Peter Schmeichel urges David De Gea to make a decision on his Manchester United future
There are few men more qualified than Peter Schmeichel to weigh into the debate surrounding Manchester United goalkeeper David De Gea, and the legendary Dane has encouraged the current Red Devils No. 1 to make a swift decision regarding his … Continue reading →

There are few men more qualified than Peter Schmeichel to weigh into the debate surrounding Manchester United goalkeeper David De Gea, and the legendary Dane has encouraged the current Red Devils No. 1 to make a swift decision regarding his long-term future.

Schmeichel was speaking with World Soccer Talk after filming a new advert for Carlsberg in south London earlier this summer, opening up on his former club, Manuel Neuer, his son Kasper, Barcelona’s goalkeeper rotation policy and the best save he made in his storied career.

But with rumors continuing to swirl surrounding United’s Player of the Year, it’s Schmeichel’s thoughts on De Gea which will intrigue those of a red persuasion.

“I tell you what I’d urge him to do,” said the former United man when quizzed on whether he’d encourage De Gea to say at Old Trafford. “I urge him to make a decision because either he goes or he stays. If he stays, we’re happy, if he goes we have to move on. We cannot get dragged into the next month and the next month, we’ve got to deal with this situation now.

“He has arguably been the best player and the best performer in the last two years, so he’s an important part of Manchester United but if he wants to go back to Madrid, which I can understand and I wouldn’t blame him for doing that, then go back and let Manchester United move on.

“Throughout the course of history, Manchester United’s history, big, big players have left Manchester United at times when you think ‘well, why? They still have a lot to offer, why are they not still here?’ They could be leaving of their own accord, they could be leaving of the manager’s decision but my point is that the club always moves forward, it always moves on, there’s always someone else you can bring in to take that position. And this is the one thing I have to say about this situation; it’s dragging on and I don’t like that.”

Real Madrid reportedly remain very interested in the Spanish goalkeeper, with latest reports from Marca suggesting the club are hoping to get a deal done “within days.” Los Blancos apparently see the former Atletico Madrid man as the longstanding successor to the departed Iker Casillas.

But if he does leave United it’s important the Premier League giants get a quality replacement in themselves. It’s something the club failed to address after Schmeichel’s own departure in earnest until Sir Alex Ferguson drafted in Edwin van der Sar.

“Yeah, I didn’t give them enough time,” said the Dane on United finding a man to fill the void left by him. “That’s probably why, 12 months isn’t enough.”

As for filling the sticks at Old Trafford? It takes a unique talent, says Schmeichel:

“Manchester United is a very aggressive football club, attack-minded football club, it’s chasing wins and it’s chasing goals. When you do that you commit people forward, when you commit people forward, you need strong defenders and a strong goalkeeper who can understand what’s going to happen next in terms of what the team is doing and certain goalkeepers that were signed after I left the club didn’t have that.”

Indeed, De Gea has blossomed into a world-class talent at Old Trafford and a player who is rightly rated as one of the very best goalkeepers in the game. Perhaps, second in those stakes only to Germany international Manuel Neuer. Needless to say, the Dane was effusive in praise when we asked about the Bayern Munich star.

“He plays the way I liked to play, but has made it work exceptionally well for the modern game,” said Schmeichel. “I have always thought it was important that goalkeepers were active for all 90 minutes, supporting the team, giving confidence to defenders that whatever is going on, the goalkeeper is there ready to help out. Neuer is the best in the world and I enjoy watching him play.”

Schmeichel continued discussing the changing role of the goalkeeper, which Neuer is the prime exponent of:  “I guess with the way the game has changed recently, the goalkeeper is now very clearly the first attacker, he makes the play, he decides where the ball starts its trail, and then he is still the last defender. It is not just about being a good shot stopper anymore, it’s a highly skilled position and you can see that today more than ever.“

Another challenge that faces a lot of modern goalkeepers is rotation. At Real Madrid in recent seasons the club have altered their man between the sticks for league and European matches, while last term Barcelona swapped between Claudio Bravo and Marc-Andre ter Stegen to great effect on their way to a trio of titles.

