Cruyff Quotes

If I wanted you to understand, I would explain it better.

Every disadvantage has its advantage.

Johan Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.

In Spain all 22 players make the sign of the cross before a game; if it worked, every game would be a tie".

The longer I played in Spain, the more I understood how important a part politics played in the game.

Why couldn't you beat a richer club? I've never seen a bag of money score a goal.

Under Cruyff, dominating the ball became the first and most important rule. ‘If you have the ball, the opposition doesn’t have it and can’t attack you,’ Cruyff would repeat daily. So the job became finding the players who could keep possession and also doing a lot of positional work in training.

Why do we open up the field?’ Cruyff would explain. ‘Because if we have the ball and we are open, it is more difficult for the opponent to defend.’ Or: ‘People criticised me because I played with three at the back, but those criticisms were really ridiculous: what we did was fill the zones on the field where the game required it. If the opponent played with two up front, which was common then, and my team went out with four defenders, I had one too many, so I moved him forward towards the midfield.

I’ve got a problem,’ he told his mentor. ‘I’ve got these two guys who I don’t know if I can control, they don’t listen to what I say and that affects how everybody else receives my messages. And the problem is, they’re two of the leaders in the dressing room and the best players. I will lose without them on board.’ Cruyff ’s response was blunt: ‘Get rid of them. You might lose one or two games, but then you will start winning and by then you would have turfed those two sons of bitches out the team.

It wasn’t enough for him to have had first-hand experience of the methods of Cruyff, Robson, van Gaal, Mazzone or Capello, so he travelled to Argentina to deepen his knowledge. There, he met Ricardo La Volpe (a former Argentine World Cup-winning goalkeeper and the former coach of the Mexican national team), Marcelo Bielsa (the much admired former Argentina and Chile national coach, and Athletic de Bilbao manager) and ‘El Flaco’, César Luis Menotti (the coach who took Argentina to the World Cup in 1978) to talk at length about football.

According to the principles Johan Cruyff introduced to Barcelona, coaches should lead by example: play football, be on the field during training and teach, because there is nothing better than stopping the game, correcting and instructing, explaining why someone needed to pass to a certain player, move to a particular position or change an element of their technique. That’s how Carles Rexach, Cruyff ’s assistant for eight years at Barcelona, explains it: ‘One word from Johan during a training drill is worth more than a hundred hours of talks at the blackboard.

Louis van Gaal is generally considered the creator of a football system or machine. It might be more accurate to describe him as the originator of a new process for playing the game. His underlying tactical principles were much as those of Michels and Cruyff: relentless attack; pressing and squeezing space to make the pitch small in order to win the ball; spreading play and expanding the field in possession. By the 1990s, though, footballers had become stronger, faster and better organised than ever before. Van Gaal saw the need for a new dimension. ‘With space so congested, the most important thing is ball circulation,’ he declared. ‘The team that plays the quickest football is the best.’ His team aimed for total control of the game, maintaining the ball ‘in construction’, as he calls it, and passing and running constantly with speed and precision. Totaalvoetbal-style position switching was out, but players still had to be flexible and adaptable. Opponents were not seen as foes to be fought and beaten in battle; rather as posing a problem that had to be solved. Ajax players were required to be flexible and smart – as they ‘circulated’ the ball, the space on the field was constantly reorganised until gaps opened in the opponents’ defence.

(the difference between a good and bad footballer, according to Cruyff, is how well you control the ball and where you place it with your first touch, accommodating it for yourself in the right direction or sending it accurately to your team-mate). It needed players who were able to be in the best positions to receive the ball, capable of constantly assisting, of one-twos, of keeping their heads up, of looking for the next pass before receiving, of anticipating play. But, more importantly, they had to be footballers capable of understanding the game.

Every disadvantage has its advantage

La filosofía de Cruyff, en cambio, era que había que avanzar haciendo pases. Y el pase no tiene que ser adonde está el otro jugador ahora, sino donde va a estar en 30 segundos”. Sala-i-Martín

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.

Cruyff tiene una frase famosa, que suele repetir, según la cual “si tú tienes el balón, tu rival no lo tiene, y no puede atacarte”.

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.

As a captain I was sociable, but I sometimes had to be antisocial as well. Kovács’s ‘hands-off’ approach forced me to act when I thought our performance was suffering because of it. I had to be critical, both of the group and of individual players. Perhaps that wasn’t clever at a time when everyone in our team was admired, but I felt professionally obliged to do it as the captain.

