Johan Cruyff and the incredible wallpaper drawings that explain modern football (2024)

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The wallpaper is dated, patterned with roses, and was taken from a cupboard at a Spanish Airbnb property 12 years ago.

Folded four times, and in recent months buried at the bottom of a house-moving box, it spreads across a dining table when unfurled. Its reverse side is inscribed in spidery writing, half in Dutch, half in English, that takes the reader into the mind of Johan Cruyff and his ideas for the future of Ajax.

It is a document, never seen publicly before, that explains the shape of modern European football as we know it.

Johan Cruyff was a man of multiple lives. There was Cruyff the player and Cruyff the coach — if he had lived just one of them, he would still go down as one of football’s most consequential figures. Put them together? A giant.

As a player, he won eight Eredivisie titles and three European Cups with Ajax, before moving to Barcelona for a then world-record transfer fee and lifting the La Liga trophy in his first season. In 1974, he led the Netherlands to the World Cup final. He won three Ballon d’Or trophies. But then there are the details which cannot be captured in a list of silverware — the speed, the footwork, the interplay, the sheer, unadulterated beauty of his play.

As a coach, he shared his footballing inheritance. Back at Ajax, he brought through a new generation of Dutch footballers — Marco van Basten, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank Rijkaard, Ronald Koeman — before returning to Barcelona, where he won four consecutive La Liga titles and a European Cup. One of the players in that team was Pep Guardiola. As the Spaniard’s mentor, and the architect of the style which came to be known as ‘tiki-taka’, Cruyff was the single greatest influence on the now Manchester City manager’s coaching career.

In the early 2010s, Cruyff was working as an advisor to Barcelona, where Guardiola had just delivered two Champions League titles. Back in Amsterdam, however, Ajax’s academy was running dry. Though the club were still winning domestic titles, their style of play was staid, and they had only progressed past the group stage of the Champions League once in the previous 10 years. Cruyff was compelled to help, despite the web of politics that had pushed him towards his return to Catalonia.

“It was a love-hate relationship that he had with Ajax,” says Ruben Jongkind, a former youth coach at the club, who worked closely with Cruyff in the years before his death from lung cancer in 2016. “For his wife, Danny, she had more of a hate relationship — she saw what the club did to him in all those years from when he was a player, a coach, a director, an advisor; she saw the suffering and the backstabbing.”

But Ajax was an addiction for Cruyff. He was born less than a kilometre away from the club’s old De Meer Stadium — if Ajax had made him, he would remake Ajax, politics be damned. The issue, to effect change at such a large corporation, was planning.

“Johan never wrote anything down,” says Jongkind. “Once, we sat to plan training sessions, and I asked him, ‘Where are your exercises (diagrams of player drills)?’ He replied, ‘Well what do you want to know?’. And then he just spoke for two to three hours.”

His was an idiosyncratic way of working.

“I’ve always thought he was a mathematical genius,” says Jasper van Leeuwen, head of talent recruitment at Ajax’s academy under Cruyff’s reforms. “Did you know he never had a phone? So he had no storage for numbers — but he’d borrow his wife’s phone, or use the landline, and he knew all the numbers by heart. And then he would always be playing Sudoku — for hours and hours.

“The way he spoke was chaotic, jumping from idea to idea mid-sentence. But he’d be constantly thinking about spaces and time, and he saw them so quickly — like Einstein.”

What Cruyff’s brain needed was a translator. As plans to reform Ajax took hold, Jongkind was on holiday in Spain during the winter break. He heard his ringtone — Cruyff on wife Danny’s phone — and scrambled to find a sheaf of paper large enough to sketch out his mentor’s plans.

All there was, in the back of a cupboard, was the roll of flowered wallpaper.

Together, the two men mind-mapped Cruyff’s total vision for Ajax — ready to present to the board on their return to Amsterdam. It has never been seen publicly until now.

Carefully, avoiding the wet coffee rings on the table, Jongkind unfurls the paper.

Fifty years ago this month, Cruyff led the Netherlands to the final of the 1974 World Cup against tournament hosts West Germany. His side’s fluid, attacking brand of play — based on Ajax over the previous five years — was known as totaalvoetbal (total football).