But despite the success of the Blaugrana, the legendary goalkeeper doesn’t think that’s necessarily the best method.

“You’re the No.1, therefore you play every time,” he said on rotating goalkeepers. “I trust you, you’re physically strong enough. I played 60-65 games a season, that’s not a problem, you can do that, it’s absolutely not a problem, so I disagree with resting the goalkeeper and changing and all that and I disagree with keeping people happy.”

“You shouldn’t keep people happy, you should keep them motivated, if not angry, you should keep them eager. If they want to play, then prove you’re a better player. I don’t like this, I don’t like the whole idea. I actually believe your back five—your goalkeepers and four defenders—or back four, if you’ve got three defenders, that’s your bank box. These guys, if you don’t have them performing at the highest level every time, you can’t do much going forward. “

One young stopper hopeful of eventually entering the same kind of bracket of De Gea and Neuer is Kasper Schmeichel. The Leicester City man was a key influence in the Foxes’ late run for survival last season and his father is looking forward to seeing how 28-year-old fares in the Premier League in 2015-16.

“I am obviously biased, but I am excited to see him and the Leicester team kick on following their great end to last season… He’s doing great and I’m really proud of him and how he’s progressing. He is working harder than most players I’ve ever seen and he is getting his rewards for that.”

As for the best save he ever made? A memorable one from United’s treble-winning season: “From Zamorano in UEFA Champions League quarter final 1999, we were under pressure and had been for a long time and he had a point blank header that I managed to save. Had he scored they would have taken an away goal to the 2nd leg and that would have made it very difficult for us.”

Carlsberg has launched a new global TV commercial called ‘If Carlsberg did Kickabouts’ to coincide with the kick-off of the Barclays Premier League 2015-16 season, staring Schmeichel and UK football presenter, Jeff Stelling. 

The TV commercial sees Carlsberg transform a typical football kickabout in the park into probably the best kickabout in the world.

Follow Matt on Twitter @MattJFootball

Here’s the complete transcript of the interview with Schmeichel:

What’s going on with the advert?

“Well, we’re doing probably the best commercial ever. For Carlsberg I’m a global ambassador and I do work with the Premier League, the sponsorship, but primarily it’s for the Euros, which is coming up in France and this is one of the activities that we’re doing. We’re doing this commercial, ‘if Carlsberg did kickabouts it’d probably be the best kickabout in the world.’That’s why we’re here. The whole idea, what’s really important for Carlsberg, is to connect with the fans and this is a way of doing that. I probably can’t say anything about that but activation around the Euros is going to be very much focused on fans and involving fans in Carlsberg sponsorship so giving fans opportunities. We did that in 2012 as well, we really tried to connect with fans via all the social media and involve them and reward them as well within the means of the sponsorship deal.”

The fixtures are coming up, what was it like as a player in pre-season?

“Well you only have to look at the logistics, for a lot of the players the season isn’t finished yet, they’ve still got internationals. So the players playing internationals will just go on holiday and I was one of them. I completely switched off and forgot about any kind of football and if I was to know about the fixtures it’d be pure coincidence, reading a newspaper, someone saying something in a phone call. It’d be, when I got home, ‘oh by the way, the fixtures are out’so lets see; ‘when do we play Liverpool away? When do we play them at home’and that’s about it. Who do we start with and who do we finish with?”

What was the excitement like, with the season approaching? Do you feel extra excitement in pre-season?

“Well I’m probably going to kill a lot of illusions but the focus is very narrow on games. So you understand that when you’re in pre-season, you play pre-season games to get fit, you play to get in a shape that’ll make you start the season. And then you don’t play them any more, the next game is actually a Premier League game, it could be another game, and then that becomes the focus. You don’t look ahead and think ‘in two weeks we play this game’, you just do your job.

