Stillness and Speed: My Story

by Bergkamp, Dennis

  Ajax had fallen a long way since winning the Champions League in 1995 and had ceased to be a European power. When Dennis returned to the club of his first great successes to become a coach to the Under-12s he was, in effect, joining a bucolic backwater. To the casual visitor, Ajax seemed cheerful and tranquil enough. But the stage was being set for one of the most bitter battles in all of Dutch football history. The conflict would pitch Dennis into unfamiliar emotional territory and prove to be another turning point in his football life.

  The key figure – as so often – was Johan Cruyff who had, for years, been criticising Ajax, usually through his weekly column in Holland’s biggest-selling newspaper, De Telegraaf. Cruyff’s principal complaint, even in the mid-nineties, was that something had gone badly wrong with the club’s youth system. At a time when Louis van Gaal’s team of tyros was the best in Europe, this looked like sour grapes. Yes, he conceded, results looked good for now, but he had seen the younger teams and it was clear to him that a few years hence the flow of exceptional players would cease. As he never tired of saying later, Patrick Kluivert was Ajax’s last great home-grown striker. Few people paid attention in the late nineties, but a decade later Cruyff’s critique found a more receptive audience.

  An outsider might be tempted to take a more relaxed view and see Ajax’s decline as inevitable. The global football economy had changed so massively and so quickly that complaining about the failure to produce new Van Bastens and Bergkamps was like worrying why the city of Rembrandt now had so many graffiti artists. Due to forces beyond anyone’s control, Ajax’s football Golden Age had passed. In any case, there was still second-hand glory to be had. Seven of the 14 Dutchmen who played against Spain in Johannesburg in the 2010 World Cup final had started their careers at Ajax. Most clubs would take pride in having produced half a World Cup final team.

  But Ajax was not most clubs. Even the directors were worried by the long decline and had commissioned a study, known as the Coronel Report, focusing on structural problems, which was to be presented at a members’ meeting in February 2008. Few people ever read this report, because Johan Cruyff gate-crashed the meeting and pulled off a stunning coup. In style it recalled one of his most legendary exploits. In 1980, at a time when he had no formal link to the club, Cruyff was a spectator in the crowd watching as Ajax trailed 3-1 at home in a Cup match against Twente. So angered was he by Ajax’s performance that he walked out of the stadium, came back in through the players’ entrance, made his way onto the touchline and sat himself down in the dugout. Having thoroughly upstaged coach Leo Beenhakker, Cruyff suggested a few changes – and Ajax promptly rallied to win 5-3. The TV cameras caught every moment of his intervention, and the match became a symbol of his near-superhuman footballing powers.

  Now, in February 2008, Cruyff produced another game-changer: he turned up unannounced at the members’ meeting. The crowds that greeted Ayatollah Khomeini when he arrived in Tehran from Paris in 1979 had nothing on the enthusiasm of the Ajax members that night. They acclaimed Cruyff ecstatically, and when they urged him to save the club, he graciously agreed. The power of the old board simply melted in his presence; it was the smoothest of velvet revolutions. Soon the chairman had resigned and Cruyff’s candidate, Marco van Basten, was installed as coach. Just 17 days later, however, the revolution ended as suddenly as it had begun. Van Basten had declined to follow his mentor’s advice to sack most of the youth academy staff. So Cruyff simply turned around and flew home to Barcelona, saying: ‘Then I’ve got no more business at Ajax.’ Wrongly, this turn of events was interpreted as a humiliation for Cruyff. In fact, he and Van Basten remained on good terms and the deeper significance was missed: Cruyff had revealed his extraordinary influence as club icon and fan favourite. As the new chairman Uri Coronel would later say bitterly: ‘Cruyff is not just anyone. He’s a demi-god here, or maybe a whole god.’ By the time the old hero was ready to renew his assault in late 2010, conditions had changed once more. Van Basten’s reign had failed: he left after less than a season, admitting: ‘I can’t live up to Ajax standards.’ Cruyff was now free to direct his withering fire on yet another board-appointed coach of whom he disapproved, Martin Jol.