It is hard to call this Cruyff’s crowning moment, because it came without a coronation — ending in a 2-1 defeat in that final. This was, however, a month which formed a nation’s footballing identity — the Netherlands had not even qualified for a World Cup since 1938 — establishing ideals which shaped not just Dutch football, but also the sport in the modern era.

The Dutch team’s shirts were numbered alphabetically rather than by position — apart from Cruyff, who wore his famous No 14 — leaving goalkeepers wearing No 8 and central midfielders as No 3. Those incongruities, however, reflect the vision of Cruyff and the team’s coach, Rinus Michels.

Through positional interplay — players capable of operating in any of several roles on the pitch, rather than sticking to a rigid formation — the Netherlands created a brand of ruthless yet beautiful football. Propelling themselves to the final with wins over Brazil and Argentina, some aspects of their play were 40 years ahead of their time.

“Jan Jongbloed wasn’t the best goalkeeper,” explains Keje Molenaar, a former Ajax and Netherlands right-back who played alongside Cruyff for two years. “But he’d be 20 yards into the field, filling in the gaps — he was an 11th (outfield) player.”

“The special thing for me, looking back, is how they ran when Johan was on the ball,” adds Wim Jonk, the former Ajax, Inter Milan, and PSV Eindhoven midfielder who won 49 caps for the Netherlands. “There were so many people in and around the box, and that made them so difficult to defend.”

This Wednesday, June 19, was the 50th anniversary of the singular action which Cruyff is most remembered for — the Cruyff Turn, where a player uses their instep to knock the ball through their own legs, completing a 180-degree turn and misdirecting the defender up against them. Cruyff unveiled it in a group game at that World Cup against Sweden in Dortmund. Though it didn’t help the Dutch win a match that ended goalless.

1. The ‘Cruyff turn’ is born

Johan Cruyff is rightly remembered as one of the best ever, but this moment is why generations of children have grown up repeating his name.

A faked cross, a silky spin and a bamboozled Swedish defender saw the world name the Dutchman’s skill as… pic.twitter.com/YeD8UvpyYu

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) June 13, 2024

“It’s pure intelligence,” says Jongkind, explaining what that single moment displays of Cruyff. “It’s being able, in the shortest space and time, to find a solution — but to do so in a totally different way. It’s also the same way he thinks in terms of running football clubs — be unique in yourself, and do what others don’t do.”

“It reminds me of one of his favourite phrases,” adds Van Leeuwen. “‘Every disadvantage has its advantage’.”

The final of that World Cup, however, brought defeat.

After going ahead through a second-minute penalty won by Cruyff’s swerving run, the Dutch were reeled in by a technically inferior West Germany side. The Netherlands were accused of playing with arrogance while ahead — trying to score the perfect goal to embarrass the opposition. Ordinarily, losing in these circ*mstances might have ruptured a person’s ideals. For Cruyff, it only entrenched them.

“This is the way I understood him,” says Jongkind. “He wanted to win, of course. But he saw football as a means, not an end.”

A 25-minute tram ride into eastern Amsterdam is the neighbourhood of Betondorp — literally translated as Concrete Town. Built in the aftermath of the First World War, its social housing is avant-garde yet hard-edged, not unlike its most famous son.

“I first saw him as an eight or nine-year-old,” remembers Sjaak Swart, nicknamed Mr Ajax, who played alongside Cruyff for club and country for nine years, making 603 appearances for the club. Swart, now 85, had a nickname for Cruyff, nine years his junior: ‘Jopi’. “Every Saturday, I arrived at the stadium early to watch him play with my buddies. He was so little, but already such a talented boy. Then, at four o’clock, he’d be a ball boy — he only lived 60 yards from the stadium.”

The construction of Betondorp gets to the heart of another Dutch concept. Maakbaarheid is the desire to transform and control an entire physical environment — to shape the world’s complexity into whatever you wish it to be. This is a country defined by it, shaped from land once below water — and Cruyff’s roll of flowered wallpaper, his vision for the totality of Ajax, is his own personal maakbaarheid.

