How Ajax went from Champions League overachievers to chaos
It all started with a photograph of the private parts of a former player. No, this is not a piece about dressingroom “humour”. This is the story of the demise of Ajax, who in 2019 were seconds from the Champions League final and now sit 14th in the Eredivisie after the game at home against Feyenoord on Sunday was abandoned amid crowd trouble with the team 3-0 down.
The goal scored by Tottenham’s Lucas Moura in the last minute of injury time on 8 May 2019 shattered Ajax’s Champions League final dream then but there could be no doubting the Dutch club had overachieved. For a team from a league snubbed by oil sheikhs and big investors, and where
TV money is a relative pittance, it was still a memorable evening and an unforgettable season.
Ajax were referred to as the Champions League winners in people’s hearts. First Erik ten Hag’s squad had survived three qualifying rounds, then resisted Bayern Munich twice in spectacular fashion in the group phase, thrashed Real Madrid 4-1 at the Bernabéu and beaten Juventus in Turin. This was achieved via amazing combination football and the superb technical skills of the budding talents Frenkie de Jong, Matthijs de Ligt, Hakim Ziyech and Donny van de Beek, while Dusan Tadic and Daley Blind were experiencing their second youth.
The ideal blend had been achieved under the football director, Marc Overmars, and although the end against Spurs was bitter and brutal, people in the Netherlands were convinced it marked the start of a new era.
Then came the day when Overmars – the former Ajax, Arsenal and Barcelona player – took down his pants in a toilet in an Ajax building, took a photo with his phone and sent it to a female Ajax employee. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it transpired it was not the only time Overmars had approached female colleagues in an inappropriate manner, and it led to his departure on 6 Feb
ruary 2022.
His conduct had been the best-kept secret at Ajax, where everything normally leaks out, which perhaps says something about the masculine inner world of the Netherlands’ largest club and the blinkers they had on.
Ajax thought they had become the Bayern Munich of the Netherlands, untouchable by the rest. In May 2022 they finished top for a fourth consecutive season. They had responded to the crushing Moura goal by producing more great Champions League nights against Valencia, Chelsea, Borussia Dortmund and Sporting.
Their traditional rivals PSV and especially Feyenoord appeared to be years behind. But Ajax missed the transfer acumen of Overmars, who not only discovered gems in Europe but had built an impressive network in South and Central America. Antony, Lisandro Martínez, Edson Álvarez, Ziyech, Mohammed Kudus and Kasper Dolberg were eventually sold for huge sums, as were the homegrown talents De Jong, De Ligt, Van de Beek and Sergiño Dest.
Overmars had been installed at Ajax in 2012 after a reshape of the club initiated by Johan Cruyff. For the first five years Overmars had to work closely with other former players such as Dennis Bergkamp and Wim Jonk and was prevented by the board from giving players a salary of more than €1m a year.
At the end of 2017 he took control of Ajax alongside Edwin van der Sar when Bergkamp was sacked together with the coach Marcel Keizer. One of his best moves was to appoint Ten Hag, the coach he had previously hired at Go Ahead Eagles. Overmars broke open the salary ceiling to bring Tadic and Blind back to the Netherlands from the Premier League, and with that the reemergence of Ajax as a big name in Europe started.
Then came the scandal of the inappropriate behaviour. Ten Hag still guided Ajax to their 36th national title but he left in the summer of 2022 for Manchester United. Ajax replaced Overmars with a few inexperienced employees and asked Van der Sar, the general director, to help out with transfer decisions. The club sold players that summer for about €200m and spent about €100m, both records, but a disastrous season followed. It featured a record 6-1 defeat in the Champions League by Napoli, the dismissal of the coach Alfred Schreuder and a third-place finish under the inexperienced interim coach JohnHeitinga, which meant no Champions League this season.
Van der Sar retired in the summer, saying he was worn out. He had appointed a new football director, Sven Mislintat, formerly of Stuttgart, Dortmund and Arsenal, who was instructed to sell heavily (€150m) and reduce the salary structure. Without Champions League income, Ajax had to make cuts for the first time in years. Mislintat succeeded, but the criticism was he acted largely alone.
He signed 12 fairly unknown talents, some of whom had never played at the highest level. He relieved Heitinga, who was popular with the fans, of his position and appointed Maurice Steijn, who was inexperienced at the top, and asked for a few months of patience.
But in Amsterdam they do not do patience. Ajax have made their worst start to a season since 1964 and to add to the sense of trouble it turned out that Misintlat had brought in a player, Borna Sosa, who was represented by the German agency AKA Global, which allegedly has a stake in the data company Matchmetrics in which Mislintat owns shares. The club has launched an investigation into the transfer.
