Johan Cruyff: The prophet of Betondorp who revolutionised the game

Johan Cruyff once famously said that as long as you have the ball, your opponents can’t score a goal.

[STORY: Johan Cruyff dies aged 68]

Part truism and part revelation, this enigmatic quote perfectly sums up the personality of the Dutch maestro, as well as his reputation in his home country of the Netherlands. So easy to grasp but so difficult to understand, the oracle from the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Betondorp was easy to relate to yet elevated above anyone else. He was, in many ways, a man of the people and mythical superhero in one.

[STORY: World pays tribute to 'Father of the modern game' Johan Cruyff]

Betondorp is no fancy place. Literally translating to ‘concrete village’, this part of Amsterdam is close to yet so far removed from the beautiful canals the city is known for. For a young Cruyff, however, it was a fantastic place to play football. On the streets, before these public spaces were cluttered with cars and traffic, and together with his brother and whoever was foolish enough to take on the technically gifted wonderkid. It didn’t take long for Ajax, Cruyff’s local club, to welcome him into its academy. He trained with the club from the age of six and officially joined their ranks as soon as he turned 10.

It wasn’t an easy road, however. Life changed for little ‘Jopie’ when he was 12 years old. In an event that would alter the course of his young life, his father passed away, and his mother, Nel, was forced to leave their greengrocer shop behind and take on a job as a cleaner at Ajax. Here, she met Henk Angel, the club’s groundsman, who would become ‘uncle Henk’ when Nel remarried. Cruyff fostered a close relationship with ‘uncle Henk’ and later recalled that, when not training with Ajax, he would help Henk with anything from putting out corner flags to marking our pitches - experiences which are said to have kept the youngster grounded.

From his teens onwards, Cruyff’s star would only rise. But his modest roots stayed part of his persona forever. Even as a retiree living in Barcelona he still visited Betondorp from time to time, and was lauded by the Dutch public for staying grounded: a personality trait perfectly fitting the national ethos of ‘just act normal, that’s crazy enough’. His confidence, which was sometimes read as arrogance, has its roots here too. Never afraid to take anyone on, from rivalling football teams to his own manager, he exhumed self-reliance in everything he did or said.

Cruyff broke into the public eye at exactly the right time. Consequently, he became a national icon. It was the late 1960s, and the Netherlands were still recovering from the devastating Second World War. In the grey streets of a country low on confidence, constantly occupied with the hard work of reconstruction, the younger generation were letting their hair grow, listening to the Beatles and enjoying the pranks and protests of the hippie-like ‘Provo’s’ in Amsterdam.

With his appearance and beautiful style of play, Cruyff took this newfound positivity to the football pitch, elevating Ajax from obscurity to world fame in the process. Winning the European Cup three times in a row, from 1971 through to 1973, the Amsterdam-based club laid the foundation for a revolution in football. The zenith of this development came in 1974, when the Netherlands reached the final of the World Cup. Although the final against West Germany was narrowly lost, the ‘Total Football’ Cruyff and his team-mates played would change the game forever.

For a small country, wedged between a collection of greater European nations and incapable of imposing itself on the world stage, this was no small feat. It changed the national identity, teaching the people that even small countries can excel and forever instilling pride in a nation still somewhat in the throes of an identity crisis. In the context of the Netherlands’ stance in the world in the 1960s and 1970s, Cruyff was more than simply a force in football: he was a force in history.

To this day, it is impossible to get in a taxi or enter a conversation with a stranger in a foreign pub without being asked about the football. And rightly so: any football fan only has to turn on the TV to see Cruyff’s influence on their beloved sport. As manager of Barcelona in the early 1990s, it was the little kid from Betondorp who mentored Pep Guardiola and helped him develop the tactical vision that would later conquer the world.

What else could have happened? Guardiola simply did what everyone did: when Cruyff talks, you listen. Even though the Dutch national team seems to have departed from Total Football in recent years, the game will forever be discussed and thought of in the terms defined by their greatest player of all time. The legendary number 14 is, and always will be, the heart, soul and mind of any game of football played in the Netherlands.

If football is a religion, then that little kid from Betondorp truly is its prophet.