, as though they had ticked the ‘no publicity’ box in their email response.

Even so the case of Frank Rijkaard is curious.

Here is a man who scaled the heights both playing and coaching, winning the Champions League as a player twice with AC Milan and once with Ajax (both sublime teams) and as a coach leading Barcelona in 2006.

At the time only Miguel Munoz, Giovanni Trapattoni, Johan Cruyff and Carlo Ancelotti had achieved that; since then Pep Guardiola and Zinedine Zidane have added their names to that list and that is illustrious company to be keeping.

It’s also easy to forget now, in this era in which Barca and Real Madrid share out Europe’s most prestigious trophy, that at the time it was only Barcelona’s second victory in the competition in history.

For many their memory of Rijkaard will be as the coach who struggled to get the best out of Andres Ineista, Ronaldinho, Lionel Messi and Xavi before Guardiola came along and revolutionised Barcelona. That is, of course, only half the story.

It is true that in 2007-08, Rijkaard had one of the most-talented squads in history. And that increasingly in that final season they looked a hopeless bunch of leaderless layabouts, Ronaldinho the chief culprit, his waistline expanding as rapidly as his bank balance as he enjoyed the nightclubs of Castelldefels, the swanky beach-side district just south of the city where many of the players live.

By the end Rijkaard looked a beaten man. Journalist Guillem Balague recounts a story of Guardiola taking his Barca B team of 2007-08 to play Rijkaard’s first team in a training match. ‘He [Pep] finally came to the conclusion that Barcelona needed a change [that day],’ wrote Balague. ‘He discovered Rijkaard smoking a cigarette… Ronaldinho was taken off after 10 minutes, Deco was clearly tired and the reserve boys, still in the third division, were running the first team ragged.’

By then Rijkaard knew the end was coming at Barca and had accepted his fate. It wasn’t quite the end of his coaching career. He had 16 months at Galatasaray and a short spell with Saudi Arabia.

But these days you’re more likely to find him hanging out with his wife, Stefanie, and their children in Amsterdam. Part of his desire not to engage in public life may be because of the huge fall-out in Holland when he split from his former wife Monique to in 2009 to move in with Stefanie, who had been the family nanny. The backlash was considerable.

Wise investments in the Amsterdam property market mean that he is financially secure, the Dutch city having enjoyed a rental boom in recent years. Those close to him say the offers still roll in periodically, particularly when Chinese clubs came calling for the great and the good of European football a few years ago. But Rijkaard’s agent doesn’t even bother asking. No club in Holland would try to tempt him out of retirement. They know he is done with the game.

It’s not entirely surprising. As a player – Rijkaard was made for the role of ball-playing centre-half-cum-midfielder so beloved by Cruyff – he never conformed to the norm.

It’s unusual for someone in the Dutch football establishment to have survived a run-in with Cruyff unscathed. But in 1987, Rijkaard, then 24, simply walked out of the Ajax team which Cruyff coached. ‘F*** you and your eternal whining,’ he is said to have shouted at Cruyff, according to Jonathan Wilson’s new book, ‘The Barcelona Legacy’.

Rijkaard refused to turn up for training. There is TV footage of a bemused reporter outside Rijkaard’s house questioning him on what was a major ruckus at the time while the player calmly replies that he won’t be going in anymore and is simply staying at home.

That defiance might have seen him cast into the football wilderness. He resurfaced but at Real Zaragoza. It was at AC Milan that he found his level, his axis with fellow Dutchmen Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten being the triumvirate which formed the backbone of one of the great teams. It is of course the team most frequently compared to Guardiola’s Barca in the debate over the greatest ever club sides.

Such was the equanimity with which Rijkaard conducted himself after his initial break-up with Cruyff that they had managed to make up to such an extent that Cruyff recommended him as national team manager for Euro 2000, a tournament Holland would be co-hosting with Belgium.

Rijkaard always said that he would quit if the team didn’t win. When they lost on penalties to Italy in the semis having enthused the nation en route, you might have thought he would give it another go in the 2002 World Cup. After all, he had Marc Overmars, Patrick Kluivert, Edwin van der Sar, the De Boer twins, and (though he wouldn’t travel thereafter, for fear of flying) Dennis Bergkamp at his disposal. Yet he remained true to his word and quit.

He took over at Sparta Rotterdam and led them to their first relegation in history, a sign perhaps that his gilded playing career might not be replicated. As such, it was an extraordinary act of faith by Cruyff (especially given their history) to give him his next break. When Joan Laporta won the Barca presidency in 2003, backed by Cruyff, he first turned to Guus Hiddink and then to Ronald Koeman but failed to recruit them. Cruyff lobbied for Rijkaard and he got the job.

When Barca won just two of their first seven games under Rijkaard it looked like going the way of Sparta and board member Sandro Rosell plotted to have him replaced by World Cup-winning Brazilian coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. But the arrival of Edgar Davids and a reversion to Cruyffian 4-3-3 formation saw them finish second in his first season, enough to sustain him in the job.

A Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o-inspired Barca won the 2005 and 2006 titles and the 2006 Champions League. He begun the integration of Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Lionel Messi into the team (though the former two were on the bench for the Champions League final and Messi bitterly disappointed not to be involved through injury).

It is true that his Barca side never reached the heights of Guardiola’s. Perhaps his finest moment came in November 2005, when, so good was Ronaldinho, that he was afforded a standing ovation at the Santiago Bernabeu after Rijkaard’s Barca beat Real Madrid 3-0.

His worst? Surely May 2008 in the same stadium. Real Madrid had won the league and honour dictated Barca would have to perform a guard of honour for their hated rivals. The humiliation continued on field with a 4-1 defeat.

In the press conference after, Rijkaard looked a broken man, unable to fend off questions and unwilling to fight his corner. He looked as though he had been hunted to the point of exhaustion and the following day he was sacked. He would only briefly be seen at the elite end of football again.