“He proved that you don’t have to stand out to be very good,” says Rinus Israël. And Jan Boskamp, his other former teammate: “How he talks about football, explains it and experiences it… There are very few who can do that.”
That Wim Jansen has meant a lot to Feyenoord and Dutch football becomes clear in the boardroom of De Kuip, where the former midfielder presents his biography on the eve of his 75th birthday: Wim Jansen, Mastermind.
The club of icons that is present has nothing but loving words left for Jansen, who played 422 matches for Feyenoord and won the European Cup 1 with the club in 1970. In those years, with Franz Hasil and Willem van Hanegem, he formed an unparalleled midfield.
Boskamp has known Jansen since he was ‘about 14’: “If I don’t know something, I still call Wim. For example, I was at Stoke City and I went crazy because I didn’t understand something. call one. Four days later he’s in Stoke and he tells me how to fix it. That’s Wimpie. He just doesn’t want to hang it on the church bell.”
