Johan Cruyff Quotes

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

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.

Every disadvantage has its advantage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Salid y disfrutad.

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.

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.

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.

Every disadvantage has its advantage

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.