Louis Van Gaal
You can’t talk about Ajax without discussing the great man in some form, even if it’s difficult to say anything new about him and even harder to really capture the impact he had on world football as a player and manager.
Cruyff started his playing career with Ajax, appearing in 240 of his 519 career league games for the Amsterdammers between 1964 and 1973 before coming back for another 36 games between 1981 and 1983.
He played for their fierce rivals Feyenoord for his final season, a decision he took primarily out of contempt for Ajax after they declined to renew his contract. As a result, Rotterdam won the league title for the first time in 11 years.
Influence of Cruyff
Even that unpleasantness couldn’t keep the man and the club apart for very long, and when Cruyff decided to transition into management after hanging up his boots, it was the Dutch champions Ajax who welcomed him back.
Ajax won the Cup Winners’ Cup and two KNVB Cups under Cruyff’s direction. Although the league championship eluded him, Cruyff’s 2.5 years in charge allowed him to establish the concepts that
When Cruyff assumed management of Barcelona in 1988, he brought the plan with him and turned the team around, making it one of the best in all of European football. Even though it has been refined, the Nou Camp continues to employ this tactic.
And while though Cruyff achieved amazing success as a player and manager, his greatest achievement may have been the legacy he left behind in every place he went. But if Cruyff’s children are Holland 1988, Barcelona 2009, and Spain 2012, then there is also a fourth sibling who we frequently ignore: Ajax 199
That may be due to the fact that it was implemented by Louis Van Gaal, despite their frequently and publicly acrimonious relationship, who spent nearly his entire career following in Cruyff’s footsteps.
As Maarten Meijer points out in his biography of Van Gaal, Cruyff, who was four years older and played a similar crucial playmaker role, prevented him from being given the chance to play for the Ajax first team. Van Gaal was ultimately forced to move and eventually settled as a first-team regular at Sparta Rotterdam due to this and a lack of pace.
That set the tone for a relationship marked by everything from minor public squabbles to major institutional strife: from a reported incident at a Christmas dinner Cruyff hosted in 1989, the details of which the two parties disagree on, to Cruyff taking his fellow Ajax supervisory board members to court to block Van Gaal’s appointment as technical director in 2012.
Despite their personal disagreements, and despite neither of them admitting it, the couple clearly agreed on a large portion of their tactical concepts.
In Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson aptly observes that the pair’s incessant squabbles were “like two Marxist theorists debating obscure doctrinal dogma.”
Birth
As a result, when Van Gaal, the youth coordinator at Ajax, was elevated to the position of head coach in September 1991, he chose to focus on refining Cruyff’s Total Football and 4-3-3/3-4-3 system rather than abandoning it.
Van Gaal was an avid note-taker and insisted on players doing things a certain way. He introduced team bonding sessions, group meals, and several novel training exercises to get players used to working as cohesive packs when pressing.
Van Gaal was far from Cruyff’s belief in judging players by eye and giving them the freedom to play.
Youth coordinator at Ajax, he was promoted to head coach in September 1991, and instead of doing away with Cruyff’s Total Football and 4-3-3/3-4-3 system, he preferred to concentrate on improving it.
He insisted on his players performing tasks in a specific manner and was a noted note-taker. To get the players used to cooperating as a cohesive pack when pressing, he implemented team bonding exercises, group dinners, and several unique training methods.
He also did not share Cruyff’s philosophy of treating players as individuals and allowing them the freedom to perform.
A compulsive note-taker and insisted on players performing tasks in a specific manner, he introduced team bonding activities, shared meals, and various novel training drills to help players become accustomed to pressing as a unified pack.
On the pitch, however, the basic composition was mostly unchanged from the previous match, and Van Gaal’s strategies were validated when he won the 1992 UEFA Cup final with a two-legged away goals triumph over Torino, winning him the first prize of his illustrious managerial career.
That summer was Van Gaal’s first opportunity to enter the transfer market, and his policy was unpopular at the time, but it proved to be wildly successful: after infuriating fans by selling popular winger Bryan Roy, he more than made up for it by bringing in 19-year-old sensation Marc Overmars.
