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- [00:00]
Advertiser
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- [02:27]
Michael Bailey
Hi everyone, IO here. And we're bringing you something pretty special today from our friends over at the Athletic FC Tactics podcast. This summer, they've launched Football Architects, a five part series telling the unsung tales behind modern football success stories from Belgium to Croatia, England and plenty more. This is episode one, the story of Ajax and how Johan Cruyff rebuilt the academy in his image. The first three episodes are live now on the Athletic FC Tactics podcast. Feedback. Hello and welcome to Football Architects, a summer series for the Athletic FC Tactics podcast. Over the next five weeks, we'll tell the stories of esteemed footballing nations and clubs, speaking to the unsung heroes who changed history from Belgium's golden generation. Press on. Oh, it's absolutely brilliant. To the DNA of the English national team.
- [03:23]
Liam Tharm
Pressure.
- [03:25]
Advertiser
What pressure.
- [03:26]
Michael Bailey
Pressure is for tyres and the rebirth of Ajax.
- [03:29]
Jacob Whitehead
It was a do or die moment.
- [03:32]
Michael Bailey
I'm Michael Bailey, this is Football Architects. We begin with the story of Ajax's rebirth. To tell this tale, we have to go back to September 2010. Dutch giants Ajax faced Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in the group stages of the Champions League. Just like their Spanish opposition, this was a club with European pedigree. The famous total football team of the 1970s won three successive European Cups between 1971 and 73. In 1995, they won another European cup without losing a single match in the competition. But in 2010, things hadn't been going so well for this historic club in Europe or domestically. They had failed to win the Eredivisie in six attempts. And the disparity between this once great team and perennial winners Madrid was stark. That was Madrid striker Gonzalo iguain making it 20 at the Bernabeu. In the fallout from that game, a plan was set in motion which would change the course of the club's history. In a damning column for De Telegraph, Ajax legend Johan Cruyff.
- [05:02]
Reuben Jonkind
Ajax is not Ajax anymore.
- [05:04]
Michael Bailey
So after years of decline, how was the club rebuilt in Cruyff's image?
- [05:08]
Jacob Whitehead
So it was put into this Cruyffian model that was based on eight principles of play. Those principles were sacred.
- [05:18]
Michael Bailey
With me throughout this series is the Athletic's Jacob Whitehead.
- [05:22]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Hello.
- [05:23]
Michael Bailey
We're going to be hearing excerpts from Jacob's interviews with key figures who are at the forefront of these projects. And along the way, a number of our writers will be joining us to break down the tactics, innovations and the legacies left behind. Jacob. Let's start with that famous Cruyff column from 2010. He was less than happy with the state of the club at this time, wasn't he?
- [05:45]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, Cruyff was at the end of his tether. I mean, we know what a hugely symbolic figure he is in Dutch football, and here he's writing a benevolence biggest broadsheet. It's effectively kind of a dik tat from on high, an address. And when he chose in a famous column after that game to say, I don't think that Ajax is Ajax anymore, that's a really, really strong message. I mean, like, you know, we fuss about Gary Neville sort of saying that Man U isn't Man U anymore. I mean, like, think how much of a bigger figure that Johan Cruyff is. He was effectively annoyed because Ajax in the 70s, 80s, when Cruyff was playing for them, and Even in the 90s, when we were in Champions League with a young and exciting team, have always had not just success associated with them, but also style and youth development. And Cruyff sort of felt like the club was drifting. They'd still be strong enough to win the occasional league title, but it really wasn't an inspiring brand of football. They weren't producing many top players anymore. So, for example, in the youth academy in that time, there's a few good players, like, you know, there's Christian Eriksen, Daley, blind, Thomas Vermalen, but of only those blind was kind of the only one who was properly Ajax in terms of going through the academy all the way rather than joining at 16. And this defeat to Real Madrid, to Cruyff, just really showed just how far they'd fallen away from the European elite. This is a club he loved dearly, very close to his heart, and this is kind of his intervention, I guess, in a way. And when he said this, it kind of sparked another debate about Ajax. Do they carry on doing what they were doing or do they go for the more difficult option of ripping it up? Bringing Cruyff back into the fold, he had been sort of spending that time in Barcelona and, yeah, really set the wheels in motion for the reformation of Ajax.
- [07:25]
Michael Bailey
Time to introduce the first interviewee of this series. This is Reuben Jonkind, former head of talent development at Ajax.
- [07:33]
Reuben Jonkind
The whole structure was not in place. So what we found is the football was not top. People were leaving the state, were complaining, the fans, like, it was not really dominant, it was a little bit boring. Players of high quality didn't come through the academy anymore. Basically, the level was like, not even Champions League, but below and not even there. They were able to compete very well, let's say, between around 2010, a little bit before. So a lot had to be worked on to change. And Cruff, of course, saw this and, well, what he said is, Ajax is not Ajax anymore. Those were the famous words that he wrote in his column in the Telegraph.
- [08:14]
Michael Bailey
Now, before we tell this story for any of you who don't know, Johan Cruyff is not only an Ajax and Barcelona legend, but one of the great revolutionaries of the game. An exceptionally gifted player, he won it all in football, from league titles to European Cups, and on an individual level, with three Ballon d'Or to his name, he was the key cog in, in the invention of Total Football by Ajax Netherlands manager Rinus Mikkels Jacob. Can you give us a bit of an explanation of Total Football?
