It was August 1, 2022, the morning after the night before. “Arjan, Arjan, Arjan!” the England players cheered as assistant manager Arjan Veurink joined Sarina Wiegman on stage in front of thousands of fans in London’s Trafalgar Square. The Lionesses had just won the European Championship.
Lucy Bronze affectionately patted Veurink’s bald head before he ushered them to quieten down. He listened, applauded and let Wiegman and the players do the talking. “They’re the dream team,” said captain Leah Williamson.
Veurink, Wiegman’s right-hand man for eight and a half years, has always been in her shadow. That has suited the 38-year-old just fine and helps explain why their dynamic — built on unwavering trust — works so well. They have made the past four consecutive major tournament finals with two nations: the 2017 Euros and 2019 World Cup with the Netherlands, then the 2022 Euros and 2023 World Cup with England.
But this will be their last tournament together. After Euro 2025, the Dutchman will leave England to take his dream job as the Netherlands head coach, signing a contract until 2029. On Wednesday, the two teams meet in what is a must-win game for England. Veurink will face his home nation and he will also come up against the man he is replacing, Andries Jonker.
“Even during a match, one word is enough,” Wiegman, speaking about her connection with Veurink, told Dutch media in May. “Over the years, you get to know so well what each other thinks. That allows you to switch quickly and make changes.”
Veurink’s influence on the Lionesses cannot be understated. England players have been effusive about him in the past, describing him as “a tactical genius”, “the mastermind” and the “unsung hero” of the team.
He is creative and has a keen eye for detail. He delivers the pre-match analysis meetings on the opposition, looking for marginal gains, plans training sessions, writes the software for video clip analysis and evaluates players’ training loads with the physical trainers. The technical staff discuss scenarios as a group. Wiegman is involved in the planning but she will send her team away to improve parts and she has the final word.
Williamson will miss Veurink’s “football brain”. “He has a lot of ideas and always challenges me,” she said on Friday. “He knows he pushes me sometimes because I go to bite at him. He’s been a great person to have around the team, especially at the 2022 Euros. We all appreciated him for the role he played and have done ever since.”
England forward Lauren Hemp said Veurink, an emotionally intelligent coach, has given her “a lot of confidence”. “He’s shown me how to have freedom in my game,” she said after England’s 2-1 defeat against France.
“We’re happy for Arjan, he’s going to a great team but we want to give him a great tournament to end on as well.”
Veurink is known to be pedantic about every detail, even to the extent of how straight the cones are in training. Asked if there is anything she will not miss about him, Hemp added: “I like everything, I haven’t got a bad word to say!”
Veurink balances banter with getting down to business. At Euro 2022, the players nicknamed him ‘Van Gerwen’ — after the Dutch darts player, a three-time PDC world champion, such was his love of the game. That competitive spirit is still there.
“Arj is super competitive on and off the pitch,” said Georgia Stanway on Monday. “Whatever the game is, he has to be involved and has to win.”
On January 25, the Dutch Football Association (KNVB) announced it would not extend Jonker’s contract after the Euros. “It is time for a new phase,” was the only explanation provided.
Jonker said in a press conference before the February Nations League matches that he was “surprised” and “disappointed” at the decision and would have liked to have continued until after the 2027 World Cup.
“The KNVB should indicate how they handled this,” he added, surprised at his exclusion from his performance review. The players were not told in advance about his departure either. In February, Jonker said his enthusiasm and ambition had not dwindled.
Two days before the Netherlands’ Euros opener against Wales last week, however, the 62-year-old told the NOS Football Podcast that at the time, he considered leaving and questioned how the players and staff would react to his impending departure. Promising results against Germany, Scotland and Austria in the February and April windows, however, reassured him.
Andries Jonker had hoped to continue in his role as Netherlands head coach (Leiting Gao/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
In the background, the KNVB was making its next move. Veurink was contacted in February. He spoke with Wiegman and had many conversations with the English Football Association (FA). He was then granted formal approval to speak to the KNVB. Despite Veurink’s England contract running until after the 2027 World Cup, the FA, which received a small compensation fee, allowed him to leave, respecting his wishes and honouring the work he had done.
