Menno van Dam was presented today as the new trainer of FC Emmen. Just in time, because tomorrow he will soon go on holiday for a week before the club starts preparing for the new season.
“It will be a laptop and telephone holiday,” says Van Dam, who will be in contact with the club daily on the Greek island of Kos. About the current selection, new players, about the training weekend to be planned: there is a lot to discuss.
But the football -crazy Van Dam is already looking forward to it. Although he was fired by the Danish Aalborg not so long ago, he did not sit still in the intervening period. “Of course I could be a lot with my family, but I also went to a Portuguese club to get inspiration again.”
The fact that he comes to work at FC Emmen also means that he no longer has to work at a distance from his family with three children in Heerenveen. “It’s an hour from my house and I am going to work with people I have known for a long time,” Van Dam sums up. How different was that in recent years in Scandinavia.
Van Dam left Denmark in a nasty way; He was fired for disappointing results. Yet he is enthusiastic about Danish football. “The playing speed, the full stadiums, the passion: fantastic.”
“I have become a better trainer there,” says Van Dam. “In the Netherlands we mainly want to play football from backwards, but certainly at Brøndby I have learned that it is possible to play football in a switch. The moment you lose the ball and dive, you can quickly go to the goal from there.”
The Drenthe amateur football enthusiast can know Van Dam as a player of MSC from Meppel. There he became affectionate Mennodinho mentioned, a name that the coach used to be at msn. “At MSC I had a fantastic time, then at the highest amateur level in the Netherlands,” he says.
Van Dam says he could walk ahead just as fast as backwards, and had to have ‘insight and cleverness’. “As a footballer, I have already developed as a trainer, I think,” he says. “After secondary education, I went to the CIOS to be busy with sport. I think I was out of it soon.”
The dismissal at Aalborg was no reason for Van Dam to doubt the trainership. On the contrary. Shortly after he was sent out, two technical directors from other clubs called him. “They said,” Menno, now it starts. Because you probably never want this feeling in your life again, “Van Dam reproduces. “That’s right. Because if I do something, I want to do that with all the effort.”
Van Dam doesn’t have to wait long for him to get to work. After his vacation at Kos, the first training will wait on Sunday 22 June.
View the first interview with the brand new trainer of FC Emmen below.