Rejected by the club of the heart, Johan Cruyff found happiness in rival

One of the most brilliant minds in football history, Johan Cruyff, who would have turned 75 this Monday (25), grew up, played and died loving Ajax. As a child, he lived a few blocks from De Meer Stadium and frequented the club’s hallways while his mother, a cleaning lady, worked there.

Cruyff became a professional player and three-time European champion with the Amsterdam team, turning him into a cult player. At the end of his career, after passing through Barcelona, ​​Levante and football in the United States, he returned to his place in the world with the desire to end his career where it all began, in the team of his heart.

In the 1982/1983 season, already a veteran (he was 36 years old), he helped the club win the double with the league and national cup titles. He intended to renew his contract and play for another year before hanging up his boots. The directors, however, had another plan.

“Ajax was still my club, but the people who ran it refused to deal with me. I heard they said I was too old and too fat, and that I was gaining weight. But I could handle those objections. But they also demanded I was happy with a normal salary and, well, I wasn’t,” said the Dutch star in his autobiography, published in 2016.

The idol had an agreement with Ajax, put together by his father-in-law, Cor Coster, which determined the division of box office receipts between him and the club. The more success on the field, the more fans in the stands and the more money for both parties. But the board came to feel that he was paid too much and wanted his slice of the pie.

The top hats then proposed to him a new contract with a minimum wage. Cruyff refused.

His career would end far from the stadium he called home since childhood. More precisely in Rotterdam, at the De Kuip stadium, home of Feyenoord, Ajax’s great rivals. An unthinkable fate, given the rivalry between the two clubs.

“I genuinely try to explain that it’s like Mohamed Salah leaving Liverpool to play for a limping Manchester United,” says Andy Bollen, author of “Fierce Genius” (Pitch Publishing), a book about Cruyff’s season at Feyenoord.

“It’s a deep, real rivalry. There’s also a class component. Ajax is from Amsterdam, liberal and elitist. Feyenoord is from Rotterdam, heavily bombed during WWII, hardworking, port.”

The agreement with the Rotterdam club provided for precisely the kind of arrangement that Ajax did not want to offer: the division of box office revenues. And De Kuip, for the sake of Johan Cruyff’s coffers, was bigger than De Meer.

Champion of the European Cup in 1970, Feyenoord did not experience a glorious period in the 1980s. Their last league title had been won in the 1973/1974 season. To further complicate the picture, not only had Ajax lifted the cup in the previous two years, but PSV had claimed a leading role in Dutch football.

On his return to Holland, Cruyff showed that he still had the strength to play at a good level. But the crowd, right away, received the rival idol’s incorporation badly.

“Feyenoord always, Cruyff never,” read one of the banners on De Kuip’s stands in the team’s first games with the new signing.

He needed to convince the public. The sprints from A Clockwork Orange’s days weren’t as common anymore, but the talent was intact. More midfielder than attacker, Cruyff took advantage of a position back in the field to serve his teammates with accurate passes and infiltrate as an element of surprise.

In addition to his arrival, a tall attacking midfielder with dreadlocks who was just beginning his career in professional football, Ruud Gullit, appeared in the team. He, who liked to play centrally, went to the right wing on the recommendation of his veteran teammate.

“Gullit thought that Cruyff just wanted more space with him out of the way. When Cruyff explained that Gullit’s pace, strength and skill would be able to leave defenders behind and, in addition to delivering good crosses, arrive for the finish, Gullit saw the merit in this change”, says Bollen.

The start in the Dutch league was promising: five wins and one draw in six matches. Until the first derby with Ajax arrives, in the country’s capital, the Amsterdam club meets Cruyff.

Betting on the counterattacks and speed of a young Marco van Basten, the hosts simply ran over Feyenoord and thrashed 8-2.

Johan Cruyff, in his own way, said somewhat surprisingly that that result would make the Rotterdam club start for the title. “Wait and see,” he said hours after the vexatious defeat of the country’s most watched football program.

Motivating device or prophecy? The fact is that Feyenoord lost just one more game during the entire campaign (to Groningen), which featured a streak of 15 straight matches without losing in which they recorded 12 wins. Among them, a 4-1 rout over Ajax in De Kuip. Cruyff scored his own in the 14th minute, a number that established him at the Amsterdam club and the Dutch national team.

With 11 goals in 33 appearances, the Dutch ace was instrumental in winning the national league and also won the Dutch Cup, eliminating Ajax in the round of 16. In the tournament decision, Feyenoord beat Fortuna Sittard 1-0 and confirmed the achievement.

“My last year as a footballer at Feyenoord was a big party. When I think back, I still can’t understand how it happened. How was that possible? It’s amazing especially when you consider that we started out 8-2 to Ajax at the Olympic Stadium. But people forget that an outcome like this is often the beginning of a resurrection. That’s how it works,” he said in the autobiography, which hit bookstores months after his death in March 2016.

His matches for the Rotterdam club, thus a lifelong rival, were the last of a career that took him into the pantheon of the greatest in history.

The following year, when he decided to start his career as a coach, he received a call. He was from Ajax. They wanted him to coach the team. This time, there was little resistance from the Amsterdam directors to the contractual requirements.