- [08:44]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Of course. He's such a remarkable figure, isn't he? Because, I mean, he's got a top five playing career just on himself and then as a coach he's got total football and, you know, which he helped implement when he was playing as an administrator. I mean, just what a titan of football. And he first came into our consciousness, I guess. Well, not mine, I was minus 20. But as part of Total Football 1974 World cup, where this Dutch side basically had this incredibly fluid attacking system, didn't come out of a vacuum like it built on the work of like the Hungarian teams, for example, of 10, 20 years before, but effectively the. The conception was that included having super technical footballers who were capable of playing in many positions across the pitch. Like this isn't say that they'd have like a striker playing left back, but it's all to do with being able to bring your left back up into midfield, having your midfielders pushing ahead of the strikers. So, for example, while Cruyff technically sort of, I guess, played as the spear of it, just as often you'd see him pulling back on the likes of Johann Neschkens or Willem von Haenigan pushing ahead. And it meant that in an era where opposition defences were very solid, set in their ways, deep block, they were just getting pulled from pillar to post by this system, it looked so different to what teams had been doing before. And in 1974, when they ran to the final of a World cup using this system and in a bit of a travesty for football history, end up losing that final 2:1 to Germany, end.
- [10:00]
Advertiser
Of the game and West Germany have won the World cup, there's the.
- [10:06]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
It just captured the ideas because I think that's one of the World Cup's greatest teams of all time. Despite not winning it. And that just I suppose shows quite how good this football was. So many of the principles are used now. I mean, you could argue this is probably the first time that goalkeepers who are good with their feet were properly prioritized. Like Jan Janblood. The goalkeeper at that time was not the best shot stopper in Holland and yet still did it was still picked. I mean, they used the midfield diamond was really pioneered here in kind of all of its technicality. And the big one for Cruyff was adding an extra man in midfield. And I mean, just watch how games are won now. And that principle is just so central. And I'm sure we'll come on to that, come on to that later as well.
- [10:48]
Michael Bailey
Absolutely. And producer Mike actually came up with a little gem here. We can actually hear an old clip of Johan Cruyff from 2004 with a chalkboard at the ready. Here he explains his diamond formation.
- [11:09]
Liam Tharm
This applies to many things like the diamond, because the way I draw it, nobody does. When I played you had four at the back. Right midfielder, left midfielder and a holding midfielder. And they make a diamond. When you put an attacking midfielder at the top of the diamond and two strikers in front. I play as a coach with the diamond like this, with two wingers. That's how I play it. And if you have a player like Marco Van Basten, then I remove the attacking midfielder and add a striker. So I would never play with a diamond. If you've got a world class striker, I always play with three men in midfield. We used to play like this too in the 1970s. But what they did back then was sub out the left back and put them in midfield. Rude Kroll in those days. And then you've got your diamond in the middle again. And this 3, 4, 3 is how we always played with Barcelona when I coached them. So when we played with three at the back, we played against two strikers. When the opponent had the ball, one of your midfielders gets to play on the left. But once you've got the ball, the left midfielder has to move inside, then he gets space on the left. Then the left winger has to run forward and the striker has to move away. And that's when one of the two side backs start moving forward. That's why these side backs used to be wingers like Sergi at Barcelona, Reitzigern. So they would run forward. You then achieve two things. If the opposition striker doesn't respond, the whole team would start to complain, the coach included. And secondly, if he did run back after 10 of those runs he would be wrecked and no longer dangerous offensively.
- [12:39]
Reuben Jonkind
The same a trade as it.
- [12:41]
Advertiser
Well, dude.
- [12:51]
Michael Bailey
We'Ll post a link to the video on our social media as well because it's genuinely fascinating to see his mind whirring as he lays out his ideas. And Cruyff continued to develop these ideas as a manager starting out with his beloved Ajax before establishing the famous Barcelona dream team. How did they both play and how influential were those teams?
- [13:12]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Jacob, you really start to I guess see the inverted fullbacks come into fruition really clearly Sergi with Ferrer. And it's kind of really lovely to see how Guardiola and Tsiki Burgerstein were central to those teams as well in the midfield pivots. Like there's such a clear link in football history which you can see like this isn't any degrees of separation. It's Cruyff, it's Guardiola and it's for now, right, like. And there's so many principles of Manchester City whether it's the goalkeeper, whether it's the inverted fullbacks, whether it's the wingers who like to drift inside and cut in, which are really great to see. I mean and this Barcelona team, their success at the continental level, obviously Ajax had it as well but this Barcelona team I suppose really took it to the next level in terms of proof of concept.
- [13:55]
Michael Bailey
Tell us what you've learned about Kroyff's relationship with Ajax as well Jacob, because I mean it's a pretty complex one, isn't it? We've heard a bit about it obviously already in terms of his position and what it meant for him to basically, basically speak publicly or write publicly on the subject. But how about the rest of it?
