Total Football: how the Ajax way works

THE intellectualisation of soccer has, they say, always foundered on a one simple problem – football players. Unless, of course, you’re Dutch.

The propagators of Total Football in the 1970s elevated an industrial sport from the spit and sawdust shop floor to an erudite, urbane beautiful game and enlightenment dawned over Europe.

Ajax Amsterdam is, of course, a catchword for home-grown productivity, expert training and, above all, success. In a country that gave the world Vincent Van Gogh and Rembrandt its greatest club has delivered innumerable soccer-playing artists in Johan Cruyff, Marco Van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp.

Two of the cogs in the well-oiled machine that is the Amsterdam youth system, Eddie Van Schaik and Renaldo Landburg came to Dublin, Belfast and Cork this week to generously pass on some their expertise.

Hundreds of men from throughout Ireland, all involved in training kids and young teams up and down the land, dusted off notepads and shook to life Biros to return to a class room in UCD last week for a brilliant orange master class. “All of us do not have equal talents,” Van Schaik explains, quoting John F Kennedy, “but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talents; that is our ethos.

“At Ajax we are lucky to offer the best boys from around the city and its surrounding area (the club insists you live within a 45-minute commute to the training facility, while at Arsenal it’s 180, for example) but one of our biggest problems is motivating these young boys. They think ‘oh, I’m here now, I’m the best’ and they relax, of course.

“Well, we teach them that it is a talent to do something with your talent. And that should apply to everyone,” he adds.

Total Football was delicately crafted from solid foundations. Every team – from under 9 up – plays 3-4-3 formation and each must be adept in every position on the pitch. Manchester United goalkeeper and Ajax graduate Edwin Van der Sar’s searching long balls and crisp distribution is down to his years playing outfield in Amsterdam, for example.

“If we have a bad header of the ball in the team, I will put him at centre half,” says Van Schaik, who has worked at the youth academy for the past three years and previously worked on the Qatar Olympic Committee for development of youth football. “If the young guy fails to take the challenge and shies away from a header then we try to help him over that failure.”

It is this holistic approach to the boys’ development that marks the club apart. Players who are late for training sit out the first hour, and the same for matches. Parents are thought how to feed their children properly. The littlest detail – like a pair of uncleaned boots or horseplay in the dressing room – is recorded in comprehensive reports and addressed immediately. “Winning games is secondary,” says Van Schaick.

The Irish audience, each member proudly wearing their club’s crested polo shirt, furiously scribble every detail nod in appreciation throughout but are sparked to question the alien approach to Dutch youth games. No scores are kept in the younger sides’ clashes and teams are regularly mixed up to make them more competitive.

“Stacking young teams with the best players is pointless in my view,” Van Schaik argues, while the problem of the competitive and vociferous parent on the sideline, insisting his child plays and indeed wins, is not a problem in Holland and can be tackled here too. “You must use the parent; make it an honour for his son to play for you. There should be honest communication: this is the way we play and there is no pressure to get silly results, we want to develop.

“Personally, I usually sit in the canteen during my son’s games and watch from the window because I want him to be independent. If he does something right – or wrong – he will look for me immediately. If he falls on the ground, he better get up because I won’t be there.”

THE room of coaches are eventually led to UCD’s sports ground where a team of young lads from Esker Celtic are put though their paces by Van Schaik and Landburg – the latter an expert in speed technique. The drills are fun and quick and the kids enjoy themselves a lot more than doing laps – an anathema to the Ajax way. But as they chase each other around hand-in-hand, they are, we’re told improving body direction speed, making them quicker in ‘transitions’ – simply changing your direction.

Earlier Landburg insisted Holland had not lost to Russia in last year’s European Championships quarter-finals because of fitness or skill levels, merely the Russians were quicker at turning around. That’s the neurotic genius of Dutch football; every mistake and weakness is identified in a document and then worked on – and on time.