Fragile, luminous, compelling: Louis van Gaal is football’s essential dad

There is a very Louis moment towards the end of Louis, the brilliant new film by Dutch director Geertjan Lassche that feels less like a documentary and more like a two-hour meditation on the meaning of sport, relationships, mortality; life through the lens of one brutally honest 70-year-old Dutch prozess-trainer.

Louis van Gaal is doing drills with the national team shortly after his latest unveiling as Netherlands manager. Virgil van Dijk approaches him, observed only by Lassche’s wonderfully wry camera, and informs Van Gaal that he, Virgil van Dijk, will be the first penalty taker in any forthcoming shootout. “Ah…,” Van Gaal says, a look of wonder spreading across his face. “So you’ve become a coach now.”

“No … no,” Van Dijk stutters. “All I’m saying, what I mean is …” But Van Gaal is already hoisting an eyebrow and laughing weirdly, before getting back to telling Frenkie de Jong to beat his man more often, then scolding the entire squad, with feeling, for standing still in possession.

The players smile and listen. It’s obvious that they love this old geezer, a Van Gaal who looks pretty startling out there these days, his monolithic head flatter than ever, chiselled like a cliff face, a head that should surely have been designated by now as a Dutch national monument.

What the players don’t know is that Van Gaal has a catheter and a colostomy bag fitted under the tracksuit hanging loosely from his shoulders. Or that he will go straight from national team duty to spend his nights in hospital, watching football on an iPhone on his gurney, fighting the after-effects of prostate cancer treatment. By the time the decisive game against Norway comes around he will be in a wheelchair, a legacy (absurdly) of falling off his bike