The former assistant manager of Manchester United has told a local audience of how one-on-one training with a young Cristiano Ronaldo helped to turn the player into one who is now chasing a career tally of 1,000 goals.
Rene Meulensteen came into the inner circle of management at the iconic club through a convoluted route of coaching in his native Netherlands and then Qatar, before rising through the United academy and reserves into the first team set up.
He built a reputation in his earliest days with the Manchester club for individual work with players, particularly strikers.
The Portuguese star was suspended for a month after reacting to provocation and head-butting an opponent early in the 2007-08 season.
‘So when the team travelled, or they got ready for a game, then he was with me, sometimes with other players, but also a lot of one to one.
‘He was in a foul mood that he couldn’t play, but I said “this is a great opportunity to to work on certain aspects of your game”.’
Meulensteen challenged the young striker to focus on beating his goal tally of 23 from the previous season.
‘He said 30, I said “I think you should go for 40”.
‘He said “that’s nearly double”. But I said that we hadn’t worked on that side of his game.
‘“Your problem is you want your goals to be the most important goal or the most beautiful one. Therefore you miss so many opportunities to score so many other goals.
‘“You need to learn to score as many goals as you can, and in many different ways.”’
He showed Ronaldo a three-minute video of United goals scored by other strikers. It took a while, but eventually the player noticed all the different types of goals that were being scored.
Meulensteen took him on to the training ground and split the penalty area into three zones, to better understand the kind of finish required in each area of the penalty box, and the opportunity to maximise his chances to score in the central zone, zone one.
‘There was a list of about six points that we worked on that he needed to understand. And then, when I started working with him, there was always in repetitions of four, which keeps the quality high and the focus high. It was four rounds, four shots, 16 goals in no time, and you become like a machine gun.
‘Then I said to him, from now on, you wear an invisible rucksack, and every goal you score, there’s a click, and you put that goal in the rucksack, even in training.
A lot of players miss chances, because they focus on the outcome rather than hitting the ball cleanly.
‘Over time, you’re going to score so many goals in training that every goal you’re going to score in the future, you’ve already scored. It’s already in the rucksack. You just have to pull it out of the rucksack.
‘You can see the cross coming. You know exactly what finish is linked to that cross. So your finishing becomes calmer, more efficient.
‘Never, never focus on the outcome. Always on the execution. It’s not “I want to head the ball in that corner”, it’s “I want to hit the ball in this way” and then it will go in the corner. That’s the difference. That’s why a lot of players miss chances, because they focus on the outcome rather than hitting the ball cleanly.
‘I wanted to change his attitude, one that he had that belief that he was going to score goals, and to change him from awareness to understanding, and if you constantly bring players into that environment, it becomes second nature.
‘So very quickly he’s thinking where’s the ball? Where am I? Where’s the opponent, where’s the goalkeeper, where’s the goal? All that goes in quickly and it's bang, in the back of the net. That is what we did over a sequence of about 12 sessions.’
A focus on goals helped to turn the young winger into the centre forward who, at the age of 40, has now collected more than 950 career goals.
‘The training was aimed at making him more effective in using his skills. He had a tendency to entertain the public, at Old Trafford it would be step over, step over, step over, blow a kiss, and nothing happened.
‘Skills are a weapon, and you need to use them to hurt the opposition.
‘He embraced everything, because he knew what he wanted, which was to become officially the best player in the world. Then it became “I want to score as many goals as possible”, which became almost a kind of religion for him, and we started to use him off the left wing into the striker position.’
Since leaving Manchester United Meulensteen has spent the past decade in short-lived management roles at Fulham and in Russia, Israel and India, before six years as assistant manager with Australia. He now performs a similar role with Iraq as they bid to quality for the 2026 World Cup, facing an inter-continental play-off in March.
Rene Meulensteen came to Guernsey to conduct several training sessions over a day at Aztech and Victoria Park with The Coaching Manual.
