Cruyff must wake up to truth behind Ajax decline
They won big trophies — European Cups in 1971, ’72, ’73 and ’95.
They had great players — Cruyff, Van Basten, Bergkamp, Litmanen. And the founding father of the Ajax myth, Rinus Michels, gave them total football, the distinctive playing style that was the envy of the world.
Then in the 1990s, modernity suddenly wiped them out. The 1995 Bosman ruling meant other clubs could tempt away their best players for no transfer fee. In 1996, Edgar Davids became the first top player to change clubs on a Bosman transfer. Patrick Kluivert followed and these days Ajax players who break through to the first team tend to stay fewer than five years before moving abroad, compared to nine or 10 years pre-Bosman.
Also in the mid-90s, Ajax left their old De Meer stadium for the Amsterdam ArenA, a concrete bowl stadium on the outskirts of town with a retractable roof and a potato-field pitch. It was supposed to make the club a commercial giant, but again Ajax were outflanked by modernity.
Their move to the ArenA coincided with the explosion in the value of football TV rights. Since the Netherlands is a relatively small country of 16 million people, the Dutch league TV rights are not very valuable.
In 2010, Ajax made €7 million from TV. Real Madrid made €161m: 23 times as much. Of course, nobody makes as much money as Real, but Ajax have also been left behind by clubs such as Tottenham, who earned €53m from TV in 2010.
That is why the Ajax graduate Rafael van der Vaart is playing for Spurs in the Champions League.
The psychological impact of becoming a small club in European competition has profoundly affected Holland’s most successful team: they have not won the Dutch league in seven years, their longest drought since the 1950s. Modern football has been terrible for Ajax. Maybe it’s no wonder that many of the fans, and apparently all the local media, have lately become more interested in politics.
Last week the politics got dramatic even by Ajax standards thanks to the gangster stylings of their legendary former player and coach, Johan Cruyff.
Cruyff has watched Ajax’s struggles and somehow come to the conclusion that incompetence, not economics, is to blame. “Something has to change. That seems clear to me,” he said. “We have recently been eliminated by Real Madrid and then the Russians.”
We must note at this point that Real Madrid’s budget is nearly six times that of Ajax and “the Russians”, Spartak Moscow, are the biggest club in one of the biggest cities in Europe. Spartak’s best player the night they knocked out Ajax was Aiden McGeady, whom they signed for €11.5m. A child could see that Ajax are losing to wealthier clubs because those clubs can sign better players.
Unfortunately, Cruyff is not a child but rather an old man with a head full of ideology. He submitted a technical report to the board which advocated the sackings of several personnel, like the coaches Danny Blind (“he has failed”) and Jan Olde Riekerink (“give him a job at Ajax Cape Town”, which is the South African satellite club).
When the board protested that Cruyff’s demands were out of order, he turned Tony Soprano. The outgoing chairman, Uri Coronel, claimed that Cruyff told him: “Who are you to judge our report? You swallow it or you go.”
Cruyff, who has a popular newspaper column, threatened to wage media war against the board: “Schrijf ik jullie kapot,” which literally means, “I’ll write you kaput”, or more figuratively, “I’ll kill you with my words”.
Realising that they had little chance of winning a power struggle against the most famous player in Dutch football history, the board took the extraordinary decision to resign en masse.
The message to Cruyff was, if you think you can do it so much better, why don’t you have a go?
The board members will remain in place until replacements can be found. Those replacements will not include Cruyff himself. He has scoffed at the idea of a hands-on role: “I don’t have to be one of them. I don’t need a blazer on.”
Of course, a blazer implies accountability. Cruyff seems to prefer the power without responsibility that comes with his role as guru and soothsayer.
Cruyff has complained that the Ajax youth system is no longer producing players as talented as in the past. But it is: look at Wesley Sneijder, the inspiration of Inter’s treble winners, look at Van der Vaart, rated by many the signing of the Premier League season, look at the Dutch squad that reached the World Cup final, many of whom were trained at Ajax.
The problem is not that the players aren’t coming through, the problem is that they aren’t staying. Changing the individuals in charge of various departments at the club isn’t going to alter the fact that the players know they can earn far more elsewhere.
All Cruyff’s plan will accomplish is to chew up the reputations of his chosen ones — like Dennis Bergkamp and Wim Jonk — who will eventually prove unable to do any better than their predecessors.
If Cruyff really wants to restore Ajax to the forefront of European football, he might be better employed lobbying for an international league involving big teams from small countries, as recently advocated by another former Ajax man, Clarence Seedorf.
Pretending that Ajax can be resurrected by simply replacing people Cruyff doesn’t like with people he does ignores the deep structural problems that have caused their decline, and makes the great Cruyff look a silly, disagreeable old man.