- [14:12]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, because I mean there's an extent to which his relationship with Barcelona was also formed by his fractious relationship with Ajax. This was a club where Ajax was the club of his heart or the club he grew up with. I've been to the post war neighbourhood where he was born and it's literally across the road from Ajax's old stadium. Like you'd walk there in two, three minutes and he grew up dreaming of playing for Ajax. He was in the youth academy from when he was 12, 13 years old. Played with Sioux Squatt, the most storied player in Ajax's history. But then the club hasn't always loved him as much as you'd expect it to be warranted given the player of his stature. I mean even at the end of his playing career Ajax didn't quite think he was good Enough and he went over to Feyenoord. I mean, like, he then had numerous sort of fallings out with the board after, in terms of being an advisor, coming back, not coming back. His wife, Danny, actually didn't want him to come back as an advisor in 2010, given how he'd been treated by the club. In 2008, he'd been going to come back to the club in a sort of technical director role, which ended up falling through. And the best way to think about this is there's a quote from an Ajax director in the early noughties, which is, ajax is not a football club. Ajax is a political party. And that's the best way to think about it. I mean, it's this institution from Amsterdam, the largest city, it's the largest club there. Like, it is a massive part of Dutch culture. And that means that people are going to have different perceptions. And so you do have a kind of split between Cruyff and a total football acolyte and a more pragmatic school which in more recent years has been led by Louis Van Gaal. And Ajax does seem to lurch between extremes of who it's favouring, between the pragmatism and the idealism. And there's a point with Cruyff where Cruyff was invited back to be on the advisory board, but yet other members of the board wanted to bring in Louis van Gaal and it ended up going all the way to court. And Cruyff was saying, hang on, part of the deal here was that I would have veto, and you've ignored this. And anyway, it ended up getting settled in Cruyff's favour. And that was part of the reason why Cruyff was able to actually enact all of these sweeping reforms. But it just shows kind of, in a way how messy it all is. And I mean. I mean, looking back at it from benefit of hindsight, you just see quite how lucky Ajax were in a sense that Karuth was willing to fight the battles to this extent, given the fact that so many of these reforms, both in the 70s and now, have led the club to be the way that it is.
- [16:34]
Michael Bailey
Well, that leads us, Jacob, nicely, into hearing from someone you interviewed for your piece. It is Ajax's former head of talent recruitment, Jasper Van Leeuwen.
- [16:44]
Jacob Whitehead
Ajax is quite complicated in its structure. So it's both a company which is public, you know, public traded, and on the other hand, it's an association with six to 700 members, and the members are all people that have been within Ajax for A very long time. A lot of them have been volunteers, some of them have been board members. So it's quite a bunch. And all have a heart for the club. This structure makes life really complicated to both run the club and especially to reform the club. So. And then there's a cultural thing, almost a thing of taste. So there's people who really believe in the Cruyff methodology and the Cruyff vision. There's also people who have a slightly different view, especially after van Gaal has been successful in Ajax. He also had a following within the club, which is quite similar, but also in some ways very different, particularly about talent development. It's very different. So it's a big umbrella under which everybody hopes the best for Ajax. But not everybody agrees on the direction because Ajax was at the bottom. The sports perspective, but equally financially was a very big problem. There was no room for, let's say, gradual improvement or, you know, small changes. It was a do or die moment.
- [18:04]
Michael Bailey
Great stuff from Jasper there. So we've arrived at the stage of the inception of the Cruyff Plan at Ajax. Jacob, where is Cruyff and Rubens plan first hatched and what does it involve?
- [18:17]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
So, yeah, I mean, seeing as Ajax were potentially going to be handing the keys over to Cruyff, he actually needed to show what he was going to implement. So he sat with some of his allies. So this included Wim Yong, who played in the Netherlands and in England for a long time. Reuben Yonkins, who was actually sort of comes from more of an athletics physical background. And they basically got together and over the phone sort of started to sketch out what was actually going to happen next. And I've written about this before, but they found this roll of wallpaper in the back of an Airbnb cupboard and scribbled out this, this plot basically to show what it would be. So, I mean, you had this ix before, ix after. And yeah, they got invited to a big meeting in Amsterdam with the rest of the board.
- [19:01]
Reuben Jonkind
I was working with Wim Yongh and he was the ambassador of the Crow Foundation. And at a certain point Wim Johan asked Wim, like, okay, you're inside, please come to our meetings. Because he was holding some meetings with, let's say, the creme de la creme of Dutch football with Van Basten, Bergkamp, Brian Roy Reichardt, Peter Bouver, a lot of Van Schip, all former players, Pete Geisert, who was also involved, that were analyzing the situation at Ajax at that time. So one day we were invited and Wim said, okay, then I'll take Ruben. And I was drawing up stuff. Obviously I drew up some stuff on a wallpaper or I don't know if it's paper for presents. I had the ideas in my mind with Wim and we draw some things up. But at that moment, we had a little plan ready because we were inside and we knew, okay, if we work on this, we will improve, at least in the Academy. And we had to go, like, in this secret place, because nobody could know what was happening. It was not official at the time. We come up, I still remember, was a lot of stairs. It was pretty tough. We come up and then open the room. And I was like, whoa, Van Bastter. I got all these. And Johan, of course, there for me, it was like a boy's dream. But I knew I also had something to bring to the table. So that was my first meeting with Greif. We presented the plan after one hour of listening to all the complaints of the former players. But the solutions were not really there. And we had something on paper and Johan asked Wim, what. What do you guys have? Well, we printed something out. So we handed out the documents and Joran was like, yeah, with his particular voice. I didn't bring my glasses, but it sounds really good, so we have got to do this. So then he said, after everybody left, we were still sticking there. And he told me, okay, tomorrow you call this number and you have to go to Barcelona as fast as possible. I was like, oh, okay. That was a little bit his idea to present it, that we had to present the plan to other people, specialists. So I had to present things to other people and they improved the plan. And this is the way I got involved. And because I wrote the stuff he gave me and Wim, basically. And back then also Dennis Bergkamp, who was more involved in the first team, let's say, the key to be the managers of the Ajax Academy crowd thought, this is the way we have to go. This is what we have to do now.
