Reconsidering Cruyff
Five years after his death, Johan Cruyff remains the most complicated, influential and misunderstood soccer player ever. Let's explore his many contradictions.
Johan Cruyff played his last competitive soccer game 23 days before I was born. Yet he has loomed large in my life. As a Dutchman, an Ajax fan, an FC Barcelona sympathizer, a soccer nut and a soccer writer, I sit in the center of a kind of Cruyffian Venn diagram. I’ve watched his games and interviews. I’ve read books and seen documentaries about him. I’ve written about him myself.
Drill deep enough into the foundation of modern soccer and there is no avoiding Johan Cruyff.
It’s been 37 years since Cruyff played in a game. A quarter-century since he last managed one. A half-decade since he died. Yet Cruyff remains everywhere, lurking in the way that we play and watch and talk about the game.
He shaped his childhood club Ajax. And the Dutch national team. And Barca. All three of those teams remade the sport in different eras. In his all-conquering stint as Barca manager, Cruyff promoted a young Pep Guardiola from the academy he had insisted on revamping. When Guardiola became Barca manager himself, with his mentor’s decisive blessing, a fourth and fifth decade with Cruyff’s imprint on the club were safeguarded.
But the thing about Cruyff that has amazed me for years is how poorly he is understood outside of his home country. Those who don’t speak Dutch haven’t experienced him fully. They were not privy to the unending monologues, machinations and manipulations. So much of what he said and did was lost in translation, or not translated at all. Beyond Dutch borders, they only saw the work—the immutable grace, the brilliant ball control, the arresting acceleration and the linchpin of the Total Football machine he popularized with his many-time coach and mentor, Rinus Michels.
Abroad, they got all of the influence and none of the nuance.
When Cruyff arrived at FC Barcelona in 1973, reunited with Michels, he was quickly nicknamed El Salvador. The Savior. And he did indeed bring salvation in the form of a first Spanish league title in 14 years in his very first season. When he returned as manager in 1988 he won four more titles and the club’s first Champions League.
But at Ajax there was mostly relief at his departure, never mind that he had just led the team to three straight European Cups,. The teammates, with many of whom he would storm to the World Cup final the following summer, were tired of his antics—the power games, the diva behavior, the injuries that always seemed to coincide with some kind of standoff. When they refused to elect Cruyff as their captain for the new season, he left for Catalonia in a huff.
Legend has it that Ajax wanted to sell Cruyff to Real Madrid, but that he couldn’t bear the thought of not being in control and decided on his own that he would join Barca instead. That same petty streak drove Cruyff to play his final season—1983-84—at Ajax’s arch-rivals Feyenoord and make them champions, to spite his boyhood club for not giving him the contract he wanted after consecutive Dutch titles.
These were the dualities of Cruyff. The genius and the troublemaker. The endless quotes and the incomprehension. The businessman who was bad with money. The icon who didn’t believe in the cause. The frail man casting the outsized shadow.
Here follows an attempt to fill out the five paradoxes that split Cruyff the person from the Cruyff persona:
1. The talker who couldn’t explain himself
There aren’t a lot of books that my grandfather cherishes. But a flimsy work consisting entirely of Cruyff quotes is one of them. I borrowed it once and, for months, he asked me when I planned to return it every single time we talked. Because to my grandfather’s generation of Dutchmen, Cruyff is indeed the savior who turned a bedraggled soccer nation into a world power, a four-time World Cup finalist—three times on the men’s side and once more on the women’s.
There are several of those books on the market—that’s how much Cruyff talked in Dutch. He had a weekly column in the country’s biggest tabloid, De Telegraaf. He was constantly on TV. And if nobody stopped him, he was liable to launch into an hourlong monologue at any moment, wherever. His Ajax teammates nicknamed him Flipper, for the 1960s TV show about a dolphin who wouldn’t stop chattering. To Cruyff, playing a game meant holding a running dialogue with the referee and an unceasing lecture to his teammates.
“From the time he was a boy, he thought he knew everything better on the field—and he did,” says Menno de Galan, who wrote a Dutch book on the world-beating Ajax team of the early 1970s and another on Cruyff’s “coup” at Ajax in 2010, when he got the entire board and front office fired and replaced with cronies. “On the field, he saw more than others did. He had more spatial awareness. But he never pointed this out quietly; he wanted to convince you he was right.”
But Cruyff wasn’t an eloquent speaker, just a prolific one. He talked in a slurry Amsterdam dialect and often struggled to make himself understood. He became a kind of Yogi Berra figure in his home country. He would deliver logically void statements like, “You won’t see it until you get it,” which would then be assigned a kind of profundity after the fact.
Or his famous utterances on playing Italy:
“The Italians can’t beat you but you can lose to them”
“If the Italians get one chance they’ll score twice.”
Or, immortally:
“If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better.”
Sometimes, Cruyff mangled expressions so badly that his gaffes became part of the national vernacular. Once, as a pundit, he derided a team’s defense as “goat’s cheese.” He meant to call it Swiss cheese—full of holes, in other words. In Dutch, geitenkaas and gatenkaas are separated by one vowel.
But dig a little deeper into those quotes—and I confess to devouring several of those books—and it becomes striking how much of it is unvarnished and unprovoked criticism, bordering on vitriol. Mostly, Cruyff seemed to talk about how everybody else was doing it all wrong. Which would usually bring him to his second-favorite subject: who he thought ought to be fired, sold or released.
There was a nastiness there that was repackaged as principled conviction.
2. The insecurity and the conflict
“I’m not a person with college degrees,” Cruyff wrote—supposedly—in the opening line of his autobiography, My Turn. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through experience.”
