Overmars reviving glory game for Ajax

Technical director tells Jonathan Liew how he is trying to defy odds and build another great team

THERE is a framed photograph on the back wall of Marc Overmars’s office at Ajax’s training ground.

A young Johan Cruyff, no more than 20 years old, crouches alongside three of his team-mates from the iconic Ajax side of the late 1960s: Klaas Nuninga, Sjaak Swart, Piet Keizer.

It is the first thing you see as you walk through the door, and its significance is clear. This is a club that cherishes its legends, protecting their memories against the attrition of time.

But then, you do not need photographs to sense Ajax’s history. It lives, walks and breathes all around you.

That’s Aron Winter, the U-19 coach, carrying a bag of footballs on his back. That’s Dennis Bergkamp, the assistant manager, dispensing advice to young strikers on the training pitch.

And looking out over the pitch from his first-floor office is technical director Overmars who in his smart business suit could scarcely look more different from the lightning winger of his 1990s peak.

With Louis van Gaal’s Ajax, where he won the European Cup in 1995, and then with Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal, Overmars was one of the finest Dutch footballers of his generation.

Since returning to the club in Cruyff ’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 2012, Overmars has been tasked with bringing back the glory days to Ajax. And on Wednesday night, they play Manchester United in Stockholm, their first European final in two decades.

“The project that we started four-and-a-half years ago,” Overmars explains, “is to build and create a team like the one we had in our time. A team so strong that they could play against any team, without fear. We knew it was almost impossible, because the world is changing a lot.”

Two decades ago, United against Ajax would have been a meeting of equals. Now, United generate seventimes more revenue than Ajax. They have spent more on transfer fees in the last three seasons than Ajax have in their history. Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s salary is more than Ajax’s entire wage bill.

“They are Goliath,” Overmars admits. “We are David. But to create that – to reach the final with a football budget of €21m – that makes me proud.”

What you may not know, however, is how close Overmars (below) came to becoming a Manchester United player in the summer of 1996. “That was a very close one,” he acknowledges.

“I broke my knee. I think (Alex) Ferguson was really interested. United and Arsenal were the two interested at that time. But I broke my ligaments, and then I was out for eight months.

“Afterwards, Arsenal kept the faith, which I am really grateful to Wenger for. Twenty years ago, when you broke your ligaments, it was quite a serious injury.”

There is a certain irony, then, in the fact that it was Overmars’ goal at Old Trafford that proved decisive in Wenger’s first Premier League title in 1998. “A special moment,” Overmars remembers.

After retiring from the game in 2004 with Barcelona, Overmars was looking for a new project.

With a natural interest in business – he co-owns a restaurant in his hometown and helps run the family’s property investment firm – Overmars was naturally drawn to the upstairs world of transfer deals and recruitment strategies.

“I worked for five years with a second division club, Go Ahead Eagles, which was financially broke,” he says.

“Together with Hans de Vroome, the chairman, we built it up, and they were promoted in five years. That’s where I found my way. I didn’t want to be a coach. Didn’t want to be a trainer.

“So that’s where I found what I was good at. Then Ajax came in with the revolution. With Cruyff.”

ROMANCE

The football writer and lifelong Ajax fan Elko Born describes it as a club defined by two “currents” – pragmatism and romance. The Cruyff team of the 1960s and 1970s represented romance; the Van Gaal team of the 1990s pragmatism.

At the start of the decade, however, these two competing visions were tearing Ajax apart.

The football was abysmal. The boardroom politics were intolerable. “This is no longer Ajax,” Cruyff declared in a now-infamous newspaper column.

When Van Gaal was installed as a director in 2011, Cruyff went to court to block the appointment.

“It was a really rough period,” Overmars remembers. “It cost a lot of energy. A lot of politics, and little wars.”

Out of the revolution, however, emerged a certain harmony. Under Cruyff’s direction, Ajax turned to its past. Legends like Bergkamp, Overmars, Edwin van der Sar and Wim Jonk returned to the club.

Expensive foreign imports were gradually replaced with promising academy players. Four consecutive league titles resulted.

Now Ajax – a squad with an average age of 22, playing exceptional attacking football – are in a first European final since 1996. And yet this summer, bigger clubs will pick them to pieces, and Overmars will have to start again. It is why, deep down, he knows that sustaining this sort of success over the long term is a pipe dream.

“I think it’s quite impossible,” he says. “We hope that players now will stay for two or three years. Christian Eriksen played four years. Fantastic. Then, it’s time for them to make the new step. You grow out of Holland. You don’t want to play against teams with 5,000 spectators. No, you want the strongest league. So it’s a natural process.

“Eriksen is the best example. He stayed four years in the first team, won the title three times. Then when he comes to me and says, ‘I really want to go to Spurs’, I said: ‘OK, Christian, no problem.’

“Davy Klaassen is the new Christian Eriksen. When – if! – he comes through this door and says, ‘Marc, it’s really time for me to go’ . . . OK. Sit, and we will find a solution.”

This is the Ajax circle of life, and it works for them. The faces change, but the vision is constant. With promising prospects flowing out of the Ajax academy like the River Amstel, and generating healthy revenue that the club can reinvest, perhaps Ajax has finally settled on a model that balances pragmatism and romance. © Daily Telegraph, London.