Henk ten Cate is Ajax's head-coach until 2008
20 May: "In ten years' time I'll be head-coach of Ajax,"
said an ambitious Henk ten Cate back in 1993, just after he'd
been presented as head-coach of Go Ahead Eagles. It
took him three years longer than that, but here he is: Henk ten
Cate (51) is Ajax's new 'captain on the ship'.
He has committed to the club until 30 June 2008. The
appointment of Ten Cate does not come as a surprise: he
has been linked with Ajax for several months. But now it's
official, two days after Ten Cate won the Champions League as
Frank Rijkaard's assistant at FC Barcelona. He will be
presented to the press on Monday at the Amsterdam ArenA.
Henk ten Cate in his NAC Breda days (2000-2003).
A born and raised Amsterdammer, Henk ten Cate is known
as a straight and high-spirited coach with a deep love for
entertaining, offensive football. It is his job to take Ajax
back to the top. "This must be the start of something
beautiful," Ten Cate said in a first reaction to newspaper
de Volkskrant. "It is my
challenge to put Ajax back on the map. I am very happy and
very proud to be the new coach of what is historically
Holland's biggest club. Somehow it felt like my career was
incomplete."
Ten Cate will put his own technical staff together. The
names of his assistants remain as yet unconfirmed, but it seems
almost certain that one of them will be Hennie Spijkerman,
who was never linked with Ajax in the media and would be
an surprising name in Ajax's technical staff. Ten Cate and
Spijkerman worked together for the Go Ahead Eagles youth
academy around 1990 and are known to be 'on the same
wavelength' when it comes to offensive football. Spijkerman
(55) is an experienced coach, who started the current season as
boss of First Division side FC Zwolle, but resigned when
dissatisfied 'supporters' of the club threatened Spijkerman and
his family.
Henk ten Cate biography
Henk ten Cate, a Surinamese Amsterdammer, was born on
09 December 1954 in the downtown working-class neighborhood
known as the Jordaan. He started playing football as a
child for (not too many people know
this!)... Ajax. As a teenager he joined De
Volewijckers of Amsterdam-North and (after a spell
at amateur club Rheden) became a
professional at Vitesse. Ten Cate was a fast,
entertaining right winger, although he could play on the
left as well. As a professional he played for five clubs
in total, but he is generally known as a 'Go Ahead Eagles
man': his spells at his other four clubs were
rather short.
Henk ten Cate first joined the Deventer
club in 1979 (coming from Vitesse). He left in
1980 for an adventure at the Edmonton Drillers in Canada,
but returned to Deventer only six months later. He
left the club once again in the summer of 1981, to join
First Division outfit Telstar, but returned to the
Eagles' Nest after only one season. After four
more seasons in the yellow and red of the Eagles, he
finished his professional career with a single season at
Heracles Almelo. In total Henk ten Cate played 188
professional league games in The Netherlands (29 goals) and 21
(5 goals) in Canada.
Ten Cate's coaching career started at (of course!) Go Ahead
Eagles: first as a youth coach (1985-1988), then as an
assistant of the eccentric Fritz Korbach with the first
team (1988-1990). When Korbach left for Heerenveen
in March 1990, Ten Cate made his début as a
(temporary) head-coach, but the club did not offer him a
permanent contract as their first team boss. At season's
end, in the summer of 1990, Ten Cate moved
to Heracles, where he started as an assistant, but soon
became head-coach (November 1990 - Summer 1992).
A happy man in Barcelona
(2003-2006). [Photo: Ajax.nl]
After one season (1992-1993) as head-coach of
Hoofdklasse amateurs Rheden (the non-league club he
also played for) he returned to... his old love Go Ahead
Eagles, accepting a job as head-coach in the summer of
1993. On 27 January 1995, after one and a half season, he
experienced what it's like to get fired for the first
time, after a conflict with the board.
In the summer of 1995 Ten Cate moved to Rotterdam-West
to coach Sparta (the first club he coached
but never played for). It was at Sparta where he first
gained prominence as a head-coach and a passionate
advocate of offensive football. He finished 6th in the
Eredivisie with Sparta (their best achievement in years)
and took them to the KNVB Cup final (1996). On 12
January 1997 he unexpectedly left the club to join
Vitesse, a club with a chairman (Karel Aalbers) as
ambitious as Ten Cate himself.
Vitesse did historically well under Ten Cate
and finished 3rd in the Eredivisie, an absolute highlight
in club history. Much to everyone's surprise Ten Cate
was fired by Aalbers in September 1998. Aalbers stated
that he wanted Vitesse to be a professional, business-like club
and that Ten Cate was "too emotional" for that. Aalbers'
words haunted Ten Cate for a long time: all of a sudden he had
the reputation of being emotional, short-tempered and straight
from the shoulder.
After a brief and unsuccesful spell at German Bundesliga
outfit KFC Bayer Uerdingen (started 30 September 1998; fired 28
March 1999) Ten Cate moved to Hungary to coach MTK Budapest. He
finished 2nd in the Hungarian league with them and won his
first major trophy as a coach: the Hungarian cup of 2000. In
spite of the success he left Budapest after only one season and
returned to Holland, where NAC Breda had convinced him of
their ambitions.
With NAC Ten Cate once again 'did his
thing' convincingly: NAC played wonderful football for
three seasons and finished 4th in the Eredivisie in
2003. Ten Cate took NAC Breda 'into Europe' for the
first time in three decades and left Breda as a hero
when Frank Rijkaard personally asked him to become his
assistant at the mighty FC Barcelona. It was the
proverbial offer Henk ten Cate couldn't refuse.
According to many Spanish football journalists Frank
Rijkaard was the 'face' of Barça, but Henk
ten Cate the 'brain'. By all accounts, Ten
Cate deserves a lot of credit for the
club's Spanish championships of 2005 and 2006 and,
ultimately, this week's Champions League triumph. Ten
Cate was universally praised for his passion for the game, but
also for his sense of humour and for the warm, fatherly way in
which he dealt with his players.
The three season spell of Rijkaard and Ten Cate at the Nou
Camp will be remembered as one of the most glorious eras the
Catalan powerhouse ever had. Both PSV and Ajax contacted Ten
Cate, who resolutely turned PSV's offer down and chose for
Ajax, the club from his home town that wants to
play the football Henk ten Cate loves, but
hardly ever did in recent years. It is Ten Cate's job to take
Ajax back to the top. He seems the perfect man for it.
De Stentor, regional newspaper for Deventer and
surroundings, published a profile of Ten Cate this week, full
of quotes from people who worked with him. One of them was
former Eagles team-mate John Oude Wesselink: "I talked to him
on the phone this afternoon. He was still hung over from the
celebrations in Barcelona, but he can't wait to start at
Ajax." (MP)
Sources: De Stentor, de Volkskrant, Ajax.nl
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