Jari Litmanen, a hardworking but magnificent playmaker, was the only other permanent addition that summer, and in January the Finn found himself playing behind the returning Ronald De Boer, who re-joined the club from FC Twente after being traded by Van Gaal’s predecessor Leo Beenhakker 18 months earlier.
Another familiar face returned in the summer of 1993, with Cruyff’s former preferred No.4 Frank Rijkaard re-joining from AC Milan as a late replacement for the beloved Jan Wouters, while Nigerian pair Finidi George and Nwankwo Kanu bolstered the attacking options for a fraction of the whopping £7.1million transfer fee Inter had paid for youth product Dennis Bergkamp.
Bergkamp was sold by Van Gaal, who also decided to part ways with Roy and Wouters, much to the chagrin of Ajax supporters.
The previous two Dutch Football of the Year honours had gone to Bergkamp, while the previous year’s winner, Wouters, had been controversially traded by Van Gaal.
Van Gaal was going to stand or fall by the performances of his new-look side in 1993–1994 after two years of his leadership but still no Eredivisie title to show for it.
Litmanen was given the responsibility of assuming Bergkamp’s No. 10 shirt, and he more than fulfilled it. The Finn, who scored an astonishing 36 goals in 39 appearances across all competitions, was nothing short of a revelation. He was given the Footballer of the Year title for his efforts.
While Litmanen helped Ajax score an incredible 36% more goals than their next highest scoring competitors, they nevertheless maintained the hardest defensive in the competition. The back four and a half of Edwin Van Der Sar, Danny Blind, Sonny Silooy, Frank De Boer, and Rijkaard only conceded 26 goals over the course of the 34-game season.
Legacy
Even though his club had qualified for the Champions League, Van Gaal seemed content with the team he had at his disposal. The only players he acquired were backup goalkeeper Fred Grim and Winston Bogarde, who played in just 19 games. Once more, Van Gaal was given the benefit of the doubt.
In all competitions, Van Gaal’s team only suffered a single defeat in 1994–1995: a 2-1 defeat to Feyenoord in extra time of the KNVB Cup quarterfinals.
That resulted in Ajax finishing the season as the first and, to date, only Invincibles in Dutch football, with an absurd record of 27 victories, seven draws, and no defeats, 106 goals scored, and just 28 goals surrendered.
Ajax won the Champions League during that unbeaten streak, and as a result, they were named European champions for the first time since Cruyff led them to three straight victories in 1971, 1972, and 1973.
The 85th-minute goal by 18-year-old replacement Patrick Kluivert gave Ajax the victory in the championship, which was all the more satisfying for Van Gaal because it came against Fabio Capello’s AC Milan, who had humiliated Cruyff’s Barcelona with a 4-0 defeat in the final the year before.
Finally, Van Gaal had the upper hand over his former rival: he had used Cruyff’s thoughts, system, and team in that 1995 victory and had outperformed the late great player himself.
Van Gaal nearly accomplished the same feat the following year, guiding Ajax to a third straight championship for the first time since 1968 and pushing Marcello Lippi’s Juventus to a shootout in the 1996 Champions League final.
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Sadly, that was the beginning of the end for the outstanding Ajax team. The post-Bosman transfer market created a scary new world where Dutch teams, including Ajax, had little chance of keeping onto their finest players in the face of temptation from England, Spain, and notably Italy over the following couple of years.
By 1999, every member of the Ajax team that won the 1995 Champions League final had departed the organisation.
Reflection
It is remarkable, however, how extraordinarily and consistently successful those players would remain at a variety of clubs: Van Der Sar at Manchester United; Reiziger, Kluivert, and the De Boer brothers at Barcelona; Clarence Seedorf at Real Madrid, Inter, and Milan; Edgar Davids at Juventus; and Bergkamp, Overmars, and Kanu at Arsenal.
Regarding Van Gaal, well, given how closely he and Cruyff were connected, there was only ever going to be one place for him to go after leaving Ajax in 1997, right?