Britain had the Beatles and the Stones. The Netherlands had Johan Cruyff. Their art forms were different but his legacy has been just as important. Cruyff was not merely the key figure in tactical revolutions in the 1960s and 70s that took them from being a football backwater to the world’s most important football nation.
He changed the personality of the country, too. In an article to mark Cruyff’s 50th birthday in 1997 the Dutch writer Hubert Smeets argued that Cruyff had done more than anyone to shape the modern Netherlands.
Emerging at the same time as the Provos and hippies, he embodied the spirit and ideas of the 1960s as much as John Lennon did. Cruyff clashed with football authorities, inspired, astonished and delighted his contemporaries and smashed old patterns of deference. To the old “regents” who ran the country he was the voice of youth who said: “Now it’s our turn.”
Some of his team-mates in the Holland team who should have won the 1974 World Cup (carelessly losing to the West Germans in the final mainly through arrogant overconfidence) had long hair and wore love beads but Cruyff was never any sort of hippy. He was ferociously competitive and interested in money. As he pointed out: “When my career ends, I cannot go to the baker and say: ‘I’m Johan Cruyff, give me some bread.’”
In what was still the largely amateur world of Dutch football, playing for the national team was considered an honour but Cruyff demanded payment. When he discovered Dutch FA officials were insured for foreign trips but players were not, he demanded – and forced – a change. He started asking questions that the whole generation was asking: why are things organised this way? And he never stopped asking such questions on the field or off.
Much like the Beatles’ songs, the Total Football that emerged at Ajax was the product of several remarkable talents provoking and inspiring each other. The coach, Rinus Michels, provided the drive, professionalism and organisational nous. The veteran Yugoslav defender Velibor Vasovic taught the callow Dutch kids how to fight and win. The doctrine of high pressing – now ubiquitous in world football but a sensation in 1970 – derived from Johan Neeskens’ habit of chasing opponents deep into their own half.
Cruyff was the essential genius behind the operation. He influenced events on the field not only as a preternaturally gifted and original player – the equal of Diego Maradona or Pelé – but also through his habit of making major tactical adjustments during a match without reference to the bench.
Cruyff and Michels together re-imagined the game as a highly skilled, swirling spatial contest: whoever managed and controlled limited space on the field would win. In this, they were unconsciously drawing on wider Dutch culture. For centuries the people of the Netherlands had been finding clever ways to think about, exploit and control space in their crowded, sea-threatened land. The sensibility is apparent in the paintings of Vermeer, Saenredam and Mondrian. It is present in Dutch architecture and land management, too. It was a small step to make it part of football.
Total Football swept Ajax to three successive European Cups between 1971-73, and enabled Holland to dazzle and delight the world at the 1974 World Cup. More lastingly, as Dennis Bergkamp once remarked, Cruyff’s personality and ideas shaped the entire Dutch football culture.
And without Cruyff the philosophy would have died in the early 1980s, a time when most total footballers had retired and defensive football had become fashionable even in the Netherlands.
At Ajax Cruyff reinstated total principles, then added a few flourishes of his own. Over time his ideas became the new orthodoxy in the Netherlands. He reorganised the Ajax youth system to educate players to play his style, then repeated the trick with a bigger budget at Barcelona. We take it for granted that Spain is the land of elegant, thoughtful creative football. It was Cruyff who made it that way.
Cruyff was argumentative, arrogant, dominating and brilliant. He prized creativity over negativity, beauty, originality and attack over boring defending. Several generations of players therefore developed the same characteristics.
Tragically, he never coached the national team, even though he seemed a shoo-in to lead the 1994 World Cup team (he fell out with the KNVB over money). Yet all the great Dutch sides played in his spirit. Sometimes they feuded, often they were beautiful and brilliant. Usually, even when they were the best team, they contrived to fall just short at major tournaments. Unconsciously, they were following the pattern of self-destructive behaviour established at the 1974 final.
There were problems along the way. With his belief in the “conflict model” – the idea that you got the best out of people by provoking fights and thereby raising levels of excitement and adrenaline – Cruyff made enemies almost as easily as he generated delight. Battles with club presidents and team-mates led to ruptures, especially at Ajax and Barcelona, the two clubs that defined his career.
He went to Barcelona as a player in 1973 only because his Ajax team‑mates had insulted him by voting Piet Keizer as captain. Twenty-three years later, Josep Lluís Núñez sacked him as the Barça coach after the Dream Team he had built began to age. Cruyff later had his revenge when he orchestrated the victory of Núñez’s rival, Joan Laporta.
In 1983 the Ajax chairman Ton Harmsen doubted the then 36-year-old Cruyff’s ability to keep drawing the crowds. Mortified and angry, Cruyff joined Feyenoord, and promptly won them the double.
His last football battle came at Ajax. Dismayed by falling standards at the club, in 2011 he engineered a coup that replaced the old suits he despised with a group of players – former pupils mostly – including Wim Jonk and Bergkamp. The idea was to make Ajax once more a world centre for football talent. But the key personalities fell out and, late last year when he was diagnosed with cancer, he withdrew.
Nevertheless, no other football figure can match Cruyff’s combined achievements in his two principal careers: thrilling, mesmerising presence and performances on the field, then inspiring and hugely influential coach off it.
It is hard to imagine many of the essential precepts of the modern game: pressing, the understanding of space as the game’s crucial element, the positional flexibility that enables attackers to defend and defenders to attack whenever the need arises.
Even Cruyff’s blind spots and weaknesses could lead to benign consequences. As he put it in one of his famous gnomic utterances: “Every disadvantage has its advantage.”
A long-running feud with the nation’s best shot-stopping goalkeeper Jan van Beveren, for example, led to Cruyff persuading Michels to take Jan Jongbloed to the 1974 World Cup instead. Jongbloed was widely considered too old and eccentric but Cruyff had spotted he was good with his feet and he could roam far from goal. If he functioned almost as an auxiliary defender, Holland could press even higher up the field than usual. The concept of the sweeper-keeper was born. Without Cruyff we would never have had such brilliant modern practitioners as Manuel Neuer.
Cruyff’s loyalty was to the principles of beautiful and effective football rather than club or country. (After the 2010 World Cup final, he sided with Spain and lambasted Holland for the violent tactics of what he considered “anti-football”.)
Arsène Wenger, one of those greatly influenced by him, once said it would be impossible to perfectly replicate the Total Football of early 70s Ajax and Holland without Cruyff on the field. Many, though, have tried.
A remarkable number of the most important teams of the modern era have been directly influenced by him. Modern Barcelona and Spain and the current Bayern Munich and German national teams bear out the point. So did Arrigo Sacchi’s all-conquering Milan team in the late 80s (based on early 70s Ajax and featuring Cruyff proteges Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard) and the Arsenal Invincibles of 2003-04.
This is because, as the Dutch writer Arthur van den Boogaard said, Cruyff solved the “metaphysical problem” of football. What he meant was that if you play a Cruyffian style well enough with sufficiently talented players it is hard to lose. He was, in effect, the father of the modern game.
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