- [21:26]
Michael Bailey
It's a fascinating story. And Jacob, you've actually seen the wallpaper that Ruben mentions?
- [21:32]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing artifact as a piece of football history. I mean, some nice flowers on it, too. I mean, a little bit chintzy maybe for my taste, but yeah, on blank side anyway, kind of. I guess the key part is this. I mean, it's. The club wants to compete in the latter stage of Champions League with a young team, mainly under 23, built on three core development areas. They wanted the best young first team, the best training staff and above all really because they needed to balance the club's budget and this was going to be the way that they ended up funding lots of the future. And I mean that did come to pass. They ended up, I think, selling about over 300, 400 million euros worth of players on the back of about 8 million euros investment in the academy a year. There's so many interesting bits where it's like they're taking influence from places like Brentford, back when they were like a League one club. This really multidisciplinary outlook. And so much of it was built into kind of an know, like Montessori, I guess, teaching methods as well, to actually get the kids really kind of well rounded. So much stuff to go into which it's a real shame we can't publish this in full.
- [22:34]
Michael Bailey
Maybe one day, hey, yeah, maybe one day indeed. I mean there's obviously the aims of the plan, but how did they actually go about implementing it and then restructuring the academy?
- [22:45]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, I suppose the key was that they didn't want to have to buy in talent because you go into a deficit, you have possibly inferior players and you don't actually sort of get that soul of a club. So there's certain kind of, I guess, concrete changes they made quite early on. One of them, which I quite like, is how traditionally it was the fact that the under 16, 17, 18 coach would always earn the most in the academy and the under six and seven coach would be on a pittance and gross. Guys came in and were sort of like, this doesn't really make sense as a principle of talent development. Like you learn all of these key motor skills really young and it forces people think, oh, I want to earn more money, so I'll try and win as many games as I can and then that will show I'm doing a good job and I can move up the age groups to under 12, under 13 and all the way up to the under 18s. And that's not actually what develops players. So they wanted to get rid of that as a motivation and instead put people on a flat salary. And that's one thing that helped. Another was really working hard to basically counteract relative age effect, which is the idea that kids born at the start of a selection period in the Netherlands, they do it by year. So it would be kids born in January, February, March are over represented compared to those at the end of the year. So while they still had to play matches in their age group, they kind of looked at it more holistically in groups. So for example, you might be in the 6 to 9 year old age group, the 9 to 12 year old age groups and there's loads of swapping of players around there. So one good example might be Nusair Mizrawi, who was late in the year and ended up actually getting played down a year, which when you think of a player, it is like a sort of a big club usually we always hear about them playing two, three years up or whatever, not him, and it actually really allowed him to flourish. And then there's the more substance of like scouting changes. So they had the system called TIPS, which had some outline of the players, but they needed to effectively make everything a bit more rigorous. So for example, they'd been hearing this stories from scouts about Frankie De Jong and discovered he wasn't actually on the system, despite the fact he was this huge talent at Willem II and he'd been missed because he wasn't necessarily that physically developed early on. So all of these sort of, I guess structure, concrete reformations are happening early on. But as of anything, this stuff takes a little bit of time to get hold. Yeah.
- [24:49]
Michael Bailey
And it's really interesting reading your piece for the Athletic because it, it seemed like Ajax almost had to unpick some of the trappings you maybe get from a big club and an academy that gets a bit stuck in its ways or maybe is doing things without really thinking about the effect or trying to get an edge or almost stick to its own identity. It felt a bit like Ajax maybe lost their way and this plan helped kind of rediscover what it was to, to be a, an academy prospect at Ajax and the way that it could work for the club in particular. So I mean this worked, didn't it?
- [25:23]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, I mean in results, I mean obviously we, I think we all probably remember with everyone to the semi finals of Champions League where it's a freak Tottenham Hotspur comeback in the end which denied them from being here when Ajax were the best team over those two leg.
- [25:39]
Advertiser
Oh, that's a great goal. What a hit by Hackings here.
- [25:43]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
They'd previously thrashed Real Madrid all the way in.
- [25:47]
Advertiser
This really is their night in paradise.
