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Everybody has their own football philosophy. Johan Cruyff’s is remarkably simple. “Football,” he said once, “is throwing the opposition into chaos. If you get past your man, you throw the opposition into chaos. Creating a one-man advantage using positional play has the same effect. If you don’t get past your man, or create that extra man advantage, then the opposition stays organised and nothing happens.” In his eyes, “the one-man advantage is total football”.

The game’s historians, intellectuals and theorists will argue that it is a lot more complicated than that. Total football, a philosophy perfected by Cruyff’s mentor, Rinus Michels, is an attacking style in which every player can change position to exploit space and confound their opponents. It worked brilliantly for AFC Ajax when they won three European Champion Clubs’ Cups in a row

between 1971 and 1973 – and made the Netherlands team that almost won the 1974 FIFA World Cup one of the most revered sides of all time. It couldn’t have worked without Cruyff at its epicentre; directing play, evaluating it and adapting it.

David Winner, in his book Brilliant Orange, likens Cruyff to Pieter Jansz Saenredam, the 17th-century Dutch painter famous for the way he manipulated space on canvas. This line of thought is repeated on the official website for the Dutch coaches’ association, which proudly declares: “Our coaches are modern Rembrandts.”

THE DUTCH DICTUMThe players who led this revolutionary approach to football have sometimes downplayed the intellectualisation of their game. Cruyff’s great friend and opponent

Franz Beckenbauer said: “It owed more to the element of surprise than any magic formula. The Dutch got away with it for so long because the opposition could never work out what tactics they were facing. There were no tactics, just brilliant players with the ball.”

Juvenal, South America’s respected writer on football tactics, differed from Winner and Beckenbauer. Writing in August 1974, weeks after the Dutch had defeated Argentina 4-0 in the World Cup’s second group stage, he noted: “At Ajax, the idea of circular football developed, in which each player moved like the concentric circles that are formed in the water when you throw a stone. The stone that fell in the water was the player with possession. Starting from there, the rotation in blocks began, with four, five, six … the players that were needed.”

Circular football, as perfected by that Dutch side, left Argentina reeling and not a little

GENIUSThe revolutionary

of Johan CruyffAs both player and coach, the innovative D U TC H L EG E N D always

revelled in using the unexpected to bewilder opponents

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perplexed. Defender Enrique Wolff said after the match: “I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s no way to stop them. They attack with seven and defend with 11. They kill you marking and pressing you and when they get the ball, they lose their markers at the same time. Cruyff gave orders and the rest followed. We were outnumbered all over the pitch, the whole 90 minutes.”

The Argentina team’s confusion was encapsulated in an exchange in the dressing room at the interval. As defender Roberto Perfumo recalled: “At half-time, I was told to press the one who came with the ball. And I answered: ‘Which of the five?’”

Miguel Brindisi, an attacking midfielder in that Argentina side who went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a coach, was mesmerised by Cruyff’s performance. “[For] the first ten minutes Cruyff played as a right midfielder, then he switched to the left wing, later he was left-back, then right-back. In the second half, he moved to left wing again. And when Perfumo took a free-kick and one Dutchman was knocked out, they tried to play the offside rule. Cruyff was the only one who realised there was this man on the ground, leaving everybody onside, and he rapidly retreated to play as sweeper and clear the ball.”

The entire Argentina team was unnerved. Perfumo noted: “They always had at least three free options of play: a short pass, a medium pass and a long pass. And Cruyff never makes the same play twice. If we’re being honest, we have to talk of football as ‘before Holland’ and ‘after Holland’.”

THE CULTURE CLUBSuch a division of eras still resonates in the Netherlands. As Arthur van den Boogaard, author of the book This Is How We Played, put it recently: “The Dutch tend to divide their football history into two periods – before Cruyff and after Cruyff”. Before Cruyff was pragmatic, after Cruyff was usually romantic, inspirational and liberating. As Van den Boogaard says: “He convinced the nation that playing beautiful football was a typically Dutch thing.” In four years, Cruyff helped to transform his country’s football culture. The Dutch quickly came to believe that artistry, innovation and nonchalance defined their football identity. And even though there have

since been periods when pragmatism triumphed over romance, that vision of their identity remains as strong as ever.