“I’m sure it’s the only opportunity he would have been tempted by,” said England FA CEO Mark Bullingham.
The job had always been on his radar and Veurink has never hidden his ambition to lead his country’s national team.
He has spent most of the past four years away from home, travelling frequently from Borne, a small countryside town in the east of the Netherlands, and staying in hotels in England. A father of three, the opportunity to work closer to home ticked a lot of boxes on a personal level.
A week after Jonker had led the Netherlands to a 3-1 win over Austria, the KNVB announced — just under three months before the Euros — that Veurink would take charge of the Netherlands for the first time in October.
There was no media, photos or fanfare surrounding the announcement. Typical of Veurink, he wanted to remain fully focused on the task at hand with England and finish it off “in style”. KNVB’s director of football, Nigel de Jon,g thanked the FA for its cooperation.
Veurink described the move as an “incredible challenge” and “exciting new adventure”, but also a “logical next step” in his career. He has been a head coach before, guiding Twente’s women’s team to four championship titles in four seasons, beating Wiegman when she managed ADO Den Haag in the process, before becoming her Netherlands assistant in 2017.
Wiegman knew this time would come at some point. When Veurink started the UEFA Pro Licence coaching course in 2023, it “unleashed a certain dynamic”, in Wiegman’s words, which left her assistant wanting more. “That itch started,” she said.
Coincidentally, it was Wiegman who presented all the UEFA Pro Licence graduates with their certificates. The baton had been passed on, literally and metaphorically. Veurink was ready to stand on his own two feet.
But Wiegman never doubted his commitment to England. “I trust Arjan, I know how he’s wired,” she said. “He really wants to give it his all until the Euros and finish it off in a great way.”
By contrast, Jonker’s doubts lingered. After a 4-0 defeat against Germany and a 1-1 draw with Scotland at the end of May and beginning of June, he told Dutch broadcaster NOS last week he considered quitting. Those comments led to a heated exchange in the Netherlands’ pre-match press conference when a Dutch journalist accused Jonker of creating a “puppet show”.
When this summer’s Euros end, Wiegman will enter a new era with England without her trusted lieutenant by her side. The Netherlands took her assistant and so she took two of theirs: Arvid Smit and Janneke Bijl. She looked at other coaches but already knew the pair well from her time as Netherlands’ head coach.
“She has the fire in her,” Smit, Wiegman’s former assistant, told The Athletic in 2023. “If you are close to her, you can see it. You can feel it. On the sidelines, she will be calm but on the inside, I know she will be thinking about every scenario in her head.”
Wiegman, however, refused to talk about Veurink as a future head coach and her soon-to-be assistants when asked about them on Tuesday, the day before England and the Netherlands meet in their pivotal Group D match. “I am deliberately ignoring everything to do with these matters,” she said. Similarly, when asked about Veurink, Jonker said: “I’m not playing against Arjan, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
The new staff’s first camp with the England squad will be in October. It will take time for the new assistants to build relationships with the players, staff and, albeit to a lesser extent, Wiegman herself. “That will be a new challenge,” she said. “One in which you’ll gain new insights.”
Wiegman envisages remaining in regular contact with Veurink. They have developed, in her words, “a close football friendship”, and it will stay that way, picking each other’s brains about the latest developments in the game.
“There’s such a strong bond of trust between us,” she said. “Unless we become opponents, then it might be less…”
There is no doubt that Veurink will leave a big hole.
“Oh, I’ll miss a lot about him,” Wiegman said, speaking from England’s hotel in Zurich last week. “I don’t want to think about that yet. We’ve worked together for eight and a half years and it goes so smoothly. We’re so complementary and it’s so natural. That’s what I’ll miss. He’s just a very, very good man and a very good coach.”
(Top photo: Jussi Eskola/Soccrates/Getty Images)