  Meanwhile Dennis Bergkamp, from his vantage point as youth coach, had reluctantly come to a conclusion of his own: something had gone badly wrong with the club’s youth system. He was dismayed by the prevailing attitude: ‘Things were really going downhill, but no one seemed to notice or perhaps they didn’t want to see,’ says Dennis. ‘Everyone seemed to be saying: “Hey, we’re Ajax, we’re the best, look at 1995 when we won the Champions League.” I thought: “What’s all that about? Nineteen ninety-five is thirteen years ago.”’

  The club’s youth teams were still good enough to win trophies, he noted, but the academy (immodestly called De Toekomst – The Future) had turned into a weird soccer version of Stepford. ‘It was as if all the kids had been made in the same factory. It felt strange. They were all good, tidy, rather technical players, but they weren’t special or flexible or creative. They did what was asked of them. They knew their positions, played their roles, but even in the first team they had so little creativity. When they had to improvise they’d look helplessly to the touchline as if to say: “Now what do we do?” All the teams played four-three-three the way you’re supposed to at Ajax. But it was completely uninspired, totally lethargic. The right-winger kept nicely to the right wing and did all the little things a right-winger is supposed to do, like getting to the goal line and putting a cross in. The left-back played exactly like a left-back and the defensive midfielder played like an Ajax defensive midfielder. It was all by the book, but the heart was missing. I didn’t see one of the typical old Ajax lads with that cheeky attitude: “Let me have the ball, I’ll do something good with it.”’

  For Cruyff, meanwhile, Ajax’s humiliating defeat at Real Madrid in September 2010 was the final straw. The score was only 2-0, but Ajax had managed just one shot on goal and Madrid could easily have scored ten. In the glory years, Ajax had measured their greatness by their crushing victories in the Bernabeu. In 1973, Gerrie Muhren had juggled the ball there en route to Ajax winning their third European Cup in a row. In 1992, Dennis Bergkamp scored one of his great goals in the stadium. And when Van Gaal’s team produced a sensational performance there in 1995, Real’s poetic coach Jorge Valdano waxed lyrical: ‘Ajax are not just the team of the nineties, they are approaching football utopia.’

  The pathetic Ajax performance of September 2010 revealed how bad things had become. Cruyff had already spent months ridiculing Jol’s counter-attacking style and his signing of expensive but mediocre foreign players and had said that the sight of overweight Egyptian striker Mido in an Ajax shirt made him feel physically ill. Now he stopped being polite. Jol’s shambolic outfit was the worst Ajax team he had ever seen. Ajax was no longer Ajax. The manager and the board would have to go. Cruyff had an alternative plan.

  Around that time, Dennis received a call from his old mentor. ‘Johan thought it was time we caught up, and he invited Henrita and me to dinner. He wanted to know how I saw my future at Ajax. I told him I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, that I would see how things developed. For the time being, I was just a rookie youth trainer. But Johan took a different perspective; he was thinking further ahead and began talking about a managerial role at the club, some kind of director’s position as well as some practical work on the pitch. I listened to him talking about me, about Ajax, and I thought: “Hey, something’s going on. Johan is up to something.” It got me excited.’ Cruyff was talking to other former players as well, preparing a cadre of ex-Ajax stars for an unprecedented revolution. His belief, nurtured over decades of battles with directors, presidents, chairmen and other ‘suits’, was that former top players knew far more about football than the grey men who ran the game. Great former players should therefore be in charge. Great former players like Dennis.

  Cruyff’s plan was now much more developed than it had been during the off-
the-cuff intervention of 2008. Urged on by his media allies, Ajax fans began chanting his name in the stadium. Jol’s position was becoming untenable. One afternoon in December 2010, Dennis bumped into chairman Uri Coronel in the car park. Coronel said bleakly: ‘Your manager has just been fired.’ Dennis shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just said: “OK,” but I was thinking: “Now let’s see what happens.” Jol’s departure set the wheels in motion. I had no idea that the next months would become a nightmare.’

