Ajax Johan Cruyff Quotes

The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.

Johan Cruyff, although he never played in Italy, had an enormous impact on the Italian game. Ajax’s three European Cup victories in the 1970s revealed a new type of football to the world – ‘total football’ – based on movement, flexibility and a swift, short-passing game. As David Winner has written, ‘total football was built on a new theory of flexible space’. In attack, teams ‘aimed to make the pitch as large as possible’, in defence, they collapsed space.20 This was supposedly the complete opposite of catenaccio, which was based around rigid man-marking, discipline and a mixture of long passing and counter-attacks.

I was a bag of bones, I looked like a shrimp, and they took pity on me, which meant that even though I had no business being there, and wasn’t even in the youth team, I was playing with the Ajax team from a very early age.

I knew that there would be major consequences from sticking my neck out like this, and everything that subsequently happened in my relationship with Ajax started with the reaction to that match, but I don’t regret saying it – it was time that someone said something and tried to sort out the mess of a team that Ajax had become.

Frank de Boer had gone on performing, and had twice won the national championship with the first team. He had had a fantastic start as a trainer after his success with the youth team, and the current squad were showing great potential. For that reason, the Ajax board had a moral duty to ensure that he didn’t get drowned in bureaucracy, as his predecessors had done, and was allowed to get on with his job.