You could, as Perfumo suggested, make a case that the same division applied across the entire game. Enthralled and inspired by the glory of Alfredo Di Stéfano, enthused by his fearless visionary coach Michels, Cruyff helped created a glory that, although fleeting,

the side’s central midfield mastermind, would win this competition twice as Barcelona coach, playing a style of football that could be traced directly back to Cruyff’s days on the pitch and in the dugout.

Ironically, the hegemony of Cruyff’s Barcelona in Europe would be challenged by Arrigo Sacchi, an innovative young coach who acknowledged the Dutchman as a mentor. Drawing on the great Real Madrid CF side of the Di Stéfano era that had inspired Cruyff and Michels – and the Ajax and Netherlands sides of the 1970s – Sacchi created a pressing, attacking 4-4-2 that helped AC Milan reach five European Cup finals in seven years, winning three of them (1989, 1990 and 1994). It was no coincidence that three of the most influential players in Sacchi’s great team – Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard – had

all played under Cruyff back in the Netherlands before moving to Italy.

The fact that this tactical challenge had emerged from Italy surprised many. The country had dominated Europe in the 1960s using catenaccio, the very antithesis of the Dutch philosophy, and Gianni Brera, the most influential Italian football writer, was particularly critical of “presumptuous total football”. Yet, as John Foot notes in his book, Calcio: “There were continuities between the supposedly contradictory systems. Helenio Herrera’s teams contained elements of total football. In the [legendary FC Internazionale Milano side] Grande Inter, attackers came back, defenders moved forward, space compressed. Taca la bala – attack the ball – was Herrera’s most-repeated slogan. Pressing was a key part of the successful Inter teams of the 1960s.”

entranced the world and inspired one of the most famous clubs, FC Barcelona, to effectively say: “We want some of that”, hiring Michels, Cruyff and his midfield team-mate Johan Neeskens in the hope of transforming the club.

Success wasn’t immediate – Barça’s best performance in the European Champion Clubs’ Cup with Cruyff as a player was to reach the semi-finals in 1975, losing to Leeds United AFC – but the gamble finally paid off. When Cruyff took over as coach, he began to reinvent the club. He changed as much as any coach could: the style of football, the emphasis on youth, the kind of players in the squad. And in 1992, he delivered the trophy the long-suffering Barça socios had hungered for: the European Cup. The captain of that ‘Dream Team’, goalkeeper Andoni Zubizarreta, is now the club’s director of football and Josep Guardiola,

“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT,” SAID ARGENTINA’S WOLFF. ”THERE IS NO WAY TO STOP THEM. THEY KILL YOU”

INTRODUCING A MODERN GOALKEEPERIt was Cruyff’s idea to replace the Netherlands goalkeeper Piet Shrijvers with Jan Jongbloed (below), who until the age of 15 had played as a striker, ahead of the 1974 FIFA World Cup. The Dutch national team, whose defenders were so often in the opposition’s half, needed a keeper who acted like a sweeper. For Cruyff, anticipation was more important than a good save. We often mention the false No9, but there is also a false No1.

REPURPOSING MIDFIELDERSAt FC Barcelona, Cruyff preferred a trio of defenders to a back four. The central player, Ronald Koeman, was educated as a midfielder and often strode out of defence – creating a back two and bulking out the centre of the pitch. The idea that midfield is the most important area of the pitch, and therefore midfielders are the most useful players, is shared by Josep Guardiola. The FC Bayern München coach, a midfielder under Cruyff when Barça won this competition in 1992, has repurposed midfielders to play everywhere but in goal.

