{"id":595745,"date":"2026-08-25T18:05:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T18:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/595745\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T18:05:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T18:05:56","slug":"netherlands-sporting-director-de-jong-we-wanted-guardiola-xavi-third-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/595745\/","title":{"rendered":"Netherlands, sporting director De Jong: &#8220;We wanted Guardiola, Xavi third choice&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nigel de Jong, the Netherlands&#8217; technical director, spoke at a press conference during the presentation of Xavi Hernandez as the new head coach of the Oranje: &#8220;Our first candidate to replace Ronald Koeman was Pep Guardiola, but he wanted to take a year out.<\/p>\n<p>Our second candidate was Arne Slot, but he preferred to stay in club football.<\/p>\n<p>So we turned to our third candidate, the man next to me, Xavi Hernandez.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nigel de Jong, the Netherlands&#8217; technical director, spoke at a press conference during the presentation of Xavi Hernandez&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,12512,105],"class_list":["post-595745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-netherlands","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}