“It sounds a bit boring but that’s the only way. Once you get going with the season, if you’re an international, you play the Champions League as well, you play all the time. You cannot look ahead, it’s just impossible. If you start looking ahead it blows your mind and you get overwhelmed. Your ability to go out and get results in an individual game diminishes, you learn very quickly to look at the next game or the game you have now and when that’s played, then you look at the next game and when that is played, it doesn’t matter what game it is, it could be a team being relegated near the end of the season, and then the next game you play could be a Champions League semi-final.

“You have to prepare in exactly the same manner, and that goes for pre-season games as well. And it also goes for what comes after. I think fans more than players are looking ahead to the start of the season, very excited about it when there’s two weeks to go. For players you’re doing a job and that’s how you treat it –as a job, and try to stay professional. You have to treat every day as an important day, a day you can get something out of.”

Is that the mentality of the United team you were in? The winning mentality?

“No, we were very good players with a very good manager playing for a very, very good football club that carries a reputation. The first of the championship teams was built over six years, seven years, and once he got it right he could develop the next couple of teams as well but we were good players. There’s no secret behind that, we were good players, every single player we had was a good player and every single position was covered by a good player or even some of the positions were covered by two good players.

“If you don’t have that you win nothing and once you start winning it breeds the winning mentality. It’s very difficult, Fergie came in 1986 and didn’t really win anything for three-and-a-half years, even though he has a winning mentality. It’s very difficult to put that onto your players when you haven’t won anything. It’s when you win that you can start to say ‘well, we did that, it’s now that we can go and win that’and it was like that with Fergie. He never, ever let you just sit there on your laurels, he was always ‘okay, we’ve won that, now we’ve got to go and do this’. It was always the next thing, and players who respond to that are good players.”

Do Man Utd need to do that now, do they need to win something before you can say they have that winning mentality?

“This team has won the championship with very few adjustments. Most of the players there won the title two years ago.”

But Van Gaal is restructuring, he’s bringing in new players…

“There are a lot of challenges, I like what he’s done for this one year. What needed to be done was stop the rot, first of all, then get us into the top four, make sure we get a chance of Champions League football, that was very, very important. Then bring better players in, that’s still to be done, but now he has, the second year, we can begin to expect things from him in terms of how the club is developing. I think, when you play for Manchester United, if you’re a manager for Manchester United, if you work for Manchester United, you have to understand what the history of the football club is and you have to understand what the traditions are, and you also have to understand how special the football club is and what the fans and supporters want for the club, and why so many people support the club.

“I don’t think that was necessary to understand this season, because it was a different job. It was just, basically, stop the team from going towards the middle of the table, turn it around and get it into the top four, that was the objective and that was achieved. Now we have to look at the style of play, players signed and winning. We’ve got to win games now. At one point we actually looked good for a Chelsea challenge and then we lost three on the bounce, and when we look at it now it was probably to be expected but at that moment we all got caught up in it, saying ‘hey we might have a chance here, if we finish second it’s still a fantastic result’. But we accept fourth because it was the objective to begin with. Now we have to expect more because this is a guy who goes out there and says he’s the best in the world. He’s manager of what I consider to be the best football club in the world, the most important football club in the world, now he has to go and prove it.”

They’re back in the Champions League. Do you think United have missed the Champions League, or the Champions League has missed United?

“I think both. But in a very bizarre way I was quite happy that we were not in the Champions League this season because the most important thing was –obviously we couldn’t have been finishing seventh –but the most important thing was to change, to get back to the road that we’ve always been on and I’m one of the guys, I’m not blaming David Moyes for anything. I think he gave it a fair crack, I think he was up against it right from the moment he walked through the doors of Old Trafford, I don’t think he really had a genuine, proper opportunity to show how good a manager he is at Manchester United. Unfortunately that’s just the way football is, he’s not the first guy to get the sack and he won’t be the last guy to get the sack but we don’t like to sack our managers so we’re all hoping that Van Gaal is a guy who can be there for quite a number of years. And with that, you have to expect trophies. It’s very, very simple.”

It looks like Van Gaal is building something. A key part of that should, probably, be David De Gea. There’s a lot of speculation around him, would you urge him to stay?