- [25:50]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
And now, I mean still, that squad has such an impact on European football. Like some of the players who came through this Ajax system at the time. You've got Ryan Gravenberch, Delicta Masrari at Man U, Botman at Newcastle, Frenkie De Jong, all passing through the doors of the TOU Comp switches the future in Darth Vax Academy called. And not only that, I suppose as a model of what an academy should look like. So, so much of it has been borrowed. I mean, later on, I mean, other Dutch academies started to follow in this footsteps and acts. Everyone's been caught up now that they've stepped away from this a little bit more. But so hugely influential in terms of balancing the books. I mean, yeah, they did that very much in terms of the club. They safeguarded the club for the next decade with some of his player sales.
- [26:33]
Michael Bailey
And what has happened since with the Cruyff plan, Have they sort of rode back on it? Have they stepped away from it or has it. How has it changed since, do you feel?
- [26:42]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
So do you remember us chatting about Ajax being a political party that reared its head again? So Craith got ill in 2015, as with Lung cancer, which effectively killed him a year later. At that time he looked, according to view of some people I spoke to, he was effectively, when he stepped down, that was almost used as an excuse to force some people out. So Rimj was under pressure to step down and when he left, basically 14 other members of the academy all left with him in solidarity. And Ajax went almost back to an older form of doing stuff. So obviously there's still like lots of residual stuff which they had and they still did produce players. I mean, you know, players later on, like, you know, for example, Graven Birch finished his academy journey in this new form of Ajax, but built on those principles. But I suppose there is an argument that they haven't quite been keeping up and that PSV's Academy or Feyenoord's Academy may now potentially be the more dominant ones in the Netherlands. They're still producing really good players like as Jiro Hato, who's going to be chatter of massive talk this summer. There's Jordi Macchio, the Belgian center back. He's already made his debut at 16. Like there is talent. I'm sure we'll come on to this later, but the first team is probably also maybe stepping away a little bit from what those old principles were stylistically as well.
- [27:54]
Michael Bailey
Brilliant stuff, Jacob. Next we will discuss the tactical revolution of this IAX team and the legacy of Cruyff.
- [28:06]
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- [30:56]
Michael Bailey
Hello and welcome back to Football Architecture, a summer series for the Athletic FC Tactics Podcast. We're recounting the stories of esteemed footballing nations and clubs. And today's focus is on Ajax. So let's zoom in on the tactical side of this Ajax regeneration, starting with the eight principles of Play which formed Johan Cruyff's methodology. Let's welcome one of the regular Tactics crew who will be familiar to us all. Liam Tharm is in the studio. Hello, Liam. May you run through Cruyff's principles of Play for us.
- [31:28]
Liam Tharm
They're all quite, actually fundamentally quite simplistic and there's a good mix of sort of in possession, out of possession stuff here. So compacting the pitch when defending, so as a unit, being as tight and as close together as you can be. The second is counter pressing, which obviously people will now recognize with Jurgen Klopp and it's a very German side of playing, but it's effectively being as aggressive as quickly as you can to put pressure on the ball as soon as you lose it and try and either win it back or force mistakes. The third one is being deep before wide, which is an in possession principle. So really that's, you know, trying to be as vertical as you can. The first pass, you go forward if and when is possible. Principle number four is creating an extra man in midfield, just looking for overloads really. And that links on to principle five, which is third man runs, which can be kind of complex to explain sort of verbally rather than visually, but involves when one player is passing to a second player, you've then got a third man, a different player who's making an off ball run, often trying to exploit space. So that often manifests kind of into. Into a wide triangle where you might get, say a central midfielder passing to a number 10 and then maybe a fullback on the outside running. Bey Principal number six is create 1v1s. Of course, everyone knows what those look like. Number seven is positional interplay, which isn't always kind of rotations, but more about players being able to fulfill multiple roles and do various things. The final one is forward defending, which kind of is just the forwards being involved in the pressing and heart the pitch. That kind of collective total football element.
- [32:46]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Liam's definitely right to talk about it being simplistic, because the idea was that these principles are kind of embedded in kids who join Ajax's academy from when they're seven or eight. You don't want to be talking about really complicated notions. I mean, fine, you might not call it a third man run until they're about 15, 16, but you're still actually kind of doing Those principles, the overwhelming, I guess, I guess kind of a mantra for this was, and you'll have to forgive my Dutch here was opweg nage organisire chaos in English, towards organized chaos. And really these are the eight tenets which when you put them all together, you get to that sort of wonderful meld of styles.
- [33:22]
Michael Bailey
Interesting, because football fans can get obsessed with formations and lineups, but these principles, I guess, are more fundamental to how a team plays and operates and what they want to do.
- [33:34]
Liam Tharm
Yeah, well, there's a silly point. It might seem like a silly point up until sort of the early teen years. Even then at academy level, sometimes they do it later. You don't play 11v11 for, you know, the, the formative chunks of your youth career when you're first developing players. Obviously there's reasons for that in terms of number of touches on the ball, just physical development. And obviously you're not going to Chuck A, a 7 year old onto a, you know, the 60 by 100 meter pitch or whatever because they're just not gonna be able to kind of COVID that space that no one needs me to explain why. But you then need to have a way where you can develop players and train players in accordance to do things that you're going to want them to be able to do and know how to do on big spaces with 10 other teammates, 11 other opponents, and that can still then work or it can have a way of working at a younger age group that really and will come onto it. But there's phrases I've heard from sort of other, other Dutch clubs in the academy and PSV are a great example where they talk about kind of filling the backpack technically with how they want to develop players almost, you know, giving them toolkits and those, those principles are saying, you know, you've got these various tools where you know how to do these things and you can then draw for whatever you see and whatever you then play what you see on the pitch and whatever you recognize in the scenario, you then know how to act upon it because you've been taught that right the way through. Even if the numbers or the, you know, specific positions and stuff change over time.
