The years of top football at PSV, Feyenoord and the Danish national team have driven away Ivan Nielsen, PSV's star player in 1988. The former defender now runs a thriving plumbing business in Copenhagen with his son. For Nielsen, football is a memory. No more than that. Winning the European Cup I? "Nice, but important? No, not really."
The towering Nielsen seems destined to become a top handball player, but the straitjacket of tactical concepts and assignments in that sport gives him little satisfaction. As a football player, he stands out as an austere defender at Fremad Amager, the club from which Ajax also recruited Frank Arnesen and Søren Lerby. A training period at the invitation of Leo Beenhakker in Amsterdam led to nothing. Nielsen felt he could earn too little in Amsterdam and returned to Denmark. Three years later came Feyenoord, with whom Nielsen did come to an agreement.
Building something beautiful
In 1984, Nielsen became national champion and also won the KNVB Cup at Rotterdam-Zuid later that year. He becomes a regular choice in the Danish national team, which conquered the world in the 1980s with surprising and daring football. In 1986, in the wake of Ruud Gullit, he makes the switch from Feyenoord to PSV. "That switch fit exactly into my career. I wouldn't have done it differently now. At that time, PSV was already a very professionally organized club with an extremely capable manager Kees Ploegsma. What a great guy he was! You could see that something beautiful was being built in Eindhoven. I wanted to be part of that."
At PSV, Nielsen formed a defense with Erik Gerets, Ronald Koeman and compatriot Jan Heintze. "That trio could attack to their hearts' content, I stayed at the back to stop the opposing team's attackers." It was the defense with which PSV won everything there was to win in the golden year of 1988: the national title, the KNVB Cup and, of course, the European Cup I. Nielsen reacts almost in amazement when we mention that this year is exactly 30 years ago. "Hahaha, thirty years ago already. You're right about that, time goes fast. It is, of course, one of the greatest successes I have achieved. At the time it was important to me, but now that feeling is a lot less. It was fun at the time, but it honestly doesn't mean that much to me anymore. I still muse about it from time to time."
Good club
"PSV was a fine, good club for me. I had a nice time there. We had a nice defense, but the whole team was very good for that time. Everything was just right." Nielsen especially mentions the now deceased assistant coach Hans Dorjee: "With him I had a very special relationship."
While the 1987-88 season was the most successful of Ivan Nielsen's career, disaster struck the following year. In the first league game of the new season - away from his old club Feyenoord - Nielsen suffered a muscle tear in his upper leg, which sidelined him for a whole year. Not until August 1989 did Nielsen fully recover from the injury, but he began the season against Willem II in the stands. But when he is passed over in January 1990, the bomb bursts. He is affected by the way Hiddink has treated him. The relationship with Guus Hiddink becomes irreparably damaged, about his former coach he now prefers not to say anything. "He once did stupid things and he knows that himself. I said it to himself. It doesn't make much sense to bring all that up again now. But it did indeed mean that I wanted to leave PSV in early 1990." In previous interviews, Nielsen said, "you may get calluses on your soul as a professional footballer, but when you are touched to the depths of your soul, the limit of the permissible has been reached. Things would never work out between Nielsen and Hiddink.
Back in Denmark, Nielsen played another year with FC Copenhagen, but Nielsen was done with football. "I still considered becoming a trainer. Or manager. But becoming a trainer was not for me. And the professionalism of Danish football was not yet like it is now. Maybe I could have been a manager in a very professional organization. After all, I was used to PSV." In 1993, he put a stop to his career.
'I'm done with it '
Nielsen has been far from inside football in his career. For more than 20 years, Ivan Nielsen now runs a thriving plumbing business with his son Thomas. "We also employ four staff members. I love being outdoors on the scaffolding every day. We have a lot of work, mainly in Copenhagen. We do a lot of new construction projects, but also renovations."
Ivan Nielsen follows PSV from time to time. Occasionally, he visits a game at Philips Stadium in former colleague Jan Heintze's Business Room. "Hardly anyone notices because Jan has a room in the north-west corner. I can almost slip in there unseen. Sometimes I see PSV in Denmark passing by on television. But football certainly doesn't dominate my life like it used to."
As he did then, Ivan Nielsen is a down-to-earth factor as an ex-top football player. "I have almost completely banned football from my life. I'm done with it. Maybe that's why the successes of yesteryear don't do much for me at the moment either. I've had enough of it. I enjoy what I have now and I'm satisfied with that."
