who helped the club narrowly secure the championship win on goal difference. The Laudrup years (2002–2006) In the 2002–03 pre-season, Brøndby announced that Danish icon Michael Laudrup was taking the manager seat in his old club with John Jensen, also a club legend, as his assistant. In their first season, there were massive cuts from the very large squad; ten players were put in the reserves squad or sold and a talent squad was established. The club was to rely even more home grown players as Brøndby was already famous for developing very talented players. In the process, Laudrup told several players to find new clubs as he thought they would not fit in the playing style he wanted to implement. During the Laudrup era, Brøndby won the Double in 2005. The club was relatively successful in the European competitions as Schalke 04 was beaten 2–1 in the 2003–04 UEFA Cup but was later beaten by Laudrup's former club Barcelona, 0–1. In May 2006, it was announced that Laudrup and Jensen could not agree with the board of Brøndby regarding an extension of their contracts, and the duo left the club. Years of crisis (2006–2013) The two were replaced by Dutch coach René Meulensteen, who had a rough start in charge of the first team. Together with newly appointed Anders Bjerregaard – son of director Per Bjerregaard – Meulensteen bought a number of questionable players in the final days of the summer transfer window. In the first matches, the new coach struggled with injuries among the key players and the team had problems living up to the expectations. Meulensteen resigned after six months, leaving Brøndby in seventh position halfway through the 2006–07 Superliga. The official explanation for his departure was that his family could not settle in Denmark, but soon after, the former coach revealed major infrastructural problems in the club's organization, calling the club "a very sick patient requiring immediate attention", as well as cliques inside the first team. In order to solve the clique problems, he had gone to director Per Bjerregaard to fire three key players – Marcus Lantz, Thomas Rytter and one club man Per Nielsen – in order to reestablish the balance in the first team squad, a demand Danish football experts later described as the quickest way of getting sacked. Tom Køhlert took the managerial reins once more, this time as a permanent solution