Johan Cruyff

His mother cleaned the lockers at Ajax. That is not a colourful detail added afterwards; it is how the family survived. His father died of a heart attack on 8 July 1959, when Johan was twelve, and his mother took work at the club to keep the household going. She later married the Ajax groundsman.

Wikipedia puts the consequence in one sentence that explains most of his career: the death became "a driving force for him to accumulate as much money as possible in as short a time as possible," and "throughout his life, he was always haunted by the fear of dying at a young age himself."

He had joined the Ajax academy two years earlier, on his tenth birthday.

He was born on 25 April 1947 in Amsterdam. He made his first-team debut on 15 November 1964, aged seventeen, away at GVAV Groningen. Ajax lost 3–1. He scored in his second match.

In January 1965 Rinus Michels became the coach, and the two of them spent the next decade rebuilding what a football team was for. Michels made 4-3-3 permanent in 1969–70 and introduced systematic pressing — the players called it "hunting." The principle was space: stretch the pitch as wide as possible in possession, compress it to nothing the moment the ball is lost, push the defensive line up to halfway and squeeze the opposition into a strip of grass.

Cruyff was nominally a centre-forward and almost never stood where one stands. He dropped into midfield, drifted to the wings, and left whoever was marking him with a decision no defender of that era had been trained to make. Wikipedia notes he was "already practicing what subsequently became known as the false nine" — three decades early. The constant rotation around him was deliberate, and he had his own name for it: controlled chaos.

The relationship with Michels is described as a Lennon–McCartney arrangement, which includes the part where Cruyff regularly changed his manager's instructions in the middle of matches.

1971, at Wembley, in front of 83,179: Ajax 2–0 Panathinaikos.

1972, in Rotterdam: Ajax 2–0 Internazionale. Cruyff scored both goals in the second half and was man of the match. Internazionale were the great defensive side of the era; Ajax dismantled them in their own tournament final.

1973, in Belgrade, 89,484 watching: Ajax 1–0 Juventus, Johnny Rep scoring in the fourth minute.

Three finals, three wins, one club, no defeats.

Then the Ajax squad voted on the captaincy and the vote went 8–7 against him. He rang his father-in-law the same day: "You must call Barcelona immediately, I want to get out of here."

Barcelona paid six million guilders — around two million dollars — in the middle of 1973. It was a world record; he was the most expensive footballer alive. Michels was already there.

He made his competitive debut on 28 October 1973 against Granada and scored twice in a 4–0 win. In February 1974 Barcelona went to the Santiago Bernabéu and won 5–0. Barcelona took the league that season, their first title in fourteen years.

Catalonia at that point was still under Franco, its language suppressed and its institutions hollowed out, and a football club was one of the few places the place could be itself in public. A New York Times journalist wrote after the 5–0 that Cruyff had done more for the spirit of the Catalan people in ninety minutes than many politicians had in years of struggle.

He named his son Jordi. The family did not know at the time that Jordi is the patron saint of Catalonia.

The Netherlands went through the 1974 World Cup playing football nobody had seen at that level, and lost the final.

The group: 2–0 Uruguay, 0–0 Sweden, 4–1 Bulgaria. Six goals scored, one conceded. The second round: 4–0 Argentina with two from Cruyff, 2–0 East Germany, 2–0 Brazil with Cruyff scoring the second.

The Sweden match is where the turn happened. Twenty-second minute, Cruyff facing his own goal with Jan Olsson tight behind him. He shaped to cross, dragged the ball behind his standing leg instead, spun 180 degrees and accelerated away. Olsson simply was not there any more. The move has his name on it and has been taught to children ever since.

The final, 7 July 1974, Munich, 78,200 people. Cruyff ran at the German defence from the kick-off, was fouled by Uli Hoeneß in the box, and Neeskens scored the penalty before a single West German player had touched the ball. Then Breitner equalised from another penalty, Gerd Müller scored before half-time, and West Germany won 2–1. Berti Vogts followed Cruyff around for the rest of the afternoon and the game never reopened.

He was given the Golden Ball as the player of the tournament.

Franz Beckenbauer, who captained the winning side, said afterwards: "Johan was the better player, but I am a world champion."

For thirty years the explanation was political — that he had refused to play in Argentina under the military junta — or domestic, that his wife had wanted him home.

In 2008 he told Catalan radio what had actually happened. A year before the tournament, armed men had entered the family's apartment in Barcelona and held them at gunpoint. Afterwards there were police outside his house and his children were escorted to school.

"To play a World Cup you have to be 200% okay," he said. "There are moments when there are other values in life."

The Netherlands reached the final again without him and lost again.

In 1978 a holding company he had invested in — including, memorably, a pig farm — collapsed, and he left Spain heavily in debt.

He went to the Los Angeles Aztecs in 1979 and was named NASL Player of the Year. Then Washington Diplomats in 1980. Then a brief, miserable loan at Levante in early 1981, where his wife was hospitalised after a fall from a horse and the club paid him only part of what it had promised.

Of the American years he said something more generous than the record might suggest: "Starting from zero in America, many miles away from my past, was one of the best decisions I made. There I learned how to develop my uncontrolled ambitions, to think as a coach."

He went back to Ajax in December 1981 and won two more Eredivisie titles at thirty-four and thirty-five. In 1982, against Helmond Sport, he took a penalty by rolling it sideways to Jesper Olsen, who passed it straight back for him to walk it in.

Then Ajax declined to extend his contract, so he signed for Feyenoord. His first Klassieker back was an 8–2 defeat to Ajax, after which he announced: "We will win the championship." Feyenoord won the league and the cup that season.

His last match was on 13 May 1984 against Zwolle. He was thirty-seven.

He died on 24 March 2016 in Barcelona, aged sixty-eight.

Wikipedia does not carry a year-by-year international table for him. It does carry one line worth more than a table: the Netherlands never lost a match in which Cruyff scored.

He made his debut on 7 September 1966 against Hungary, a 2–2 draw, and scored.

Individual: Ballon d'Or 1971, 1973, 1974. World Cup Golden Ball 1974. Eredivisie top scorer 1966–67 with 33 goals. NASL Player of the Year 1979. IFFHS European Player of the Century, 1999 — and second in the world vote, behind Pelé.

He first wore it on 30 October 1970 against PSV, coming back from a groin injury, because Gerrie Mühren had his usual 9. He never gave it up — not at Ajax, not for the Netherlands, at a time when starting players wore 1 to 11 and everyone knew what each number meant.

In the 1974 World Cup he also wore a shirt with two stripes on the sleeves rather than the three every other Dutch player had, because his personal sponsorship deal was with Puma and the national team's was with Adidas. A man who would not wear the right number of stripes on a World Cup shirt is telling you something about how he handled instructions generally.

Franz Beckenbauer, asked what he would be worth in the modern market: "When players like Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo are worth around €100 million, Johan Cruyff would go in the billions."

The historian Jimmy Burns put the same thing in terms of the dressing room: "with Cruyff, the team felt they couldn't lose."

The numbers in the table above are a good career: 294 goals, three European Cups, three Ballons d'Or, a World Cup final. They are not why football talks about him more than about players who scored twice as much.

What he left is a method. The pressing, the false nine, the idea that a team without the ball should be actively hunting it rather than waiting — all of it goes through Ajax in 1970 and Barcelona in 1974, and then through the coaching career that followed, and then through the players that coaching career produced. Pep Guardiola played for him. Most of what a modern top-level team does on a Saturday is a refinement of an argument Cruyff was having with his manager, in the middle of matches, in 1971.

He also did the most unusual thing available to a great player: he made his ideas outlive his highlights.