Defensiveness was inherent in his psyche. Cruyff tolerated no dissent to his opinion. If anybody pushed back, he would immediately take his leave. He walked away from his beloved Ajax a half dozen times—on bad terms in each instance. Sooner or later, he would return, criticize and insult everything and everyone, and quickly leave again. That was the Cruyff play, especially after his 8-year run managing Barca ended:
Enter the fray to make unreasonable demands—usually for immediate, wholesale changes and unfettered power;
Resign when those edicts aren’t followed to the letter.
“Just like on the field, he always needed to dominate,” says Auke Kok, who wrote a Dutch book on Holland’s 1974 World Cup team and a meticulous Cruyff biography that will be translated into English next year.
As Kok sees it, conflict followed Cruyff around wherever he went because he equated making concessions to defeat.—if he gave an inch, he would be crushed, he believed. “He just couldn’t admit when he was wrong,” Kok says. “Once he’d formed an opinion he was incapable of changing his mind. That forced him to obfuscate and try to talk his way out of corners by blaming others.”
Cruyff didn’t see any difference between a match and a dispute—all matters were black or white to him. You were either winning or you weren’t. It was a worldview that left no room for compromise.
So confrontational was Cruyff that he drove his many enemies and observers to armchair psychiatry. Over the course of his long public life, he was unofficially diagnosed with just about every psychological disorder that was ever labeled.
Another explanation is that Cruyff, for all the bravado, was insecure. He hadn’t spent much time in school. He was acutely aware of his own academic shortcomings. That’s perhaps why he started the Cruyff Academy and the Cruyff Institute, graduate schools for sports business in the Netherlands, which de Galan sees as an attempt by Cruyff to burnish his intellectual credentials.
Because Cruyff—whose father was the Ajax greengrocer before dying young, and whose mother cleaned the club’s locker rooms to make ends meet thereafter—looked up to the establishment. While he was imperious on the field, a sense of inferiority lingered away from it.
Yet this hardheadedness also protected his legacy. After all, as Kok points out, Cruyff is the only one of soccer’s generational stars credited with ushering in a new tactical era.
3. The progressive icon and the conservative
There’s a famous photo of Cruyff. He’s in his Dutch uniform, looking straight ahead—pensive but not posing. It’s usually depicted in black and white. He has long hair and it flows freely. There’s something of Che Guevara to it.
It became one of the most common images of his time. And as such, it came to symbolize the era. Cruyff the man who came of age in the 1960s and helped define the 1970s. Cruyff the creature of the counterculture. Cruyff the paragon of progress.
His shaggy hair and abundant sideburns made him look like a hippie. He rose to fame at the height of the Dutch provo movement of anarchists. He helped reinvent his sport while much of his generation questioned conventions.
Cruyff raged against managers and chairmen as nobody had before. “He challenged all of the traditional power structures,” says de Galan. “He disrupted the old dynamic of the all-powerful club board and the subservient player.” If he didn’t get his way, Cruyff would sometimes feign an injury—or at the very least exaggerate the severity of the discomfort to his fragile feet.
But Cruyff hardly reflected his zeitgeist. He didn’t change soccer because he thought the world needed to abandon the old ways. He did it because Total Football suited him better than traditional tactics. He wasn’t a thorn in the side of coaches and administrators because he believed in egalitarianism—he opposed a fashionable Dutch idea of “flattening” the nation’s salaries in order to reduce income equality. Rather, he simply refused to let anyone tell him what to do.
Insofar as he had politics, Cruyff—who married at 21, became a father at 23 and never strayed from his family—was a conservative.
4. The wheeler-dealer who couldn’t cope
Cruyff, under the tutelage of his father-in-law Cor Coster, had more or less invented the notion of an athlete as a brand. Even early on in his career, he hustled side gigs long before those were common. As an arrived star, he began his own sportswear company and refused to wear a Netherlands jersey with a third stripe down the arms for its Adidas sponsor. After all, Cruyff had a shoe deal with Puma and Adidas wasn’t paying him directly. So he wound up playing in a slightly different uniform from his teammates.
Yet Cruyff, a numbers wizard, wasn’t particularly interested in how much money he actually had. To him, it was about getting what he felt he deserved.
When he retired from Barca, Cruyff fancied himself a fully-formed businessman who no longer needed to lean on his father-in-law. But a charismatic conman got his hooks into him and, soon enough, Cruyff was broke—to the merriment of the Dutch press, which had duly taken note of Cruyff’s prophesies of a business empire, he lost most of his money on a pig farm. Coster was summoned to fix the whole financial mess, and Cruyff, broke and humiliated, was forced to resume his playing career in the North American Soccer League.
“Every time I thought I could do it on my own,” Cruyff lamented in My Turn on the subject of his business dealings, “things immediately went wrong.”
He styled himself as a Renaissance man, but the only thing Cruyff ever demonstrated any aptitude for was soccer.
5. The small man with the large shadow
Like Pele and Maradona, the superstars who came before and after Cruyff, fate and his physique did not appear to have marked him for greatness. “There was a lot going against him and his chances of becoming a famous athlete,” Kok says. “Physically, he was hardly equipped to be an elite sportsman. He was too small and too frail. He was nervous and suffered migraines. He said later that he would probably have been diagnosed with ADHD today. He had a bad foot and needed special shoes. It was almost strange that he became so successful—an opinion that he shared, by the way.”
Cruyff had no choice but to remake his sport. Because if he hadn’t modernized it to emphasize speed and technique—the two things that set him far apart—the game would have had no use for him.
He found new spaces and discovered new routes to goal not out of ideological zeal but so that he might have a place on the field.
Soccer miscellany:
Great writing. I always want more! Cruyff, to me, was a Physics professor
with a green pitch instead of a blackboard. Space and Time were his playthings.
i had no idea about this, very interesting stuff!