- [34:43]
Michael Bailey
The other thing, Liam, these principles can be backdated a fair amount of time. So have they had to change or evolve with how football has evolved? You know, it is, you know, regarded as a much more physical game, for example, now.
- [34:57]
Liam Tharm
Yeah, I think actually a lot of the evolution of football has progressed towards more of those principles, working with a fundamental still, because as Jake and I were saying they're, you know, quite simplistic things that you go and look at perhaps England DNA, for example, which is obviously something that's a lot more recent from the, you know, the late 2000s, early 2010s that would have taken a lot of inspiration from stuff like this. And they're simple fundamental principles because they are, when you put down to what works or what's effective, they are the ways of doing it. And obviously how that manifests can change. But I think with the rising kind of physicality, a lot of these become even more important. You can look at the idea of sort of third man runs, those extra players making the off ball runs. Midfielders especially, they're really key these days against the press where, you know, you get players that couldn't exchange passes between them and suddenly you can then get that release pass of perhaps a fullback playing diagonally inside to a midfielder. And that third man run from the midfielder can often split a press apart. I think the one that's maybe changed is the 1v1s. We see a lot of coaches now, a lot of head coaches that don't seem as keen for those in terms of, I don't know, they coach you out of place, but they don't. You don't get many coaches building a team or a philosophy or a style of play around that just because it's too risky in terms of turning the ball over too much. And I still think that the positional changes are really big. And I think Paris Saint Germain are a great example of that last season of a team that can have individuals that can pop up in different parts of the pitch and play in different ways. And of course, what we're really talking about with the physicality is the counter pressing rise, right. And that needs, in a sense, compactness with the team. So you've got players that are in close proximity to the ball and then close players around that player. So when the first player goes to press, they get backed up and there's not suddenly big spaces and you get the secondary and the tertiary press. So I actually think it's probably a sign of success in that those principles kind of stand the test of time and football's kind of moving towards that and perhaps in a way it's responsible for it too.
- [36:38]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Right.
- [36:39]
Liam Tharm
When you look at the number of coaches that were once players on, you know, in croft teams or that have at least been influenced by other people, the offshoots of this, when you look at perhaps like almost like a family trivet, right, it must be absolutely massive for the people that have been inspired or exposed to this throughout their career. So I think yeah, that's you know, kind of proves the the quality of them.
- [36:57]
Michael Bailey
Another point from your interviews Jacob, was players playing out a position in the academy to speed up their development. One example in this case is former Ajax defender, now of Manchester United of course, Matthias de Ligt. Let's hear once again from Ajax's former head of talent recruitment, Jasper van Leeuwen.
- [37:14]
Jacob Whitehead
Matthijs de Licht was a famous example. He was very strong at a young age and he very talented. So he was moved up two to three years, that's one. And not only was he moved up also he was left to play in midfield for a very long time even when we already knew that he would be a central defender. So for winning the matches at that moment in time that was quite a stupid move. So some youth coaches did not really like it. But for Matij's development it was perfect because he got to develop his 360 degree vision, his speed of action was improved and he was challenged much more.
- [37:54]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Jasper's explanation there is so good because it kind of shows this is part of a philosophical battle which is happening at Ajax at the time. He told me a really good story about an under 15 coach who was kind of uncertain about this notion of playing players out of position because you kind of have a double loss, right? You're not only let's say playing your best centre back in, in midfield and so losing a centre back but you're also forcing one of your best midfielders to either be on the bench or out of the team. And that meant that results weren't always great. And so this coach was like I'm not winning these matches, like you know, we should talk about this, it's not right. And Jasper said look, if you win the league title is this ever in the newspapers? Do you ever read about it? Surely if it is important you'd read about it in the newspapers and obviously they're not. I mean his point was it's important for you personally but it was not for the world in general. The priority is developing the super talent like Delict or whoever. It was like actually the Timber brothers are a really good example. They were recruited from Feyenoord. They played as a centre back duo together at Feyenoord and basically didn't concede any goals ever because they're physically quite early developers as well. And so part of the way they challenged them would be to get them to play elsewhere. And Quinton Timber, who's currently at Feyenoord, can basically now play anywhere in midfield. Jurrien Timbers now got the versatility to play center, back, full back, even as number six. So you sort of really see the benefits there and it feeds into that versatility which we saw in the growth Ian Principles as well.
- [39:30]
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- [41:29]
Michael Bailey
So the Academy has been rebuilt and Ajax are making their own stars again. The squad which gets to the 2017 Europa League final and 2019 Champions League semi final includes the likes of Academy graduates Matisse Delict and Donny Van De Beek. This is what Ajax is all about. Ajax are in again and Dolbeck. This time it's done enough. That is the away goal for Ajax ex Amsterdam. They're 51 up on aggregate.
