In a café in the heart of Enschede is a familiar face from 1980s and 1990s Scottish football. The goalkeeper Theo Snelders, 58, was five times a Scottish Premier Division runner-up with Aberdeen and Scottish PFA player of the year in 1989, later joining Rangers. He was also, before he came to Pittodrie in 1986, an institution at FC Twente. He met Ten Hag when the latter was a youth player at Twente and then again when the both of them studied for their Uefa A-license.

Snelders knows British football well. He was the replacement for Jim Leighton at Aberdeen when the then Scotland goalkeeper moved south to join Ferguson at United. “He’s ready,” Snelders says of Ten Hag. “Look at his management career and how he has built his way up from an assistant to a coach.” On the Uefa course, alongside Michel Vorm and Wim Jonk, Snelders says that Ten Hag was “two steps ahead of everyone else, the best in the class”.

“You ask his players what he is like. Everywhere he has been people have started moaning when he got there. They got taken out of their comfort zone. It was the same at Utrecht, the same at Ajax, and then they start to see it works.” Snelders has a theory too about modern coaches like Ten Hag. “A lot of them were players who played in midfield and like Erik were not that quick but quick in the head. Same with Arne Slot at Feyenoord.

“Erik has got a small ego, not a fancy guy. His presence is not that big in front of the camera. But what do you want, someone who is more about the outside [perception] or the inside? We see a lot of coaches on TV but not Erik, he is always working. He doesn’t need to drive to Amsterdam to be in a studio to promote himself. He cares a lot about his players and always protects them. In the dressing room, he will be really hard on them.”

The time at De Graasfchap was instructive for Ten Hag who joined them in 1990 at the age of 20 after a first season at FC Twente. That 1990/1991 season is so famous at De Graafschap that the players have a reunion every March to remember their second tier Eerste Divisie title which they secured having not lost a single game. Frank Lukassen, 54, was the right-back in the side, with Ten Hag a central midfielder. “Erik was a very technically sound player,” Lukassen says. “He had a lot of knowledge about the game. He was also very confident even then.”

The coach of that De Graafschap team, Simon Kistemaker, who died last year aged 80, was a profound influence on his players. He simply got more out of them than anyone else had. “From the moment he woke up to the moment he slept, I’m pretty sure he thought about De Graafschap,” Lukassen says of Kistemaker, “and if he ever woke up in the middle of the night he would have had De Graafschap on his mind.” Life in the Eerste Divisie then was not glamorous. Most of the players had full-time jobs and trained in the evenings. Lukassen worked in a bank. Ten Hag had one advantage in that respect. The family business was flourishing and he could concentrate on just playing football with a bit of financial support from his father.

“We were crazy about football, and the money took second place,” Lukassen says. “Nowadays it’s a bit different. Then the most important thing for the players was the football and the memories we have of that time money cannot buy.” Although for all the success of 1990/1991, and just two defeats all season after the title was secured, Ten Hag’s first taste of the Eredivisie was sobering. De Graafschap finished 17th out of 18 and were relegated.

By the time McClaren met Ten Hag in the summer of 2008, the young midfielder with flaxen blond hair was a shaven headed former footballer making his way in coaching. He had retired in 2002 and worked at FC Twente as an assistant under the coach Fred Rutten who had led the club to a fourth-place finish in 2007/2008 before taking the manager’s job at Schalke. McClaren recalls the day he agreed to take over at FC Twente, as he sought to rebuild his career post-England. “The chairman said, ‘We’d like you to speak to the press’,” he recalls, “‘but before you do, come and have a chat with your assistant’.”