Dutch masters What happened to Ajax’s all-conquering side of 1995?
Had spells with Juventus, Fulham and Man Utd. Now Ajax chief executive.
Played for Barcelona, Middlesbrough and PSV. Now a coach at Sparta Rotterdam.
Took over as Ajax coach in 2005, and Holland in 2015. Fired in March. Became Ajax manager in 2010. Sacked after three months at Inter in 2016.
Led Barcelona to Champions League in 2016. Now works on youth development in Florida.
Won four more Champions Leagues with Real, Inter, and AC Milan. Struggled as coach at AC Milan and Shenzhen.
Became a fan favourite at Juventus and Tottenham, and had an odd spell at Barnet. Had success at Liverpool under Gérard Houllier. Now in the media.
Had a brief period with Ipswich. Now coaches the Majorca Under-16s.
Moved to Arsenal and Barca, before going into business. Now Ajax’s technical director. abysmal. The boardroom politics were intolerable. “This is no longer Ajax,” Cruyff declared in a famous newspaper column in 2010. 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 says. “It cost a lot of energy. A lot of politics, and little wars.”
Out of the revolution emerged a certain harmony. Under Cruyff ’s direction, Ajax turned to their past. Legends such as 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 – are in their 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. 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 want the strongest league. So it’s a natural process.”
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 have finally settled on a model that balances pragmatism and romance.
Overmars points again at the back wall of his office. Next to the iconic shot of Cruyff ’s 1967 team hang two similar photographs. One, from the early 2000s, featuring Johnny Heitinga, Wesley Sneijder and Nigel de Jong; next to them, Donny van de Beek, Appie Nouri, Vaclav Cerny and Terry Lartey Sanniez: four of the club’s finest young players from the present day. Three photographs, three eras, the same pose, the same vision. At Ajax, the past and the future are never quite as far apart as you think. Now assistant manager of Ajax A1, the club’s elite youth team. Had spells at Arsenal and Portsmouth.