Johan Cruyff - football's modern Prometheus

At the turn of the century, Johan Cruyff was voted as the greatest European footballer of the previous hundred years. When he turned 50 three years earlier, he said that he had already lived 100 years. He died in 2016 from lung cancer after perhaps the most remarkable football life ever lived.

I recently reviewed Cruyff's book – My Turn – with Al Bond, my co-host on the Ademola Bookmen Podcast. The book is longer than it should be, extremely tedious in parts, with football a mere backdrop to Cruyff's musings on various topics and detailed descriptions of the very many fights he picked in his life. If you are interested, I suggest you read only the first half, unless boardroom battles for the soul of a football club – in this case, Ajax – are your thing. Because that's what the second half of the book is about.

While it's not the best book you'll ever read, Cruyff himself was an absolutely extraordinary individual. Like Maradona, his life had a cinematic "you couldn't make it up" quality to it.

He played in the 60s and 70s; well before my time. I knew he was good, but I didn't know how good. Footage is in short supply but what you can see online is incredible. He was quick, he was graceful, he was stylish. He won the Ballon D'or three times, something that he doesn't bother to mention in the book. When you consider how the accumulation of trophies and individual accolades has become so central to football and to the modern elite footballer in particular, this is very unusual in itself.

More unusual still is the fact that when he brought the Netherlands – or Holland as they would have been known at the time – to the brink of footballing immortality in 1974 by reaching the World Cup final, he wasn't even that bothered when they lost it. He was more interested in the fact that the football he had invented with coach Rinus Michels – known as Total Football – had been introduced to the world. Or at least that's what he said in the book anyway.

Cruyff was born a stone's throw from Ajax. That the club's greatest ever player could be essentially from across the road from the stadium seems uncanny until you realise that it was Cruyff who elevated Ajax to greatness, not the other way around. When his Dad died when Johan was 12, his mother married the club's groundsman and got a job as the cleaning lady. From a very young age, the club was his family. But the team itself was a mediocre one in a country that was at the time a footballing backwater.

Cruyff said that you play the game with your head and not with your feet. On a personal level, this was disappointing for me to learn, as I could always take comfort from the understanding that my own footballing mediocrity was due to a lack of athleticism rather than intelligence. Oh well.

But this is the key to understanding Cruyff. He might have been quick on his feet, but what was happening upstairs was so much quicker. The word genius is thrown around in relation to sport with such abandon but in the case of Cruyff it fits. It was Cruyff – together with Michels – who got Ajax, then the Netherlands, and then the world to play passing football; to understand space, to work in triangles of three players, and to approach an athletic pursuit with a scientific method.

Arsene Wenger is said to have described Cruyff as impossible for any player to emulate because he was a coach as much as a player on the pitch; a kind of conductor directing his orchestra while running at top speed, dress in immaculate luminous orange.

His life was punctuated by constant fallings out. Despite being widely acknowledged as the beating heart of the Ajax team that won three European Cups in a row in the early 70s, his teammates voted for a different player as captain when the issue was put to a vote. The story goes he left the changing room and immediately called his father-in-law cum agent and told him to arrange his transfer to Barcelona.

At Barcelona, he found another team that was down on their luck, immediately turning that ship around and leading them to their first league title in over a decade. In his career there as a player and later as the manager of the Dream Team of the early 1990s, he built what Pep Guardiola described as a cathedral. According to Guardiola, his job and that of other coaches who follow is merely to maintain and to renovate the cathedral that Johan built.

Guardiola has been described as Cruyff's heir, his footballing son. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Cruyff is the fact that the football he created not only outlived him but has gone on to dominate global football, with coaches like Pep and Klopp being among its many proponents. Cruyff himself hated the defensiveness of Mourinho's football but that kind of game has been killed by Total Football, at least for now. Cruyff lives on in the football that rules the world today.

I didn't know much about Cruyff before reading the book. Now I know that not only was he one of the greatest players the game has seen; he was its greatest innovator, its re- inventor. I would not really recommend that you read Cruyff's book, but I would highly recommend that you read about Cruyff.

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