“I tell you what I’d urge him to do, I urge him to make a decision because either he goes or he stays. If he stays, we’re happy, if he goes we have to move on. We cannot get dragged into the next month and the next month, we’ve got to deal with this situation now. He has arguably been the best player and the best performer in the last two years, so he’s an important part of Manchester United but if he wants to go back to Madrid, which I can understand and I wouldn’t blame him for doing that, then go back and let Manchester United move on. Throughout the course of history, Manchester United’s history, big, big players have left Manchester United at times when you think ‘well, why? They still have a lot to offer, why are they not still here?’They could be leaving of their own accord, they could be leaving of the manager’s decision but my point is that the club always moves forward, it always moves on, there’s always someone else you can bring in to take that position. And this is the one thing I have to say about this situation; it’s dragging on and I don’t like that.”

When you left United, they went through a succession of goalkeepers…How do they go about…

“Yeah, I didn’t give them enough time. That’s probably why, 12 months isn’t enough. No different time, you cannot compare then to now, you can’t, because it’s a much more common thing now for goalkeepers to move across borders and it wasn’t at the time. It was still very unusual if someone moved from one country to another so you cannot compare that. Now it’s everywhere, we’ve got players from countries, goalkeepers, that you wouldn’t even consider bringing players in from, in the Premier League now. You wouldn’t consider that five years ago. So the change in the style of play and the evolution of the way the Premier League is developing and all that, it’s a changed mentality as well, so you can basically scout the whole world now and bring anyone in from anywhere. When I left Manchester United you wouldn’t do that, and I think once you don’t sign the right guy to begin with, you panic.

“The goalkeeping job at Manchester United has always been important, it always been important because of the style of play. Manchester United is a very aggressive football club, attack-minded football club, it’s chasing wins and it’s chasing goals. When you do that you commit people forward, when you commit people forward, you need strong defenders and a strong goalkeeper who can understand what’s going to happen next in terms of what the team is doing and certain goalkeepers that were signed after I left the club didn’t have that.

“They didn’t have that confidence, didn’t inspire that confidence onto their team-mates and their immediate defenders. That was a big problem, it was a big problem. Fortunately it was sorted out when Edwin (van der Sar) came in, and the standard of goalkeeping was back to where it should be.”

Has Valdes got that?

“I have absolutely no idea. Victor Valdes was very unfortunate in getting that injury, the word out of Spain was that he was pushing for the No.1 place at the time and the word out of Spain was that he could have played the World Cup, maybe even should have played the World Cup ahead of Casillas, had he not got the injury. That’s how highly they rate him in Spain. He’s played for one of the biggest clubs in the world, probably the biggest club in the world in this moment in time. Of course you are a very, very good goalkeeper, and not because Manchester United and Barcelona are playing the same type of football, but it’s the same principle: you commit people forward, you don’t hold three or four extra players back, so the goalkeeper’s jobs are very, very similar.

“But the problem that Victor Valdes has, and the reason I cannot say if he’s the right guy, is that he’s been injured. He’s had a cruciate ligament injury which, in some cases, changes a player, in the worst cases it ruins a career. I’d say it’d be very, very risky to think that he’s the replacement. If I was the manager I would still bring someone in to guarantee that I had at least one good goalkeeper and then I’d sort the problem with who is the better goalkeeper as an extension. As a manager you can’t look at it on a personal level, you have to look at it overall as a team, and for the benefit of the club. So that would be my solution. You see with Barcelona winning the Champions League, and, well, everything, you see that Ter Stegen has not even featured once in the league, so that’s Luis Enrique’s way of solving that problem. He’s got more than one good goalkeeper. Personally I disagree with that way of doing it but that is an option.”

Is there a reason you disagree with that way of doing it? Did you just like to play back-to-back games? 