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.

Young Schuster could have been the answer to many of West Germany’s problems. So good was he that Barcelona came in with an offer only three months after the European Championship. Schuster had fallen out with his club coach and so the country’s best prospect went abroad at a tender age indeed. Schuster stayed in Spain for 13 years, proving he feared nothing and nobody when he moved from Barça to Real Madrid – and then from Real to Atlético Madrid. Later, the Spanish press voted him the best foreigner ever to grace their league, ahead of Alfredo Di Stefano and Johan Cruyff.

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.

footballers who come from a poor family, play good football, get rich and go off the rails. Put yourself in their position. Just try to digest it. In fact, hardly any European clubs even look at that kind of issue. Because the worlds are too far apart. The board, the directors and the managers who should be keeping an eye on things like that don’t understand the culture of players from that sort of background. They just don’t have the life experience to be able to imagine themselves in that situation.

anxiety to become good enough for Johan Cruyff to notice us cannot be put into words. Without that desire, none of us would be who we are today.

He also taught his players how to mark an opponent, teaching them to focus on a rival’s weaknesses – while accentuating what you were good at, to fight the battles you could win, in other words. It was a revelation for Pep, who lacked the physique to beat a tall, powerful, central midfielder in the air – so he learnt, under Cruyff, to avoid jumping with his rival, but to wait instead. Cruyff ’s theory was: ‘Why fight? Keep your distance, anticipate where he’ll head the ball and wait for the bounce. You’ll be in control while he’s jumping around.

Before heading out on to the pitch, Johan Cruyff gave his players a simple instruction: ‘Go out there and enjoy yourselves.’ It was a statement that embodies an entire footballing philosophy and was central to Cruyff ’s principles; yet for others, its simplicity, ahead of such a key game, might be considered an insult to the coaching profession.

Cruyff wanted his players to express themselves, to enjoy themselves...

Basilevitch persuaded Cruyff to let him invest his hard-earned money in a variety of ventures, the most disastrous of which was a pig farm.70 Looking back in 2015, the victim laughed at himself: “Who could imagine that Johan Cruyff had gone into pig-rearing? I ended up saying to myself, ‘Ditch the pigs. Your thing is football.’ ”71

Her zaman bir filozofmuşçasına hareket etti. Futbol onun için felsefik hatta ideolojik bir şeydi. Ünlü aforizmalarıyla açıkladı kendini: “Futbol basit bir oyundur, zor olan basit oynamak” dedi: “Daha erken koşmaya başlarsan, daha hızlı koşmuş olursun” dedi: “her dezavantajın avantajı vardır” dedi: “Tesadüfler de planlı olabilir” dedi: “Kazanmanın tek formülü rakibinizden bir gol fazla atmaktır, dahası değil” dedi. Felsefesi saha dışına da taştı; ateist Cruyff, “Tanrı’ya inanmıyorum. Maç öncesinde İspanya’da tüm 22 kişi ıstavroz çıkarıyor. Eğer Tanrı olsaydı, bütün maçlar berabere biterdi” diyerek açıkladı kendini.

Salid y disfrutad.

El mejor fue Pelé, yo lo vi jugar mucho, me enfrenté con él. Maradona está con los Di Stéfano, los Cruyff, aunque yo entiendo que muchos lo pongan ahí arriba. La gran diferencia es que Pelé, cuando se retiró, no tuvo una vida extradeportiva tan particular y mediática como la de Maradona. Lo más fue Pelé, Diego fue muy bueno, pero el grande fue Pelé.

Tuve la suerte de jugar con Pelé en Santos y de entrenar a Diego Maradona en Argentina, y para mí Pelé fue mucho mejor jugador que Diego. Pelé fue una mezcla de Di Stéfano, Maradona, Cruyff, Messi, metido en un solo jugador.

Pelé fue el único futbolista que sobrepasó los límites de la lógica.

Pele is the greatest player of all time. He reigned supreme for 20 years. All the others, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini, rank beneath him. There's no one to compare with Pele.

A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all expectations are translated into something positive.

Johan Cruyff, explaining his profound aestheticism, once said that he preferred to hear the noise of the ball striking the post to scoring a goal.