  Frank de Boer was appointed manager, with the approval of Cruyff, who was now working with the club in an ‘advisory capacity’. But, as far as Cruyff was concerned this was just the first of many steps. He wanted to change the very DNA of the club. In April 2011 the Ajax board resigned, saying they found it impossible to work with Cruyff. A new, temporary board headed by a lawyer and psychologist called Steven ten Have took over. But Cruyff’s campaign continued. He wanted his plan implemented in every particular area.

  The plan had taken physical shape in the form of a report written by members of a circle close to Cruyff and reflecting his ideas. The authors were Wim Jonk, Ruben Jongkind, an athletics trainer who specialised in improving performances and who had worked with Jonk on an experimental training programme, and Todd Beane, Cruyff’s son-in-law, an American coach who had spent eight years developing the international dimension of Cruyff’s football institute, which helps educate youngsters who want to build a career in sport – and prepares them for life afterwards. The report envisioned a root-and-branch transformation of the club through its youth. The old, Van Gaal-style focus on tactics, systems and teamwork would be swept away and replaced by a new intensive approach to developing extraordinary individuals. De Toekomst would become less like a football factory and more like a workshop for encouraging and educating genius: not so much a vocational apprenticeship, more like an Oxbridge college or a French Grande Ecole. The greatest of former Ajax players would become tutors, imparting their know ledge, wisdom and experience to exceptional young talents who would in turn become not only spectacularly good footballers but wise beyond their years. The roles of technical director and head of training would be abolished and replaced by a sort of revolutionary committee known as ‘the technical heart’. This would consist of manager Frank de Boer, Wim Jonk . . . and Dennis Berg kamp. A canny financial dimension was built into the plan, too. The unplanned career paths of men like Cruyff, Van Basten and Bergkamp would now be used as a prototype business model. By educating their own junior players to first-team standards, Ajax would both save money and ensure a steady stream of players for the first team. These players would be much better than the mediocre foreigners the club had been buying. And later, the young players and Ajax would share the financial rewards when the stars were sold on to Europe’s elite clubs after a few years in the Ajax first team.

  During the transitional year of 2011, the men Cruyff dubbed ‘suits’ balked at his radical ideas, offering instead small reforms and concessions. The suits argued that anything else would cause turmoil and cost the jobs of cherished employees. Cruyff pushed on, insisting on implementation of his entire revolutionary programme. Civil war now raged, with bitter accusations, insults and rumours flying around the club and in the media. Even the quarrelsome Dutch had never seen anything quite like it.

  Dennis recalls the terrible strain: ‘It was an awful period. I would come home in the evening and say to my wife: “Riet, you don’t want to know what’s going on over there. There is so much tension it’s frightening.” Wim [Jonk] and I were the enemy at Ajax. We wanted change and many people within Ajax didn’t. They were comfortable in their positions and the only thing they wanted was to remain comfortable. That’s why they resisted us, tooth and nail. At De Toekomst the atmosphere was positively hostile. Conversations would stop when Wim and I approached. That’s when you know they’re talking about you. All sorts of things were going on behind our backs, but we soldiered on as best we could.’

  For a while an uneasy balance held between the ancien regime and the revolutionaries. Then matters came unexpectedly to a head. Interim chief executive Martin Sturkenboom – hired without the knowledge of the Cruyffians – started handing out disciplinary warnings to his opponents. Wim Jonk received two and was in danger of being fired. Then Danny Blind (now in the anti-Cruyff camp, though the two had been close twenty years before) was appointed technical director. Then came an unmistakeable attempt at a counter-coup. Ajax’s supreme body was now a five-person board of supervisors, including Cruyff. The other four members, including Ten Have and Edgar Davids, having blocked Cruyff’s candidate for the crucial post of chief executive, now, in Cruyff’s absence, offered the job to his arch-enemy Louis van Gaal. When he heard the news, the astonished Cruyff shouted: ‘Are they out of their minds!?’

  Dennis: ‘The resistance was so intense and so provocative that we had to act forcefully. Johan felt obliged to hire a lawyer and ultimately we had no choice but to go to court. Cruyff hated the idea of litigating against his own club. But there was no alternative. At that point, all the former footballers closed ranks around Johan and we said: “We’re in this together.” At first the judge simply annulled Van Gaal’s appointment. Unwisely, the club appealed and unintentionally invited the decisive blow. In February 2012, the Amsterdam Appeals Court ruled that four of the five members of the board had acted premeditatedly and unlawfully by going behind Cruyff’s back to recruit Van Gaal. The board fell. Resistance was broken. The civil war was at an end.

