First German World Cup opponent
Putin gave this national coach a private jet
December 8, 2025 – 1:16 p.mReading time: 3 minutes
He once coached German clubs, now Dick Advocaat has to compete with Curaçao at the World Cup against the DFB team. His involvement in the Caribbean changed him significantly.
Dick Advocaat was surprisingly calm. “I don’t have to give interviews anymore,” Curaçao’s national coach told the Amsterdam newspaper “NRC Handelsblad” in a surprisingly open conversation. He and his team will be the German national team’s first group opponents at the World Cup next year – and have already secured a record.
The game against Germany on June 14, 2026 makes him the oldest coach in World Cup history. The 78-year-old replaces Otto Rehhagel, who was 71 when he coached Greece at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. However, Advocaat is still working on a new image before the World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada.
As assistant coach to the strict Orange coach Rinus Michels, he was long considered the “little general”. “You’re playing! You’re not,” he remembered Michels’ authoritarian leadership style, which he had long adopted for himself. Be it as a World Cup coach for the Netherlands (1994) and South Korea (2006) or as a club coach in the Bundesliga at Borussia Mönchengladbach. “That’s how I was. Players had to work. If things didn’t go my way, I could be tough,” explained Advocaat. “I couldn’t help it,” he added.
That sounds mild in old age. But his involvement in Curaçao, which he came to through the son of his assistant coach Cor Pot, also changed the coach. “Knuffeln,” for example, is a special Dutch form of hugging and loving each other. For a long time, the distant advocate was considered unsuspicious of this form of greeting. Now he revealed to the newspaper: “The greeting is different than what players actually do. But I thought: ‘Okay, they’re hugging each other, then I’ll hug too.'”
Curaçao has been an autonomous nation within the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 2010. The country became a FIFA member, but continues to benefit from the Dutch football school. An example: Kenji Gorré, son of Advocaat’s assistant Dean Gorré, plays for Curaçao. He was born near Amsterdam and came through the youth teams of “Oranje”. As do captain Leandro Bacuna and his brother Juninho, both of whom come from Groningen. By the way: Curaçao is in the Caribbean, but plays with a Dutch accent.