This despite the fact that beneath the antipathy Van Gaal was stoking the Barça academy production line and honing that possession-based style.
It has been the easiest game in Portuguese football over the past couple of decades and they almost always tend to have rolled off the Sporting Clube de Portugal academy production line – Luís Figo, Simão, Ricardo Quaresma, Cristiano Ronaldo and the rest.
Ricardo Laborde's first-half effort embarrassed Joel Robles in the home goal and inflicted a first European defeat of the season on Everton but with the combative Ryan Ledson impressing in central midfield and Luke Garbutt confident at left-back, the continued health of Goodison's academy production line provided the bigger picture.
Walsall manager Dean Smith told BBC WM: "We were given a good test, they're a good team and a good squad of players, but we came through it and our two goals came from our academy production line, which was very pleasing.
Ingmar Bergman will make his 10th visit to the academy in a production of Schiller's "Maria Stuart" with the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden.
Antony Greaves, head of the academy's audio production school, said that administrators had decided to introduce the program after noticing that every year, a dance music clique would form among students enrolled in the general music production course.
Casual Films runs an academy providing video production training for young people from Islington, regardless of their backgrounds, with staff giving their time freely to help them get a taste of working in the film and television industry.
About $500,000 in grants will enable the school to set up by next year a creative arts academy, with video production and graphic design studios.
Thanks to a $3.1 million gift from Ronald P. Stanton, a businessman and philanthropist who feels similarly about the production, the academy brought back "Atys" to open its 150th-anniversary season on Sunday afternoon.
Returning to education, Mao enrolled and dropped out of a police academy, a soap-production school, a law school and an economics school.
