Dick Advocaat

Dirk Nicolaas "Dick" Advocaat (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈdɪk ˌɑtfoːˈkaːt]; born 27 September 1947) is a Dutch football manager and former player. He is currently without a club, having resigned as head coach of Premier League club Sunderland on 4 October 2015.

He was successful as a football player and as a coach, including two stints with the Dutch national football team. He has coached a number of clubs in the Netherlands and abroad (including the Russian club Zenit Saint Petersburg, with whom he won the 2008 UEFA Cup Final), as well as the national teams of a number of countries, including South Korea, Belgium, and Russia. His nickname is "The Little General", a reference to his mentor Rinus Michels' sobriquet "The General."

Club career

Advocaat was born in The Hague and was a defensive midfielder during his playing days. His career began as an 18-year-old with Hague club ADO Den Haag, and he made his debut with the club as 21-year-old in 1967. His professional debut was 21 May 1967 in a 3–0 win against GVAV. He only featured for Den Haag once more that season, and that summer, the San Francisco Golden Gate Gales franchise imported the Den Haag team, which included Advocaat, to play for six weeks in the United Soccer Association as part of an effort to make the sport more popular in the country. It was the following season that Advocaat won his only honour as a player, the Dutch Cup in 1968. In the 1969–70 he became a regular in the team, making 29 appearances that season and scoring his first goal for the club; he made 33 appearances the season after that. From the 1971–72, the club merged with Holland Sport and became FC Den Haag. In that season and his final season, Advocaat made a further 66 appearances and scored six goals. In total he made 147 appearances and scored seven goals for the club.