“I think, for goalkeepers, goalkeepers are the first attackers, if you like. Pep Guardiola says that everyone is a defender and everyone is an attacker and that’s very true in the way that goalkeepers play these days. They’re very much involved in build-up and all that but the fact of the matter is, the core work for goalkeepers is still goalkeeping and I think it very much relies on confidence. Even if you’re told you’re rested, it plays on your confidence. You’re the No.1, therefore you play every time. I trust you, you’re physically strong enough. I played 60-65 games a season, that’s not a problem, you can do that, it’s absolutely not a problem, so I disagree with resting the goalkeeper and changing and all that and I disagree with keeping people happy. You shouldn’t keep people happy, you should keep them motivated, if not angry, you should keep them eager. If they want to play, then prove you’re a better player. I don’t like this, I don’t like the whole idea. I actually believe your back five –your goalkeepers and four defenders –or back four, if you’ve got three defenders, that’s your bank box. These guys, if you don’t have them performing at the highest level every time, you can’t do much going forward. You can play around with the guys going forward but those guys, and you see with Chelsea –near enough the same back five in every game this season –it’s no coincidence that they conceded the least goals, and it’s no coincidence, really, for me that they won the championship.”

What does England need to do in order to have a successful Euro 2016? Is there anything they need to drastically improve upon?

“First and foremost it’s important to realise that there is competition from many other countries. England, the whole country needs get behind the team in good and bad times and the media has to stop building big expectations. England has a good team, but so has other nations, therefore the team must perform to its maximum in every match to have chance at winning”

What was the best save you have ever made in your career? 

“From Zamorano in UEFA Champions League quarter final 1999, we were under pressure and had been for a long time and he had a point blank header that I managed to save. Had he scored they would have taken an away goal to the 2nd leg and that would have made it very difficult for us.”

What was the best goal scored against you?

“Robbie Fowler, I thought he would cross the ball from the left hand side, but he had a shot instead. The angle was tight and I realised straight away what his intentions was, but I had no chance getting back to it.”

How can grass roots football be improved in England? 

“It’s a number of things –there’s no easy answer and it takes time. From what I can see in the UK, the quality and access to facilities needs to continue to improve as does the standard of coaching. And we mustn’t forget to make coaching football enjoyable. Let kids fall in love with the game –like a kickabout!”

Is there a particular goalkeeper you are excited to see in the upcoming BPL season and why?

“Kasper! I am obviously biased, but I am excited to see him and the Leicester team kick on following their great end to last season. I’m also curious to see how Peter Cech gets on at Arsenal –I rate him highly and, for me, that’s a good piece of business. And now it looks like De Gea is staying, so it’s going to be very interesting to see if he can continue to be top world class after all that’s gone on this summer.”

What are your thoughts on “sweeper keeper” Manuel Neuer? 

“He plays the way I liked to play, but has made it work exceptionally well for the modern game. I have always thought it was important that goalkeepers were active for all 90 minutes, supporting the team, giving confidence to defenders that whatever is going on, the GK is there ready to help out. Never is the best in the world and I enjoy watching him play.”

In what ways has the role of goalkeeper changed from when you were between the posts? 

“The role is constantly evolving, as you’d expect. I guess with the way the game has changed recently, the goalkeeper is now very clearly the first attacker, he makes the play, he decide where the ball starts its trail, and then he is still the last defender. It is not just about being a good shot stopper anymore, it’s a highly skilled position and you can see that today more than ever.“

How do you think you’d be able to adapt to being a modern goalkeeper where ball control skills are much more required than in the past? 

“The rules were changing when I was still playing, so in my time we went from being allowed to pick up back passes to not being allowed. For me it wasn’t a problem, I enjoyed the change and think it is the best rule change ever made.”

How impressed have you been with Kasper’s development at Leicester? 

“He’s doing great and I’m really proud of him and how he’s progressing. He is working harder than most players I’ve ever seen and he is getting his rewards for that.”

What are your views on concussion? Are players being over protected? 

“Concussion is a big talking point at the moment and not just in football, sports like NFL and rugby are having to deal with this issue too. Player welfare has never been better and I’m sure the games authorities are looking into this issue and taking the appropriate steps to ensure everyone is safe.”