Cruyff’s stellar qualities make him a unique great
THERE shouldn’t be any real argument about it. Johan Cruyff is, pound for pound, the most important man in the history of football. Some players achieved more in terms of prizes, fine.
His coaching career was stellar but short. OK.
But if you do the ‘pound-for-pound’ measurement, which boxing utilises to pit fighters of different sizes and eras against each other, then it’s Cruyff, by a million miles
To capture his elegance as a footballer, even simply as an athlete, it’s obsolete to simply look within the sport.
You have to reach for comparisons, adjectives, concepts from ballet, opera, high-class flat racing, fashion, pop culture i n order to come somewhere close to giving your description worth and accuracy.
As a coach, he not only launched a dynasty at the Nou Camp, the brand of football he has always found to be innate, but one which he could also teach, led Europe out of a couple of decades of catenaccio, fear, tactical dullness, hooligan-violence, racism, stadium disasters … and into an era when, gradually, skill, technique, creativity and daring would be valued again.
His Barcelona ‘ Dream Team’ achievements may seem distant now, quickly truncated, but they were catalytic, inspirational and shone with renaissance brilliance, at a really dark time.
Add in the way he’s spent his time since that last full-time managerial position, in 1996 — Godfather and grand-thinker to Barca and author of the basic credo upon which this golden era was based.
Organising a re-boot at Ajax, the Dutch star raised money for over 200 Cruyff Courts to be built around the world, so that kids can hone their skills.
It gave them the chance to have fun and play, for free, in deprived neighbourhoods where once streetfootball would have been the norm. Combine that to the other components and you’ll see that, all in all, there’s never been a more important or valuable man i n football’s entire history.
From his first professional kick of a football in 1963 until this week, when his lung cancer was diagnosed, he has been consistently adding brilliance, intelligence, strategy, fun, elegance, thrills, tricks, skills, controversy and downright cussedness to the game which dominates the world.
Now the key and only concern, in real terms, is that he gets better. That he has the fight, health, support and luck to beat this horrible, unfair and random disease. But the metaphor is impossible to ignore.
At at time when football’s governance has routinely been shown to be sick, deluded, greedy, manipulative and mendacious, this Amsterdammer whose life has been dedicated to his vice of making football more beautiful, more loveable, more inclusive, has been diagnosed as needing to fight a vicious, greedy foe.
Football’s ‘elected’ leaders are sinking in a mire of their own making — meanwhile football’s spiritual leader, at a time when the sport needs his vision and talent as much as it ever did, has fallen ill.
A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed him in Berlin in front of an audience of Europe’s best football Academy specialists.
He told me a story of his Cruyff Courts — the embodiment of his dream that the fundamental skills and life lessons he and his fellow Dutch greats, van Basten, Bergkamp, Rijkaard, Davids, Seedorf, all learned on the now prohibited cobbled streets, not be lost.
The great man finds money (his own, sponsors’, government, football clubs etc) and these courts get built — weather-proof, modern, safe and free. But not wholly vandal-proof.
A vital concept is that local kids care for what they’ve been gifted by maintaining the facility and treating it with respect.
One of the longest-established courts (which can now be found in nearly 20 countries around the world) had produced it’s first professional player (not bad for an unsupervised kick-around pitch).
A ceremony was held, to mark the occasion. Media attended, dignitaries were involved, so was Cruyff.
As he was handed a slice of celebratory cake, he felt a little tug on his sleeve. There was a 10-yearold tough guy there. He said: ‘Sorry Mister, you can’t eat that here — we don’t allow any food on our football pitch. Them’s the rules. We have to look after it, you know.’
Oh, how he loved that. Ownership, value, pride and defiance.
In my 2011 book: Barça: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World, I wrote: ‘If the 175,000 FC Barcelona members (or socios) queued up in an orderly line, night after night, to massage his tired feet, cook his dinner and tuck him into bed; if they carried his golf clubs round Montanyá’s hilly 18 holes; if they devoted 50 per cent of their annual salary to him… it still wouldn’t be near enough to repay the debt those who love this club owe Johan Cruyff.’
If he had not installed a culture, a philosophy at the Nou Camp, then Lionel Messi would have been rejected and sent home as an underdeveloped 13-year-old kid. Andreas Iniesta wouldn’t have been selected.
Pep Guardiola still thinks that only at a ‘Cruyff’ club could he have had a top-level playing career.
He’s a man who can inspire dislike and controversy, he also inspires — possibly more than any footballer has ever ‘inspired’.
The testimonial to Cruyff’s status as a beacon of sporting beauty came from a Real Madrid all-time legend, Emilio Butragueno.
El Buitre once explained: ‘I always told everyone that Cruyff was my idol. I’m not being disloyal to Madrid by saying that. You’d have to be narrow-minded and short on insight to think like that.’
His Barcelona achievements may seem distant now but they were catalytic, inspirational and shone with brilliance at a really dark time