Its eventual implementation only came after a long, political battle — many at Ajax thought the reforms were too sudden, too idealistic, and too extreme. But over the next five years, the club’s academy began to produce again. Frenkie de Jong. Matthijs de Ligt. Donny van de Beek. Dozens of others who now play across Europe’s top five domestic leagues.

In 2017, Ajax fielded the youngest-ever side in a major European final, while two years later they were only a freak Tottenham Hotspur comeback in the second leg of their semi-final away from reaching a Champions League final. In recent years, their principles have been adopted by the Netherlands’ other top clubs, Feyenoord and PSV.

This was the first attempt by Cruyff to formulate his footballing philosophy into a coherent and replicable whole — the Cruyff Plan.

The wallpaper is around one square metre when unfurled, and its content is built around two central circles: Ajax 1.0 and Ajax 2.0. Jongkind and Van Leeuwen did not want to publish it in full detail — ”You could build a club with this!” — but much of it can be shared.

On the left side, Ajax 1.0 is Cruyff’s analysis of what the club were doing at that moment. Arrows branch off into sections which, in Dutch, are titled collaboration, finances, first-team football, business model, youth training, and, most intriguingly, mission.

That final bubble outlines the aim to compete in the latter stages of the Champions League with a team under the age of 23, a hope which came to pass, built on three core development areas — to have the best young first team, the best training staff for talent development, and to balance the club’s budgets.

Cruyff’s father, Hermanus, died of a heart attack when the future football superstar was just 12 — forcing his mother Petronella to change jobs and giving their son a fixation with financial security which he would carry into his own professional life. The plan names several players deemed as expensive but unsuccessful transfers — and suggests a change of focus.

At the top of the paper, calculations suggest an increase in young player investment from 6% of the club’s total budget to 7.5% — it may not sound like much, but is sizeable for a club who were only spending €100million each season.

“This was a source of conflict,” remembers Jongkind. “The board didn’t want to do this, because they didn’t see the value creation which academy investment could offer — but when it eventually happened a few years down the line, it eventually created a few hundred million euros.”

Today, the concept of funding an elite club’s business through academy-player sales has been most heavily adopted by Manchester City and the City Football Group (CFG) — led by Txiki Begiristain, who was originally brought to work at Barcelona by Cruyff. The Cruyff Plan was drawn up in 2012, a year before CFG was founded.

But these are all lofty ideals — unless that talent can actually be developed.

Moving to the right-hand side of the sheet, Ajax 2.0 features three aphorisms — “Talent is everywhere. Talent can be developed. Environment affects development”.

The largest section of the Cruyff Plan, but also its most sensitive, is devoted to changing the Ajax environment — highlighting an increasing use of technology, the creation of a research and development centre, and challenging an inherent conservatism within the club’s existing regime. “You know much more about experienced players than those with high potential,” it reads.

One of Cruyff’s focuses here was education, and specifically how to adapt it to a footballing setting — factors he considers include self-regulation, individual approaches and flexible schedules, as well as overarching concerns, such as fun, housing availability, and poverty reduction. Once again, it is football as a means, rather than an end.

Cruyff was also interested in multi-club models — recognising the potential advantages of having several mini-Ajaxes across the globe. Listing locations such as Jamaica, Brazil and South Africa (written as Ajax Cape Town), the plan outlines the desire to improve social conditions in the area around each academy, while generating elite-level talents using Cruyff’s footballing principles, before reinvesting money from any sales of players produced back into the foundation.

But one part of this section, entitled “Phase Two”, shows the full range of Cruyff’s long-term planning. Under the sub-section “Ajax UK” is the name of one club — Brentford.

At the time, the west London side were in the English third tier, with owner Matthew Benham having taken full control less than six months before. However, Cruyff was not only keeping an eye on the now Premier League club down in League One, but he recognised a kindred spirit in what they were doing.

“They were thinking differently, innovatively, even back then,” Jongkind says. Nine years after he wrote down their name, Brentford won promotion to enter the Premier League for the first time.

Written out, the Cruyff Plan appears a symbiosis of the CFG model (how a club can dominate their own environment) and those of Brentford and Brighton & Hove Albion (at a European level, how Ajax can gain on clubs with far higher budgets than their own).

