A summary of the career of Rinus Michels, the best coach of all time according to France Football.

The famous magazine, France Football, which is in charge of awarding the Ballon d'Or, published a controversial ranking of the 50 best coaches who have passed in the history of soccer.

The magazine based its ranking on three criteria: Achievements, legacy, length of career and impact.

Topping the ranking is Rinus Michels, the Dutch coach who started managing Ajax in 1965, a team that was close to relegation, and turned it into one of the best in the world, even leading it to become European Champion in 1971. He also coached FC Barcelona where he won the Laliga, the Copa del Rey and the Fairs Champions Cup match. He coached the Netherlands national team, where he was runner-up in the 1974 FIFA World Cup and champion of the 1988 European Championship.

While coach of Ajax he began to implement the invention for which he went down in history: "total soccer". Michels got the idea from Jack Reynolds, an Englishman who was his coach while he was an Ajax player.

This idea of "total soccer" meant that every player could play in any position. Thus, no defender, midfielder or striker remained in his starting position during the match. The center forward (Johan Cruyff) could drop into midfield or play as a winger. The midfielders played as defenders when the opponent had the ball, and joined the attack when their team attacked. The full-backs were constantly moving forward, playing as a winger. All this combined with a pressure after loss that suffocated the opponent.

Rinus Michels has been called the "father of modern soccer", as many tactics we see today in our soccer, such as "tiki-taka" or the "false 9", are tactics or style of play inherited from Michels' "total soccer".

His attacking soccer led him to the bench of FC Barcelona in 1971, thus beginning the legendary relationship between soccer in the Netherlands and the Cule team. Two years later, Johan Cruyff joined the team. In Spain he won a league title in 1974.

Just in 1974 he simultaneously managed the Netherlands national team. He arrived with the team qualified for the World Cup that year.

It was with the national team, nicknamed the "Clockwork Orange", that Michels went down in history. He managed 10 matches, 9 of them undefeated, losing only the final against Germany. Despite losing the final, Michels' team enchanted the world with a style of play never seen before. Thus marking a before and after in world soccer.

After the World Cup, Rinus Michels began to make short-lived moves to the bench: he returned to Ajax for one season, then returned to Barcelona in 1976 and won a Copa del Rey in 1978.

In 1984 he returned to the Dutch national team, where four years later he won the only title in the team's history: the 1988 European Championship.

In 1992 he coached the Netherlands at the European Championship, which was to be his last coaching experience.

He continued to work as a member of the UEFA Technical Committee, but Rinus Michels died at the age of 77 on March 3, 2005 in Aalst, Belgium, after suffering from heart problems. Johan Cruyff would say at the time that "both as a player and as a coach, no one taught me as much as he did. I always admired his leadership.