FIELDING FALSE No9sDespite Gerd Müller’s astronomical goal count, Cruyff was critical of the striker because he felt the German played like the archetypal No9, with limited movement. With Cruyff, the lines between positions became blurred. The player had at least to be able to play in the position next to him. The No9 could move into a midfield position or to the wings, while someone else slotted in to fill the role he had vacated.

PREACHING ONE-TOUCH FOOTBALL“The ball will never become tired,” explained Cruyff. “But the player will if he is condemned to watch how the other team’s players play the ball with one touch between them and no chance to intervene.” He was determined that football is about the brain, not how strong or fast a player is, and that the ball should be made to do the work. That influence is still evident at Barça more than 20 years after he led them to the European Champion Clubs’ Cup. Players such as Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta have become stars despite their relative lack of physicality.

RE-EVALUATING THE No6Cruyff’s mantra was about movement and space, so, if room was tight for the traditional playmaker in the No10 role, the creativity had to come from somewhere else. Though further from goal, the No6 was right in the centre of the pitch with avenues to every team-mate. At Barça, the deep playmaking role was handed to Guardiola, whose intelligent passing made up for a lack of pace and began many attacks for the Blaugrana.

THE TR AILBL AZERFive ways Johan Cruyff changed football

Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling is the author of Der König und sein Spiel: Johan Cruyff und der Weltfußball (The King and his Game: Johan Cruyff and World Football).

DUTCH TREATCruyff beats Argentina’s Daniel Carneval to make it 4-0 to the Oranje in the 1974 World Cup

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When total football proved so successful – Ajax defeated Inter and Juventus in successive European Champion Clubs’ Cup finals – Italian football began slowly, sometimes painfully, to reinvent itself. Giuseppe Marchioro tried to introduce the Dutch style at Milan in 1976/77 but lasted only 15 games. In the 1990s, Luigi Maifredi at Juventus and Corrado Orrico at Inter made similarly unsuccessful efforts to revolutionise their teams.

ITALIAN STYLEBefore Sacchi, only one coach, the great Nils Liedholm, had successfully channelled the influence of Cruyff and Ajax in Italy. In the 1982/83 campaign, his AS Roma side challenged Italian tactical orthodoxy with a 4-3-3 in which positions were relatively flexible, players marked zonally, rather than man-for-man, and possession was paramount. The term tiki-taka

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would later be coined to describe Guardiola’s Barcelona. In the 1980s, Roma’s approach was labelled ragnatela (spider’s web). Liedholm’s pioneers reached the European Champion Clubs’ Cup final in 1984, losing the shoot-out in their own stadium to Liverpool FC.

Sacchi learned from Cruyff and Liedholm, shook off catenaccio’s obsession with a libero in a five-man defence, and subjected his players to training regimes that some of his charges found punitive. In an age when 4-4-2 has been stigmatised as stodgy and defensive, this may seem hard to believe, but Sacchi’s side were formidable and fascinating to watch. Like Michels before him, he emphasised the importance of the collective. He insisted that the distance between his defenders and forwards should never exceed 25m. His famous credo “all my players must learn how to play in defence and up front, and they must attack

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE THAT THREE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT MILAN SIDES HAD PLAYED UNDER CRUYFF

In the mid-1980s Johan Cruyff was in charge of a plethora of talent at AFC Ajax, including Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, and Ronald Koeman. But it was stylish right winger John van ’t Schip (below) who Cruyff called ”the biggest talent of his generation”.

Canadian-born Van ’t Schip arrived in the Netherlands with his Dutch parents in the spring of 1972, when he was nine. The family settled in Amstelveen, near the Olympic stadium, and, inspired by Ajax’s European Champion Clubs’ Cup victory over FC Internazionale Milano, he joined local side NFC, before moving to Ajax.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY With Gerald Vanenburg and Danish whirlwind Jesper Olsen on the wings, Van ’t Schip spent his first few seasons mostly on the bench, and then a severe hernia kept him out for nearly two campaigns while his team-mates Vanenburg, Van Basten and Mario Been stormed the Eredivisie.