Separately, Jongkind and Jonk, both of whom were already coaching in Ajax’s academy, worked with Cruyff to distil his on-pitch philosophy into eight universal principles, which could be coached at all levels across the club. These had already been implemented at Barcelona, through Cruyff’s time as their coach, and passed down to Guardiola and Begiristain — but his fundamentals had always been imparted in a loose, unstructured way, absorbed through osmosis.

“Johan was all about intuition,” today’s Netherlands head coach Ronald Koeman, a former player and coach at Barcelona, told Dutch football magazine Voetbal International (VI) in 2016. “When he came to training in the morning, he had nothing prepared, he had no plan what to do. It just came to him.”

“I was always speaking to him on the phone,” remembers Jonk. “We asked ourselves: what is attractive football, what is attacking football, and how can we make it as simple as possible? And this is where we began to talk about principles. We didn’t want hundreds of them — just eight. And we wanted to produce players with high intensity, but also creativity.”

The eight they produced were:

• Compact the pitch (when defending)
• Counterpressing (win the ball back immediately)
• Deep before wide (the first pass should always go forward)
• Create an extra man in the midfield
• Third-man runs (create opportunities for players who cannot be found with a direct pass)
• Create one-vs-ones
• Positional interplay (players should be capable of fulfilling multiple roles)
• Forward defending

Taken together, it is the simplest formulation of a style now seen across the globe, particularly through Guardiola’s Manchester City teams in the Premier League.

“The old paradigm was thinking in terms of formations — but Cruyff wanted to make that looser, but with non-negotiable principles,” says Van Leeuwen.

This thinking sparked the title of the Cruyff Plan — ‘Op weg naar georganiseerde chaos’. In English? ‘Towards organised chaos’.

Koeman tells a story about moving to Barcelona from PSV in 1989.

He had played against Cruyff and Ajax for Groningen early in that decade when they were at opposite ends of their playing careers and was later coached by him at the Amsterdam club — while, in a strange circularity, Cruyff’s Ajax debut in 1964 came against a Groningen side featuring Koeman’s father, Martin.

On arriving in Catalonia, Koeman rented a house next door to that of his coach, whose wife Danny became a support network for his own partner, Bartina.

If the new arrivals ever returned home late at night, Koeman would ban Bartina from flushing the toilet, in case Cruyff could hear it through the shared wall, and question his professionalism.

It shows how closely the pair were intertwined.

It is unsurprising, given their relationship, that Koeman’s sides as a manager show some hallmarks of Cruyff’s.

Going through those eight principles of football, the Ajax coaches and Dutch journalist Pieter Zwart, editor-in-chief of VI, believe the Netherlands displayed five tenets against Poland in their opening game of Euro 2024 last weekend.

“Xavi Simons is key to it, because they’re playing with Denzel Dumfries high on the right wing,” explains Zwart. “That means Simons can become the fourth midfielder, and sometimes with Memphis Depay dropping in (from striker), he can become a fifth. When they’re coming into the opponents’ half, then (Nathan) Ake was coming forward (from left-back), also creating problems by being an extra man.

“You can look at the famous clip of Cruyff where he’s explaining the diamond — he’s basically explaining what Ake was doing in that game.”

Yet Koeman is not totally wedded to his former mentor’s ideals.

Historically, Koeman has felt a side can only play in this way if they have the best players — so that while Guardiola might be able to at City, this Netherlands team does not afford him full freedom.

“Koeman is a little inspired by Cruyff, but for me, he is not a coach for taking a lot of risks,” explains Jonk. “Against Poland, after playing a good possession game, they started to get passive — and if the Netherlands start passive, then we are in trouble.”

“They are very different personalities,” agrees Molenaar, who played with both Cruyff and Koeman at Ajax. “Johan was much more adventurous. The only thing that is left is the basic 4-3-3. Koeman is a little scared, I think. Remember, he was a defender. Johan would never think like that.”

Part of the reason his ideals no longer proliferate the Dutch national team is what happened in late 2015. Amid infighting at Ajax over the implementation of the Cruyff Plan, 14 members of the academy staff left, including Jongkind and Jonk. The following March, Cruyff died of lung cancer at age 68.

