The tributes to the Dutchman Rinus Michels, who died last week at the age of 77, were worldwide and heartfelt. Soccer has lost a great man, a coach who had a global influence on the sport and who is now hailed as the inventor of the style of play known as Total Football.

In 1999, FIFA rolled out a unique award for Michels: He was named Coach of the 20th Century. Some may argue whether Michels deserved such a sweeping award – Austria’s Hugo Meisl, England’s Herbert Chapman, Italy’s Vittorio Pozzo, Germany’s Sepp Herberger, and Argentina’s Helenio Herrera all deserved consideration – but the honor was really all about Michels’s wonderful Dutch national team of the 1970s that put Total Football into electrifying practice.

That short list of deserving coaches is a sharp reminder that, in the 150-year history of soccer, there have been amazingly few coaches who have left a permanent stamp on the sport. Indeed, it’s not even clear that Michels did that.

His invention of Total Football is questionable. The ideas on which it was built – the constant movement of all-around players who could defend and attack with equal facility and skill – had been set down on paper nearly 20 years before the Dutch enchanted everyone at the 1974 World Cup.

Willy Meisl, in his book “Soccer Revolution,” foresaw the style of the future as what he called “The Whirl – it must rotate on individuality rooted in all-round capacity.” Meisl thought that the idea had already been tried, but that it hadn’t worked so far because there had not yet been “a sufficient layer of first class players [that] the whirl will need.”

Michels got lucky, if you like, because he was around at the crucial moment when a brilliant generation of Dutch players came to maturity. Michels knew what to do with them: He was a disciplinarian, nicknamed in Holland The General. You had only to hear his sharp, staccato voice raised a notch or two to realize that this was a man who was going to be obeyed.

So he gave his orders, but at the same time he understood that his players were special, they were the individuals that Meisl spoke of. And they had to be allowed a huge degree of freedom. In particular, there was one player whom Michels rarely reined in – Johan Cruyff, the mercurial genius whose inspired play brought the theory of Total Football to life.

The Cruyff-Michels partnership was like no other in soccer: two strong-willed characters who worked in perfect harmony. Michels, I think, had the more difficult role to play, since he had to suppress his liking for strict discipline to allow Cruyff the freedom of the field.

Michels enjoyed his first coaching successes with Ajax in the early 1970s. Cruyff was on the team, as were many of the players later to star for Holland, including Piet Keizer, Ruud Krol, Arie Haan, Johan Neeskens, and Gerrie Muhren. Ajax won the European Cup in 1971, and Michels moved to Barcelona later that year. Cruyff and Neeskens joined him in 1973, and Barcelona – who had been suffering under 14 years of Real Madrid domination – won the 1974 Spanish championship.

Michels was then called in by the Dutch to do something about their national team, which had qualified for the 1974 World Cup, but had not looked too convincing in doing so. It was that team, transformed by Michels, that took the soccer world by storm and popularized the style of Total Football. Dubbed the Clockwork Orange for the color of their shirts, the Dutch provided non-stop excitement as they pressured all over the field, got the ball back as soon as they lost it, then quickly played it forward with skill and intelligence.

Was it the quicksilver Cruyff who made it all work? Or was it the slower, more cerebral Wim van Hanegem? Or was it the extraordinary stamina and anticipation of Johan Neeskens?

It was all of them no doubt, but above all, surely, it was the stoic figure on the sidelines, where his calmness and placid facial expression earned Michels another appropriate nickname, The Sphinx.

The joyful memories of those free-flowing Dutch games are so enchanting that they almost obscure a sad truth: The Dutch did not win anything – they were beaten in the final by Franz Beckenbauer’s West Germany.

But Michels’s 1974 team marked the arrival of the Dutch among the world’s soccer elite. The Dutch game – skillful, intelligent, attack-minded – that is so widely admired today was born under Michels. Success came, eventually, in 1988 when Michels led a new generation of lively Dutchmen – it included Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, and Frank Rijkaard – to the European Nations title.

I don’t really believe that Michels invented Total Football, and I never heard him claim that he did. More accurately, he invented Dutch soccer, and the soccer world can be thankful for that. But he did something else with his 1974 team, helping to redirect a sport that was going sadly astray, getting itself lost in a morass of defensive tactics and unattractive “professional” touches like time-wasting and tactical fouling.

The Dutch put a smile back onto the face of the game, a broad attacking smile that I like to think grew from the slight grin that seemed to be Michels’ permanent expression. Because Michels, for all his strictness and his serious thought about the game, was not a humorless man. He was well-known for witty one-liners.

In 1978, he arrived in the USA to coach the Los Angeles Aztecs, where he was in charge of a group of players a notch or two below the level he was used to. Expecting the Aztecs to be suddenly transformed into Holland-74, I was irritated to see their goalkeeper repeatedly booming the ball downfield, as high and as long as he could.

“Is that good soccer?” I asked Michels. The grin widened a centimeter or two: “No. But you have to trust your fullbacks not to give up the ball when the goalkeeper gives it to them. Sometimes, when he does that …” and there was another centimeter expansion of the grin, “… I am closing my eyes.”

Which must have been the only occasions when this hawkeyed master-mind of soccer, who may or may not have invented Total Football, failed to notice what was going on during a game.