- [41:55]
Liam Tharm
And now Leon needs 4.
- [42:02]
Michael Bailey
And the.
- [42:03]
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Cross will fall away.
- [42:10]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
There is PIs hockey here, hockey there at the line.
- [42:16]
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0. Feudal Ajax.
- [42:19]
Liam Tharm
It is mathematically done and dusted for the 34th time. Ajax, our champions of the Netherlands for.
- [42:29]
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The first time in five years.
- [42:34]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
And.
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Is delivered.
- [42:45]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Famous captain's goal for Ajax.
- [42:48]
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The Ajax boys have kicked over the old lady.
- [42:52]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
The upstarts have plundered the establishment. And the famous Ajax of Amsterdam are.
- [42:58]
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Into the semi finals of the Champions league for the first time since 1997.
- [43:09]
Michael Bailey
Liam, can you sort of take us through some of their strengths and weaknesses in terms of that team from a tactical point of view?
- [43:15]
Liam Tharm
Sure. I mean some of the strengths also seem like some of the weaknesses in a sense where a team sort of packed with technical quality, you know, you start to add up the chance I face that Inanna de Ligt Maserari, Donny van de Beek, Frankie de Jong, Nero, Ziyech Tadic. All kind of went for, you know, silly, silly money all put together. I mean all kind of going. I know. Ironically, quite a lot of them seem to end up at Manchester united with erik10hag but. But not always directly and with periods in between where they all went to very different clubs and top level teams. It's probably worth remembering then at the time as well. I think that was their first league title win for about five years and they were unbeaten at home that season, which people might expect to viax a lot but I think doesn't kind of always happen. I went back through and rewatched the highlights from the Bernabeu win and the winaway at Juventus as well. And their capacity to come from behind the moves of some of the goals that they scored, the way they so quickly get overloads and some of the finishes as well. I think the third goal at the Bernabeu is a really, really stylish goal where they, you know, win the ball back wide. And they're so quick at being so vertical. Kept from it by Nasrawi who also kept it in play for Ziyech. Brilliant, didn't he?
- [44:18]
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Masherari.
- [44:20]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
And there's Taliafico. And here's Van De Beek.
- [44:23]
Liam Tharm
There's a spare man here, Van De Beek and Tonic. A really, really talented to team overall. And perhaps the issue was being so technical to a sense where they maybe lack the physicality a little bit. But this was a really young and I think relatively inexperienced team at the top Champions League level. So I looked at the numbers of teams in the Champions League that season they were the second youngest with an average age of 24.3. Actually overall, when I looked at clubs that have actually gone deep in the competition since 2018, 19. So we're talking about six, seven years now or six, seven seasons worth. Only PSG who've done it twice and RB Leipzig have actually made Champions League semi finals with a younger team, which is quite amazing as a point of comparison. That is almost a bit of an overachievement in some sense. I think it's always a bit crushing when you get to the last four and you've won so many knockout games and you've shown really that you can pass those tests but not quite win that last one to get into the final, of course from such an advantageous position in the tie itself that, that I think retrospectively will always go down as some kind of failure or a missed opportunity at least. Failure feels quite harsh in that regard. But yeah, for so many reasons. It was clearly such a formative team.
- [45:32]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
And it wasn't a one off either, was it? I mean, two years earlier they got to the Europa League final with largely the same squad who were even younger at that point. Like I don't know what the average age was off the top of my head, but I think it was a record, at least at the time. You know, it had staying power. That squad, it just got broken up very quickly after, which was always going to be part of a plan and.
- [45:52]
Michael Bailey
Something that Ajax will probably always have to deal with if we bring it right up to say this season just gone. How has their style of play changed again? Francesco Farioli. He resigned from the post as manager after their quite spectacular failure to win the Eredivisie in the end. And did it feel like a far cry from the Cruyfuum way of playing?
- [46:14]
Liam Tharm
Well, he's much more of a pattern based coach from everything that I've seen and ironically almost feels too on brand to be an Ajax coach in the sense that, you know, to this guy that studied philosophy at university feels that's just kind of dripping with everything you'd want there. Right. But he's an interesting kind of coach to pivot to because from what I was looking at on Transfermarkt, he's the first non Dutch coach they've had since the late 90s. He just turned 35 when he joined, of course came and came from Nissan Liga. The pattern kind of worked similarly there where they started the season really, really strongly and fell away in the second half of the season. And the Critique, really, I think, which is fair of Fabioli, is he's really good at implementing these patterns in a very Italian manner very quickly and having some kind of instant success. But the shock factor seems to wear off in the second half of the season where everyone gets to play them again and they go, well, if you're always going to press in the same way and work the same patterns, then we face that once a season. We kind of know what they are. We can work it out a little bit more. So he only lost one of his first 22 games at Ajax and they were, you know, nine points clear in the Odovisie, I think is at some point deep in sort of, sort of April. And that's, I mean, for any club, let them a club of axis stature that's, that's too late in the season to be that far ahead and, and not win. And also there's some interesting stats on the high proportion of minutes they had to club train players. So players that were there for, I believe it's three years between ages 15 and 21, it was 44 last season, which was the highest in the Era Divisie, which is another good mark of success, I think we should recognize. It's also progress from, you know, the disaster season they had for a lot of 20, 23, 23, 24, where there's obviously so much going wrong on the pitch and off it. But again, it's kind of that issue where you say they're always going to be measured by league titles. European success. Eintracht Frankfurt really made light work of their high line in the second leg, especially in, in the Europa League saw quite a few goals where Ajax tried to press and obviously implement those correct principles. But you know, with Ekketk especially and that pace, that is kind of the vulnerability that you, you put yourself up against. If you're saying we're committed to playing that way, even against really top teams, I think it was. Mourinho once made quite a, quite a scathing comment about Ajax being at home with their philosophy, watching the Champions League final after they'd obviously lost the semi final from a leading position. So you're always going to get criticisms of if you try and play something your way and it goes wrong, and then of course you'll get even more praise when you win in your own way. So I'd argue there's some progress in that, but it's maybe more foundation progress than it is actually anything shiny to hold, which for a club that is as big as Ajax, you Need to win things.