There has been a marked decline in the Ajax academy’s productivity. In the Netherlands’ opening game of these Euros, not a single current or even former Ajax player was in Koeman’s starting XI, and PSV and Feyenoord now create more players for the national team — while using several of Cruyff’s ideas. At PSV, as explored by The Athletic last year, they have moved to principles rather than formations, with an added focus on education and psychology.

In many ways, despite his face serving as the facade of Ajax’s Amsterdam Arena stadium, which was renamed after him in 2018 following his death, Cruyff’s legacy is upheld abroad, or at Ajax’s rivals, rather than by his hometown club.

“Barcelona accepted fresh ideas more readily than Ajax,” says Jongkind. “In the Netherlands we have a saying: ‘If your head is too high above the grass, we’ll cut it off’.”

Watching games at Euro 2024, Cruyff’s wider influence is clear. Guardiola’s successes at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City have hastened the implementation of his football across the continent, but Cruyff himself was responsible for several of the Spaniard’s most famous tweaks.

”If you look at all the stuff that Guardiola is doing now, with the square in midfield, the full-backs in midfield, Cruyff was doing this already with Barcelona in 1996,” explains Zwart. “Watching the Netherlands 50 years ago, you can see their influence on the Spanish team — but Germany are also displaying a lot of ‘Cruyffian’ principles.”

Julian Nagelsmann is a devotee of Cruyff and Guardiola, building his Germany team on the fundamentals of high-line and extreme counter-pressing. His front four of Florian Wirtz, Kai Havertz, Ilkay Gundogan and Jamal Musiala are this tournament’s best example of positional interplay.

“The only Netherlands players I saw interchanging (against Poland) were (Tijjani) Reijnders and Simons — but Germany’s attack were doing it the whole time,” says Van Leeuwen. “I also saw third-man runs with them. They’d play it into an attacker before dropping it to Musiala or Wirtz — and Havertz is also really good at it. If you look at the principles, Nagelsmann is using almost all of them.”

“The way Germany is playing is exactly how Johan wanted to play,” adds Molenaar. “He always thought that football was about amusem*nt, that was why people came to the stadium. You have to do your utmost to give your best to the people. When you look at (Germany’s) Manuel Neuer, that’s a goalkeeper Johan would love. He has guts.”

But it isn’t just the Germans. “If you look at the positional play of England now, particularly what they’re doing with Bukayo Saka, it’s all about creating one-vs-ones — it’s totally Guardiola, taken from Cruyff,” explains Jongkind.

When asked which innovation over the last eight years Cruyff would have most enjoyed, Jongkind and Van Leeuwen reply: “The Premier League”.

“It’s crazy,” Van Leeuwen says. “They’re all playing Cruyffian football — even Burnley.”

They are particularly effusive about how he would have enjoyed parts of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool — whose gegenpressing is a cousin of Cruyff’s own ‘three-second rule’ of regaining possession.

“(Current PSV manager) Peter Bosz told Cruyff that he has a five-second rule,” laughs Jongkind, knowing what his mentor would say next. “And Cruyff made him close his eyes and count to five. (Then Cruyff said) ‘It’s too long, eh!’.”

By now, the conversation is loose and fluid, topics interchangeable. The wallpaper is tucked away, because, for all its insight, it would take more ink than Amsterdam’s canals have water to fully outline Cruyff’s footballing inheritance. Just as certain mathematical truths cannot yet be formulated, a sheet of paper cannot define the entirety of his vision.

“One of the things he always spoke about was the beauty of the game,” Jongkind says of Cruyff. “When he was 4-0 up, he said he’d aim for the post because of the spectacle — especially when there was rain, to see the water spraying off the crossbar. It was about entertaining as well as functionality.”

“I miss him,” says Jonk. “His phone calls. Because we’d chat about life, not just football. He was always looking for new things. So yes, I often think about him. He was like your second dad. That was Cruyff for me.”

(Top graphic: Peter Robinson/EMPICS via Getty Images; design Eamonn Dalton)