  During the conflict, Cruyff was depicted by much of the Dutch media as the bad guy – irresponsible, vengeful, gangsterish – and his collection of former players were accused of being stupid and incapable of running the club. Dennis emphatically refutes all this and describes – off the record and in eye-popping detail – some of the dirty tricks deployed against himself and other Cruyff supporters. He prefers not to speak publicly on the subject, but believes Cruyff’s side of the argument, and that he and his supporters were the ones most sinned against. At the time of writing it is too early to tell how the Ajax revolution will turn out. But the club, revived and re-energised and again using mostly home-grown players – coached now in the new methods – have won three Dutch championships in a row, a feat that matches the great teams of the sixties and nineties. As at Inter and Arsenal, Dennis’s modest, patient but steely pursuit of footballing excellence – the defining characteristic of his entire career – has made him an agent of radical change.

  * * *

  THE OLD GUARD at Ajax saw your side as the aggressors.

  Dennis: ‘The way I describe it was that Ajax had become the ninety-five Club’. They’d say: “We won the Champions League in ninety-five, and in ninety-six we were in the final.” OK. Well done, but this is 2013 now, and you have to evolve, you have to move on. And they’d say: “But look, we’re making one or two little changes, so we are evolving.” And I’d say: “No, you’re not evolving. You’re really not. You’re still doing the same, but instead of one hour a week training with kids, it’s one and a half hours. That’s not change. You need a complete change every year to keep evolving.” That’s what they didn’t understand.’

  You see what you’re doing now as an advance on the old Ajax system, and on Barcelona’s La Masia, which is based on the old Ajax system?

  ‘The outcome hopefully will be better. Because since Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart we didn’t have one truly exceptional player coming through to the first team. Not one player who’d spend three or four years in the Ajax first team, then go to the first team of Madrid or Milan or Man United. It’s still good, but the standard has gone down a bit. They go to lesser teams now, and sometimes they don’t even get a first-team position in those teams. It’s not what it was. So we have to do something else because we want to be different, we want to be unique. The idea now is that we are trying to create complete, exceptional players.

  ‘We’d run into a wall. Wim Jonk had started doing individual training already, working w
ith Ruben Jongkind, and it was accepted – but only in a very limited way, with only three or four players. Wim would work intensively with these guys on, say, finishing or controlling the ball or passing. He was very excited about this. He was saying: “This is the way forward!” He wanted to take it further. But the club would say: “We don’t do it like that because it’s a team sport and that’s not our way of thinking. Maybe someday in the future . . .” These were guys who’d been in the Ajax Youth Development since just before 1995. They simply wouldn’t change. It helped when Johan made a few comments, and the fans were unhappy, too, because they saw a lot of bad things on the pitch. Ajax wasn’t recognisable as Ajax any more, the way we played. It had to change.’

  People complain that Johan continues to live in Barcelona and leaves the club to guys like you and Frank de Boer and Jonk. They say Johan doesn’t take responsibility.

  ‘But he does take responsibility. He has always been interested in Ajax, and always spoken about it. I don’t see that as not taking responsibility. He puts his opinion out there again and again. That is taking responsibility by itself. People attack him for it. But he really says things the way he sees them. How many people in the world are brave enough to say: “This is wrong, you have to do it differently and I know how to do it differently”? Holland is a small country, so how can we succeed? And how did we succeed in the past? We succeeded by bringing exceptional talent, exceptional football to the world. As you said, it becomes almost a religious thing, being the best the Dutch can be. It’s our philosophy.

  ‘I believe in what we’re doing here. And I believe that we in Holland should stop worshipping The System. For years we’ve talked and taught too much only about tactics. When I went to Italy for two years and to England, for thirteen years – eleven years’ playing – I experienced other ways of thinking and playing football and I was like: “This is interesting.” So now I want to bring that here too, to Ajax.’