BackCapturing the artistry of Johan Cruyff, football’s philosopher and revolutionary
Johan Cruyff was a revolutionary, whose ideas and vision about the way football has to be seen and played, will outlive the man himself
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German and Real Madrid midfielder Toni Kroos is right. In Johan Cruyff, as Kroos tweeted, heaven has indeed found a new playmaker. The legendary Dutch footballer passed away in Barcelona on Thursday, losing a hard-fought battle with lung cancer. Cruyff, regarded as the enduring symbol of ‘Total Football,’ was 68 years old.
Cruyff wasn’t just a footballer in the strictest sense of the word. He was an artist—think the Cruyff Turn at the Westfalonstadion in the 1974 World Cup. He was an innovator, a creative genius far ahead of his times. He was modern football’s best-known philosopher, his legacy best represented by Ajax and Barcelona, the teams he played and coached to distinction. In short, Cruyff was a revolutionary, whose ideas and vision about the way the sport has to be seen and played, will outlive the man himself.
This passage by David Winner in his seminal work, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football sums up Cruyff’s artistry and vision, and how he saw football a little differently from his colleagues at Ajax and later Barcelona. “The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyfff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn’t talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. ‘No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.’ He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered."
Winner adds, “Total Football was built on a new theory of flexible space. Just as Cornelis Lely in the nineteenth century conceived and executed the idea of creating giant new polders and altering the physical dimensions of Holland by dike-building and exploiting the new technology of steam, so Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff exploited the capacities of a new breed of players to change the dimensions of the football field."
The book, by the way, is a must-read for those interested in the Ajax and the Dutch national team of the 1970s. No wonder he was dubbed ‘Pythogoras in Boots’ by British sports writer David Miller.
And then, Cruyff transformed Barcelona, first as a player, then as a coach or “trainer" as the Catalans say, and finally, as a philosopher. Here’s Sid Lowe, writing in The Guardian about Cruyff’s profound influence and long-lasting impact on the club’s very identity. “There may be no man who has influenced modern football like Cruyff; at Barcelona there certainly isn’t. There he became the defender of a footballing faith, a deity, the man who revolutionised the club, not one but twice, and for ever...Cruyff gave Barcelona a new identity and a new, sporting discourse that complemented and deepened the socio-political situation he came to understand and embrace so well; came to embody, in fact."
Lowe continues, “There is a Before Cruyff and an After Cruyff. As a player he led them to their first league title in 14 years; as a manager he led them to their first European Cup. The legacy is clear, profound and present. Before 1990 Barcelona had won 10 league titles in their entire history and no European Cups; since then they have won 13 leagues and five European Cups. But it is not about the trophies, or not only; it goes beyond that, to philosophy and identity. Winning, sure; a way of winning too."
The Financial Times’ Simon Kuper in his tribute to Cruyff, sums the man up perfectly. “It was he was the lightbulb and Thomas Edison in one. “Football is a game you play with your head," he (Cruyff) said in a typical bon mot. Though he had little grasp of grammar in either Dutch of Spanish, and spoke both in a 1950s’ Amsterdam working-class accent, nobody talked more interestingly about football."
There’s football, and then, there’s what’s now known as Cruyffian football, the template that has sparked many European football clubs and national teams, including Spain and current world champions Germany. Winner, in a recent article for Bleacher Report, aptly titled “The Church of Cruyff", wrote, “Once radical and revolutionary, Cruyffian principles have become standard throughout the modern game. His blueprint for developing young players has been copied all over the world." He added, “Cruyff ‘s admirers don’t just like the way he and his teams played. They believe the world could be a better place if his vision of football prevailed. Cruyffian football, they feel, is more beautiful, more fun and more spiritual than other approaches." No one epitomised Cruyffian principles better than Bayern Munich manager Pep Guardiola, who his tribute to his former coach and mentor said, “Cruyff painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since have merely restored or improved it."
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