Johan Cruyff: The Dutch mastermind behind modern football
Johan Cruyff was never short of an opinion, or a turn of phrase as sharp as the turn he made famous on the pitch. So it comes as no surprise that he should have written his own obituary in advance.
Now that everything really has come to an end it is difficult to overstate Cruyff’s contribution to football and his status in the game.
There have been many great players. People will argue forever about who are the best, and the best of the best. Cruyff is probably up there on the podium alongside Pele, Maradona, Di Stefano, Messi and whoever else you’d like to nominate for the final place in the top half-dozen.
Elegance and precision are two of the words that come to mind about his style of play, but above all vision.
RIP Johan Cruyff.
— Complex Sports (@ComplexSports) March 24, 2016
The game wouldn't be what it is today without you. pic.twitter.com/YWUPWMilD5
Not only could he see things before they happened, and thus out-think opponents who were quicker or stronger, but he also had a vision of the game as a whole.
He was a strategist on the pitch, even in defeat – for example that famous 1974 World Cup final against Germany when the Dutch paid the price for scoring too early against Franz Beckenbauer and company.
Led by Cruyff, the Dutch arrived in that tournament looking like a bunch of laid-back students, and then performed like the Harlem Globetrotters.
Total Football wasn’t a new concept. Years before, the Austrians had devised a way of playing that was christened “The Whirl”, with players interchanging positions all over the pitch. But the Dutch took it to a different level.
Arie Haan, a brilliant player in his own right and Cruyff’s midfield team-mate in the Ajax side that won three consecutive European Cups, tried to explain it as follows:
“People talk of total football as if it is a system, something to replace 4-2-4 or 4-3-3. It is not a system. As it is at any moment, so you play. That is how we understand. Not one or two players make a situation, but five or six.
“The best is that with every situation all 11 players are involved, but this is difficult. In many teams maybe only two or three play, and the rest are looking. In the Holland team, when you are 60 metres from the ball, you are playing.”
Cruyff was the fulcrum. And even though the Dutch fell at the final hurdle in Munich in 1974, and then four years later in the cauldron of the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires, they had changed football forever.
Total Football, interpreted in different ways, mostly less ambitious than Haan’s description, has become the Holy Grail and Cruyff and his team-mates are rightly seen as the best side never to win the World Cup, ahead even of the great Hungarian team of the 1950s.
Those achievements with Ajax and the Netherlands alone would place Cruyff among the greatest-ever players, but his achievements and his subsequent influence make him unique.
As a player, Di Stefano possibly outranks him with five European cups and because he was even more versatile on the pitch. But while Di Stefano won a couple of titles in Argentina and Spain as a manager, he never approached Cruyff’s achievements with Barcelona.
It was at Barcelona that he became European footballer of the year in 1974. It was thanks to him, and his experience with Ajax, that Barcelona set up its La Masia academy which eventually became the cornerstone of the club’s success and the incubator of players such as Xavi, Iniesta. Puyol, Busquets and Messi.
'El gol imposible' Barça 2-1 Atleti 1973 (Johan Cruyff) (Vine by @Futbol_RTVE) https://t.co/rgk0jx1hZq
— @rinit31 (@rinit31) March 24, 2016
Philosophy is a much-abused term in football, but Barcelona’s unmatched record in player development and coaching over the past 15 years are rooted in Cruyff’s legacy. Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique are both products of his school and style of football and the almost seamless continuity from 2004 and Frank Rijkaard’s time in charge to the present day is a monument to Cruyff’s lasting influence.
No other man has achieved such success and impact on football both on the pitch and off it.
There might have been more.
The Dutch view is that had Cruyff gone to the 1978 World Cup they would have won the tournament, even with the odds stacked against them. For years, the story went that Cruyff’s principles prevented him taking part in a tournament under a military dictatorship.
That may have been one factor – and there was a less idealistic argument about sponsorship behind the scenes – but the main reason was his family, as he revealed in 2008.
“I had problems at the end of my career as a player here,” he told Catalunya Radio, “and someone put a rifle at my head and tied me up and tied up my wife in front of the children at our flat in Barcelona.”
The 1977 kidnap attempt failed, but it changed his life.
“The children were going to school accompanied by the police. The police slept in our house for three or four months. I was going to matches with a bodyguard.”
Cruyff left the city in the wake of that incident, which was followed by a strange interlude when near tragedy turned to farce with a move to the Los Angeles Aztecs that included a bizarre tour of England, sponsored by the Dutch Meat Marketing Board, in the company of girls in national costume promoting a smoked sausage with the slogan “Score with a Dutchy”.
Back home, Cruyff subsequently fell out with Ajax and joined up with the young Ruud Gullit at rivals Feyenoord.
It was part of a long love-hate relationship that resurfaced in 2008 after a difference of opinion with Marco Van Basten and then again four years ago when he resigned from the club’s advisory board after he took them to court to block the appointment of Louis Van Gaal as chief executive.
The other might-have-been in an incredible career was the fate of the Cruyff Dream Team in 1994. His glorious creation as Barcelona manager had won four La Liga titles, the Cup Winners’ Cup and the European Cup. They seemed destined for true immortality that season, the European final in Athens seemed almost a formality: there were even pictures ready of Cruyff holding the trophy.
Hubris is always a danger in football, even for the true greats. “We didn’t prepare; we lacked concentration,” admitted assistant manager Carles Rexach.
Key players were tired, Romario’s relationship with the volatile Hristo Stoitchkov was at breaking point.
Milan had two first-choice defenders missing, but Cruyff’s dream died in the face of an astonishing team performance by Fabio Capello’s side, with Marcel Desailly outstanding and the unrated Daniele Massaro scoring twice.
Twenty-two years on it seems we could have a European final in Milan between two of Cruyff’s most gifted protégés: Guardiola and Luis Enrique, two contrasting disciples from the same school. Perhaps other teams will have their say and the Dream Final will go the same way as the Dream Team.
But romantics will hope that destiny calls and will imagine a ghostly figure holding the trophy aloft in the San Siro stadium on May 28.
el famoso GOL FANTASMA @JohanCruyff https://t.co/FssktMtFuq
— FERNANDO SCHWARTZ #nuncabajolosbrazos (@fersch_4) March 24, 2016
El primer penal de dos toques https://t.co/hVDvQI7J3I
Cruyff philosophy
“Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”
“You play football with your head, and your legs are there to help you.”
“Why couldn’t you beat a richer club? I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.”
“We must make sure their worst players get the ball the most. You’ll get it back in no time.”
“Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake.”
“I always threw the ball in, because then if I got the ball back, I was the only player unmarked.”
“In my teams, the goalie is the first attacker, and the striker the first defender.”
“Someone who has juggled the ball in the air during a game, after which four defenders of the opponent get the time to run back, that’s the player people think is great. I say he has to go to a circus.”
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