Johan Cruyff

Athlete

• Date of birth: April 25, 1947
• Place of birth: Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Date of death: March 24, 2016
• Place of death: Barcelona, Spain

Sport: Soccer

Early Life

Johan Cruyff was born on April 25, 1947, in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Growing up in the Netherlands, Cruyff had an interesting choice of winter sports—ice-skating, field hockey, and soccer. In all these sports, the Netherlands enjoyed a degree of international success. However, fate determined that soccer would attract Cruyff. After Cruyff’s father, a grocer, died of a heart attack in 1959, Cruyff’s mother had to find work, and she found employment as a cleaning lady in the Ajax Stadium in Amsterdam. The stadium was the home of the professional soccer club AFC Ajax.

European soccer was based on a vast grassroots movement, drawing its players from the immediate community and utilizing the talents of very young players. Cruyff trained and practiced diligently from the age of four. He knew that to be accepted as a soccer apprentice took a degree of good fortune and an enormous amount of hard work.

At the age of ten, Cruyff was selected to be a member of the elite Ajax Juniors after a grueling process that eliminated two hundred other hopeful players. Rinus Michels, a famous Dutch coach, later said of Cruyff that even “as a baby he was an exceptional player.” In addition to his skill and deftness, Cruyff had remarkable physical strength and stamina for his size. At fifteen years of age, he was only five foot three and weighed just 115 pounds.

Professional Career

In 1965, when Cruyff joined the senior Ajax team as a forward, the team had been continually finishing in the lower half of its league. Cruyff proved to be a dynamo. He scored goals, led by example, and was an inspiring player.

Cruyff followed up three consecutive Dutch player of the year awards with two European player of the year awards in 1971 and 1973. He starred for Ajax and the Dutch national team, and although the Netherlands lost the FIFA World Cup Final to West Germany in 1974, he was voted the tournament’s most valuable player.

One year earlier, in 1973, Cruyff had left Ajax to join El Club de Fútbol de Barcelona in Spain. Sporting superstars are frequently motivated by complex reasons for switching clubs. Among Cruyff’s reasons for leaving the Netherlands was that he wanted to join his former coach, Rinus Michels; he also was unhappy with the country’s 80 percent level of income tax for people earning what he did. Barcelona paid Ajax the sum of $2,250,000 for Cruyff, which was the highest transfer sum in soccer history up to that time.

In the 1970s, European professional soccer clubs were willing to invest huge amounts of money in attempts to create championship teams. In his first year with Barcelona, Cruyff was paid a basic sum of $10,000 a month, and once incentives, bonuses, and endorsements were added to that, it was not surprising that the Spanish press came to name Cruyff not the “Flying Dutchman” but the “Golden Dutchman.”

Perhaps Cruyff’s greatest asset was his ability to motivate and transform his teammates. Just as he had with Ajax in 1965, he turned a losing team into an incredible power that won or drew its next twenty-six games. At the end of the season, Barcelona was the Spanish League champion, and Cruyff was on his way to becoming a major Spanish hero.

Cruyff’s inspiring leadership continued into 1974, with Barcelona winning the Spanish League title again. In 1976 and 1977, Barcelona was runner-up. Sadly, the pressure of public celebrity took its toll on Cruyff and his family. In June 1978, he announced his retirement. He commented bleakly that “even if you go to the toilet, somebody’s marking you.”

Happily, Cruyff’s retirement was short-lived. He decided to play some exhibition games for the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL), who had done a brilliant job of resurrecting the career of the Brazilian star Pelé. However, the chance to play again under Michels took Cruyff to the NASL’s Los Angeles Aztecs. In July 1979, Cruyff signed a two-year contract with the Aztecs worth, in total, more than $2 million.

Although he was thirty-two years of age, Cruyff proved that he still possessed magical skills. Players in the NASL were awed by Cruyff’s ability to beat defender after defender. Just as with Ajax and Barcelona, Cruyff was such a dangerous threat that opposing teams had to devise two-player formations to defend against the Dutchman.

In 1979, Cruyff was the NASL’s player of the year, but he never really enjoyed playing with the Aztecs because the team played some of its games indoors on artificial turf. Cruyff negotiated a sizable contract with the NASL’s Washington Diplomats and announced that “real” soccer should be played on proper grass. The Diplomats had a natural grass soccer field. In 1980, Cruyff played in Washington, but he left near the start of the 1981 season. He transferred to the Levante club in Spain.

One goal that is still talked about took place on August 16, 1981. Cruyff, playing for the Diplomats and surrounded by three defenders, banged in a goal from 40 yards out against the Toronto Blizzard.

At the end of 1981, Cruyff re-signed with Ajax of Amsterdam. Many soccer players stay in the game into their late thirties with skills and speed that erode and then evaporate. That was not the case with Cruyff. Although his blinding pace and acceleration were diminished, his artistry and technical ability remained untarnished. He took Ajax to two championship titles, and then, as a swan song, joined Feyenoord—another Dutch professional soccer team—and guided the team to a league championship. In 1985, Cruyff was appointed as Ajax’s technical director, and one year later he was named European manager of the year.

Later, Cruyff replaced Terry Venables as the coach of Barcelona, and in 1989, he led the team to the European Cup Winners’ Cup. In 1992, he added the European Cup championship to his list of accomplishments, helping Barcelona step out of the shadow of national rival Real Madrid. By 1994, he had won four successive Spanish Championships. In 1996, however, he was replaced after two disappointing seasons. During his tenure with Barcelona, he won eleven trophies in eight years, successfully making the transition from player to coach. He then served as an adviser at Camp Nou. After thirteen years, Cruyff took another managing job with the Catalonia team in November 2009. In 2011 he returned to Ajax as an adviser and was appointed to the Ajax board of directors a few months later. He ultimately resigned in April 2012 due to ongoing disagreements with the club's advisory board.

Cruyff won numerous accolades, including the Royal Netherlands Football Association’s (KNVB) golden player award, which, in 2003, designated Cruyff as the most outstanding Dutch player in the last fifty years. In 2006, Cruyff received the lifetime achievement award at the Laureus World Sports Awards, and in 2009 he received the UEFA Grassroots Award.

Cruyff died of lung cancer on March 24, 2016, at the age of sixty-eight at his home in Barcelona. He had been a heavy smoker before he underwent major heart surgery in 1991, after which he quit smoking. He was survived by his wife of nearly fifty years, Danny Koster, and their three children, Chantal, Susila, and Jordi. His son, Jordi, has played for FC Barcelona and Manchester United.

Summary

Johan Cruyff was the world’s top player through much of the 1970s, and some experts rank him with Pelé among soccer’s all-time greats. Like the Brazilian superstar, Cruyff turned his teams into winners wherever he played. He had a profound influence on Spain's style of soccer and helped to establish training methods at FC Barcelona's youth academy La Masia.

Bibliography

Barend, Frits, and Henk van Dorp. Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff: The ABC of an Obstinate Maestro. London: Bloomsbury, 1998. Print.

Hunt, Chris. The Complete Book of Soccer. Buffalo: Firefly, 2006. Print.

Janssen, Roel. “Hail Number Fourteen.” Europe 367 (1997). Print.

LaBlanc, Michael L., and Richard Henshaw. The World Encyclopedia of Soccer. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Print.

Marcus, Jeffrey. "A Dutch Great Helped Transform Spain's Game." New York Times. New York Times, 10 July 2010. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.

Meagher, Gerard. "Johan Cruff, Total Football Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 68." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 Mar. 2016. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.

Welch, Julie. "Johan Cruyff Obituary: Europe's First Football Superstar." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 Mar. 2016. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.