- [48:34]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
It's caught between, isn't it? I mean, at the same time they've got this loads of youth academy players coming through. Like the number of those which are actually super talents is probably not massively high, but they kind of have the elements of. Yeah, like Liam said, they have the base. It's just they aren't necessarily playing with the style right now, which you'd necessarily associate with Ajax. And I don't think that Johnny Heitinger will be a coach or a term, so that necessarily. It's probably sticking more on the pragmatic school of it.
- [49:00]
Michael Bailey
Yeah, quite. And if we just expand it beyond Ajax. Interesting that Jasper mentioned Barcelona under Hansi Flick as the current side, which most exemplifies the Cruyff way of playing. So the blueprint of his football is still around, isn't it, Jacob?
- [49:16]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah. And I mean, even without diving too deeply in terms of the tactics of the system, this is a Barcelona side which is built in its youth academy. It's a youth academy which is built by Johan Cruyff. And I mean, the key to this team, their reemergence has been the likes of Kabasi, Gavi, Laminamau. It's obviously easy to say, like, oh, there's all these super talents that mirrors exactly what we were trying to do. But I think when it comes to Cruyff from Barcelona and you know, this was his other club, it is pretty inescapable.
- [49:42]
Michael Bailey
So that's a stylistic legacy. But in terms of the legacy of Cruyff's academy methodology, it made it all the way to the Arctic Circle with Bodo glimp, didn't it, Jacob?
- [49:52]
Jasper Van Leeuwen
Yeah, it's quite funny. It sounds like when these guys are in control of the academy, the Bodeo Glimp coaches are almost hanging around like a bad smell. They were like, oh, they're here every month. They were chatting to everyone and Bodeglimt, just for a bit of context. And sure, people know about them already, but they're this team from a tiny coast of town in the north of Norway who have come up. They were in the second division in Norway just not too many years ago and have started to sort of apply some of these theories and this very holistic method to their. To their training program, to their academy and got all the way to the Europa League semi finals where they lost to spurs this season. And Jasper and Ruben were explaining just how much they see on a. On a smaller setting at Bodoglympt, but just they've become the most dominant team in Norway now and are even making impact on a continental level. So it shows you don't necessarily need to be this huge super club or historic institution to actually implement some of these ideas. Like for example, if you're a league two club who applies some of this stuff, that's going to give you a major advantage in stepping up if you are able to have this youth development program in place.
- [50:49]
Liam Tharm
There was a really fascinating report from the CIS Football Observatory which is a great, great research group really in, in Switzerland and they do a lot of great analysis of stuff and one of the things they did, it's basically two decades worth of I suppose almost research. This is the training clubs they call it of big five league players which are as I mentioned earlier in terms of club trained players age 15 to 21 where you spend at least three seasons. They worked out, they basically did, did the maths and crunch the numbers on where players in the top five leagues had trained and they split it based on clubs that are actually in the top five leagues. So Real Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, Manchester United, Ren etc and then they split it for clubs outside of that obviously Ajax being in the Netherlands, it's one of the leagues that is probably sixth or seventh. It's close on the coefficients but it's not a big five league. They were comfortably top in terms of the number of minutes acquired in the top five leagues by players that had trained at that club. So developing players that went on to play in the top five leagues, it's well over 400,000 minutes. 71 Club Train players from 20045 onwards up until last season. Which I think just goes to show really that the impact and when I looked at the number of clubs in the top five leagues that have had players accrue more minutes, there's only 22 teams in those leagues itself and you think, you know, you're talking about 90 odd clubs across those divisions and there's a proportion of those, but not many that can even match Ajax for developing players. And that's not even for the league that Ajax play in. That's you know, Europe's other bigger and better league. So that's quite amazing to me.
- [52:15]
Michael Bailey
What a fascinating chap. Brilliant stuff. That is all we have time for today. A huge thank you to Jacob, Liam and producer Mike of course. We will return next week with another episode of this football architect series. Until then, goodbye. That was the story of the regeneration of Ajax, Episode one of Football Architects on the Athletic FC Tactics podcast feed. The first three episodes of the five part series are available to listen to right now. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts from, we'll catch you soon.
- [52:52]
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Liam Tharm
Sure thing.
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Jasper Van Leeuwen
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