When Van ’t Schip returned, in August 1985, Cruyff was Ajax’s head coach. With his damaged back muscles the returning player lacked a certain physical flexibility, but Cruyff used him as a tactical instrument on the pitch – to widen the attack and stretch opposing defences, making space for an incisive cross into the path of either Van Basten, John Bosman or any of numerous midfielders surging forward.

Van ’t Schip went on to earn 41 caps for the Netherlands and featured in the Oranje side that triumphed at the 1988 UEFA European Championship. But despite also winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1987, and the UEFA Cup five years later, he never quite lived up to Cruyff’s billing. He ended his playing career with Genoa CFC in Italy’s Serie B and is currently head coach of the recently renamed Melbourne City FC in the Australian A-League.

Yet to his old boss Cruyff, he remains one of those “special guys, intelligent guys”, who always knew that, as a footballer: “If you don’t use your head, using your feet won’t be sufficient.”

Cruyff described Van ’t Schip as the best talent “of his generation”

Schip Ahoy

PITCH PERFECTThe innovative Dutch genius flew the flag for Barcelona as both player and coach

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space”, sounded for all the world like one of Cruyff’s pronouncements.

THE DREAM LIVES ONSacchi left Milan in 1992 to coach Italy’s national side. His deputy, Fabio Capello, took over, tinkered a bit – the Dutch trio were either sold or sidelined by injury – and led the Rossoneri to the UEFA Champions League final in 1994, where they faced Cruyff’s Barcelona. The Dutch coach tried to bill the final as a contest for the soul of football – with his Blaugrana, of course, on the side of attacking virtue – but the ploy backfired. Milan won 4-0.

At the time, this nightmare for the Dream Team was interpreted as more than a defeat, seeming a definitive rejection of Cruyff’s philosophy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The next year, his old club, Ajax, defeated Milan in the UEFA Champions League

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DENNIS BERGKAMP HAS DESCRIBED CRUYFF’S COACHING AS “EXCITING, SPECTACULAR AND ADVENTUROUS”

final. The most influential player in that talented young side was Rijkaard, who had played for – and argued with – Cruyff in the early 1980s. Eleven years after that, Rijkaard led Barcelona, playing a brand of football and using a 4-3-3 formation influenced by Cruyff and Michels, to victory in the 2006 UEFA Champions League final.

Rijkaard’s Barcelona evolved into something more sophisticated and dazzling under Guardiola, the pivot of Cruyff’s Dream Team. The Argentinians who had been undone by the Netherlands in 1974 would understand how, at its best, Guardiola’s side demoralised opponents. After losing to them in two UEFA Champions

HERO’S WELCOMECruyff, alongside club president Josep Lluís Núñez, emerges as Barça’s new coach in July 1988

League finals, former Manchester United FC boss Sir Alex Ferguson observed: “They get you on that carousel and make you dizzy with their passing.” Like the Argentinians in 1974, opponents often complained about being outnumbered. At its zenith, this style captivated opponents – and spectators – in a fashion worthy of Sacchi’s Milan and Cruyff’s Ajax and Barcelona.

Cruyff’s influence on football remains immense. Although Barcelona are striving to adapt their approach, his philosophy reigns supreme at Ajax, where another of his proteges, Dennis Bergkamp, is helping to implement it. As Bergkamp told author Winner in Brilliant Orange: “Johan’s coaching is based on what he was like as a player: adventurous, spectacular, attacking.”

In Cruyff’s vision, the perfect team is full of, Winner says, “intelligent, talented

players, educated to become independent-minded individuals who instinctively make the right decisions and collaborate with

team-mates”.It’s a dream that may never be fully realised,

but for Cruyff, and those who think like him, it is a dream that will never die.

DREAM FOOTBALLCruyff’s flexible, attacking approach made sure his teams had the purists smiling