Peter Bosz’s PSV Eindhoven are perfect. Eight Eredivisie games, eight wins. Twenty-seven goals scored, just two conceded. It has been as successful a return to Dutch football as Bosz could have hoped for.
On Sunday it got better. PSV overwhelmed Sparta Rotterdam. After a goalless first half, they diced their hosts in the second, playing with pace and style. Bosz and PSV head into the international break not only with a two-point lead in the table, but having played some of the best football in Europe.
Will it last? As ever with Bosz, that is a difficult question to answer.
His coaching origin story is compellingly Dutch. He was a good enough defensive midfielder to represent the Netherlands and has told stories about how, after national team training with Rinus Michels, he would scurry back to his hotel room to take notes on the sessions. He also idolised Johan Cruyff — not just for his football, but his iron-clad convictions and single-mindedness, too.
One half, four goals 😍😍#SPAPSV pic.twitter.com/3SoEjdHMYI
— PSV (@PSV) October 8, 2023
Cruyff’s surrogate, Pep Guardiola, provides more contemporary inspiration. Bosz used to gather his coaching staff around his Barcelona games. Unsurprisingly, he also counts Pep Confidential, Marti Perarnau’s fly-on-the-wall account of his time at Bayern Munich, among his favourite books.
That list of influences is potent and seductive. Dangerous, even. It hardly needs saying that the 59-year-old Bosz believes in attacking football, a swarming press, and a 4-3-3 formation. Nor that he is unbendingly faithful to his own vision.
There are many quotes describing what that vision is. He believes the ball should go forward. He thinks that the game should stir the soul. He once said, self-deprecatingly, that Peter Bosz the footballer was not good enough to play the football that Peter Bosz the coach wants to see. But perhaps the one which best captures his romanticism and his flaws was given after the 2017 Europa League final. Bosz’s young Ajax won hearts and minds that season, but little else. They fell short in the league and were ground to dust by Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United in that Stockholm final.
“High pressing was difficult because Manchester United only played long balls, didn’t take any risks and played only on second balls,” Bosz said at full-time. “I think it was a boring game.”
Bosz is no pragmatist.
“Playing wide, playing backward, only playing long passes, that doesn’t belong to the football that I love,” he told Deutsche Welle in 2019. “I want to cheer when I watch football. It should be fun to watch. That also is why I try to let my team play in a way that the fans like.”
Peter Bosz is an idealist when it comes to football (John Thys/AFP via Getty Images)
He is someone who Mourinho might disparagingly refer to as a “poet”. An idealist. And accusations of naivety have chequered his past.
First at Borussia Dortmund, immediately after that 2017 final, where he lasted just six months. He was accused of being too loyal to the 4-3-3 and from being unable to prevent Dortmund from being vulnerable on the counter-attack. He coached the infamous game against Schalke in which Dortmund raced into a 4-0 lead, but surrendered it in the second half to draw 4-4. For a while, that became his identity.
He partially restored that reputation at Bayer Leverkusen between 2018 and 2021, where he was successful for much of his two-and-a-bit years, but was still unable to arrest a sharp decline in early 2021 and, again, was given the sack. Most recently, he spent 18 months at Lyon. He finished eighth in his only full season and was dismissed with the team in ninth in October 2022.
Exactly a year later, he is showing that PSV were the right team for him to inherit.
His predecessor, Ruud van Nistelrooy, won the KNVB Cup in his only season and finished second in the Eredivisie, top-scoring in the division. Van Nistelrooy’s abruptly resigned in May 2023 citing a lack of internal support, but he left behind an attacking, pressing side who were familiar with a 4-3-3. Rather than having to transform PSV, Bosz has ratcheted up their intensity.
Passes per defensive action (PPDA) measures the number of passes a team allows outside of their own third of the pitch. The lower the number, the fiercer the press. Under van Nistelrooy in 2022-23, PSV were allowing 11.7 PPDA, the fourth lowest in the league. So far this season, under Bosz, PSV are now allowing just 8.3, comfortably the lowest in the division. Prior to this weekend, they had created the most shooting opportunities (14) from turnovers within 40 metres of their opponents’ goal.
Van Nistelrooy’s team were proactive. Bosz’s PSV are relentless.
His work has had obstacles. PSV sold Cody Gakpo to Liverpool before he arrived, while Xavi Simons and Ibrahim Sangare departed over the summer. All three were starters. Dauntingly, Simons and Gakpo had also contributed 28 goals and 20 assists.
However, four of the Eredivisie’s top seven chance creators this season are PSV players. One is veteran forward Luuk de Jong, another is new signing Noa Lang, and the two others — Johan Bakayoko and Ismael Saibari — have had their squad status upgraded in response to those sales. Among that group, only De Jong is older than 24.
Veteran Luuk de Jong has been creating chances for PSV (Olaf Kraak/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)
Young players have often succeeded under Bosz. At Ajax, at Leverkusen, at Lyon too. It is happening again. Lang (24) and Bakayoko (20) are gifted wide forwards who both carry and create. Both are playing outstandingly. Lang was forced off early through injury against Sparta Rotterdam, but Bakayoko gave a dominant performance, scoring one of the goals of the weekend. Saibari (22) was only a substitute, but resembles a young Nabil Fekir and is a big playmaking talent and a hounding presser.
Beneath those headliners, Malik Tillman, currently on loan from Bayern Munich, has made just a few appearances, but is already playing with the freedom that has often characterised Bosz’s young teams. On Sunday, he scored the first goal, finishing off a one- and two-touch move that swept up the pitch and was typical of the team he is now part of.
Sergino Dest has been revived too. Bosz gets value from his full-backs and Dest, still 22, played inverted from the left, stepping off the touchline to drive and create. Bosz believes Dest can play as a midfielder. Whether he is able to turn him into Philipp Lahm is another issue, but the intention characterises the local optimism.
Why not? The football is fabulous. De Jong is the attack’s centrepoint, but he is surrounded by so much out-to-in movement around him and support from the midfielders or full-backs behind that, really, defences are having to face what is often a front-five. They are facing it at speed too, because PSV are moving the ball vertically and accurately. There is a balletic rhythm to them, but with the effect that they are scoring over three goals per game.
This, most definitely, is football that Peter Bosz wants to watch.
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