Ajax said Mislintat had declared his interest in Matchmetrics when appointed but that they had not known about AKA Global’s alleged holding in the company at the time of the transfer. Mislintat, the club said, had said “he will offer his full cooperation and share all relevant documents” with the inquiry.
Everything culminated last Sunday in the match against Feyenoord, the arch-rivals who had been looked down upon with malicious pleasure in Amsterdam for years but who had overtaken Ajax by a massive margin last season, nationally and in Europe.
Feyenoord took a 3-0 lead. Ajax fans from the F-side ultras shouted for the board and Mislintat to go and twice threw fireworks on to the field, forcing the game to be halted. There were riots afterwards around the stadium, with hooligans forcing their way into the main entrance and confronting the police and mobile units in a manner not seen in Amsterdam for a long time. That evening, Mislintat was fired.
On Wednesday the club that would never allow itself to be overtaken by a Dutch rival must try to overcome a 3-0 deficit against the champions Feyenoord in 35 minutes in an empty stadium.
The future? Some fanatical fans are hoping that Overmars, who is now very successful at the Belgian double winners Antwerp, will return. Many others think that is a bridge too far. The club is hopelessly divided, which can almost entirely be traced to that moment Overmars dropped his pants and took out his phone.
draws in the league – and it would have been eight but for a late winner by Norwich’s Andy Townsend at Old Trafford. To compound Ferguson’s frustration, United led in all eight games apart from Derby away. They found a creative solution to the problem of giving away a lead: their next game was a goalless draw at Newcastle.
The best we can find in the English top flight is seven consecutive score draws by the Norwich City team that charmed (almost) everyone at the start of the Premier League era. In January 1994, when Mike Walker left to take over at Everton, his replacement John Deehan started with a 1-1 draw at Stamford Bridge. There was an FA Cup defeat soon after, but in the league the score draws kept coming.
Chelsea (H) 1-1
West Ham (A) 3-3
Liverpool (H) 2-2
Arsenal (H) 1-1
Swindon Town (A) 3-3
Blackburn Rovers (H) 2-2
Sheffield Wednesday (H) 1-1 Wimbledon spoiled the party, bulldozing Norwich 3-1 at the start of March.
Knowledge archive
“As I type, the full-time whistle has just blown at Villa Park where Liverpool have scored six goals, all by different players, which seems unusual to me. So, what is the most goals scored in a game by one side, all by different players?”wondered Andrew Hill in 2016 (and plenty of you this week after Newcastle’s eight-goalscorer win at Sheffield
United).
A few of you set the bar at seven. Charly Yver nominated Nantes 7-0 Nice in 1996-97, when Claude Makélélé was one of the scorers. Sveinn Sigþórsson cited Manchester City 7-0 Norwich in 2013-14, while David McManus went all the way back to Leeds’s 7-0 shellacking of Chelsea in 1967-68. The last two cases both included an own goal, so maybe that only counts as six.
Either way, that great Leeds side must bow down at the feet of Clitheroe FC, who walloped Shelley 8-1 in 2014. Sure, it was a pre-season friendly but, well, look in the book. It has happened in a competitive game too: Brendan Slattery recalls Ventspils 8-0 B68 in the qualifying rounds for the Uefa Cup of 2004-05.
Stephen Crisp wearily reminds us that Liverpool had eight different scorers when they beat Crystal Palace 9-0 in 1989; Steve Nicol ruined a great factgasm by scoring his second goal in the 90th minute. Liverpool went one better in 1974-75, with nine different scorers in an 11-0 defenestration of Strømsgodset. The only players who didn’t score were Brian Hall and the goalkeeper Ray Clemence, though Clemence did get an assist. Thanks to Chris Carey and Stefan Glosby for that one.
[ᦘ 2023 update
Here’s Ben Janeson to flag that “in the DFB-Pokal first-round match between Landesliga Bayern-Nord (fifthtier) club DJK Waldberg and Bayern Munich on 15 August 1997, the hosts lost 16-1, with nine different Bayern players scoring (Jancker x5, Élber x3, Hamann x2, Scholl, Basler, Fink, Strunz,
ᦘ]
Helmer, Rizzitelli)”.
Can you help?
“I work for Marine AFC and due to cup games, replays and rescheduled fixtures, we have no home games on a Saturday between 26 August and 21 October,” writes Adam Yates. “Have you heard of any similar waits when there are no stadium factors in play?”
“While at the Allianz Arena watching Bayern-Manchester United, the fact that United had three goalkeepers on the bench got me wondering: what is the highest number of players to play in goal for one team in a competitive match? And have three or more specialist keepers ever appeared in one match for the same team?” asks Paul Vickers.