Stillness and Speed: My Story (33 page)

During the transitional year of 2011, the men Cruyff dubbed ‘suits’ balked at his radical ideas, offering instead small reforms and concessions. The suits argued that anything else
would cause turmoil and cost the jobs of cherished employees. Cruyff pushed on, insisting on implementation of his
entire
revolutionary programme. Civil war now raged, with bitter
accusations, insults and rumours flying around the club and in the media. Even the quarrelsome Dutch had never seen anything quite like it.

Dennis recalls the terrible strain: ‘It was an awful period. I would come home in the evening and say to my wife: “Riet, you don’t want to know what’s going on over
there. There is so much tension it’s frightening.” Wim [Jonk] and I were the enemy at Ajax. We wanted change and many people within Ajax didn’t. They were comfortable in their
positions and the only thing they wanted was to remain comfortable. That’s why they resisted us, tooth and nail. At
De Toekomst
the atmosphere was positively hostile. Conversations
would stop when Wim and I approached. That’s when you know they’re talking about you. All sorts of things were going on behind our backs, but we soldiered on as best we
could.’

For a while an uneasy balance held between the
ancien regime
and the revolutionaries. Then matters came unexpectedly to a head. Interim chief executive Martin Sturkenboom – hired
without the knowledge of the Cruyffians – started handing out disciplinary warnings to his opponents. Wim Jonk received two and was in danger of being fired. Then Danny Blind (now in the
anti-Cruyff camp, though the two had been close twenty years before) was appointed technical director. Then came an unmistakeable attempt at a counter-coup. Ajax’s supreme body was now a
five-person board of supervisors, including Cruyff. The other four members, including Ten Have and Edgar Davids, having blocked Cruyff’s candidate for the crucial post of chief executive,
now, in Cruyff’s absence, offered the job to his arch-enemy Louis van Gaal. When he heard the news, the astonished Cruyff shouted: ‘Are they out of their minds!?’

Dennis: ‘The resistance was so intense and so provocative that we had to act forcefully. Johan felt obliged to hire a lawyer and ultimately we had no choice but to go to court. Cruyff
hated the idea of litigating against his own club. But there was no alternative. At that point, all the former footballers closed ranks around Johan and we said: “We’re in this
together.” At first the judge simply annulled Van Gaal’s appointment. Unwisely, the club appealed and unintentionally invited the decisive blow. In February 2012, the Amsterdam Appeals
Court ruled that four of the five members of the board had acted premeditatedly and unlawfully by going behind Cruyff’s back to recruit Van Gaal. The board fell. Resistance was broken. The
civil war was at an end.

During the conflict, Cruyff was depicted by much of the Dutch media as the bad guy – irresponsible, vengeful, gangsterish – and his collection of former players were accused of being
stupid and incapable of running the club. Dennis emphatically refutes all this and describes – off the record and in eye-popping detail – some of the dirty tricks deployed against
himself and other Cruyff supporters. He prefers not to speak publicly on the subject, but believes Cruyff’s side of the argument, and that he and his supporters were the ones most sinned
against. At the time of writing it is too early to tell how the Ajax revolution will turn out. But the club, revived and re-energised and again using mostly home-grown players – coached now
in the new methods – have won three Dutch championships in a row, a feat that matches the great teams of the sixties and nineties. As at Inter and Arsenal, Dennis’s modest, patient but
steely pursuit of footballing excellence – the defining characteristic of his entire career – has made him an agent of radical change.

* * *

T
HE OLD GUARD
at Ajax saw your side as the aggressors.

Dennis: ‘The way I describe it was that Ajax had become the ninety-five Club’. They’d say: “We won the Champions League in ninety-five, and in ninety-six we were in the
final.” OK. Well done, but this is 2013 now, and you have to evolve, you have to move on. And they’d say: “But look, we’re making one or two little changes, so we are
evolving.” And I’d say: “No, you’re not evolving. You’re really not. You’re still doing the same, but instead of one hour a week training with kids, it’s
one and a half hours. That’s not change. You need a
complete
change every year to keep evolving.” That’s what they didn’t understand.’

You see what you’re doing now as an advance on the old Ajax system, and on Barcelona’s La Masia, which is based on the old Ajax system?

‘The outcome hopefully will be better. Because since Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart we didn’t have one truly exceptional player coming through to the first team. Not one
player who’d spend three or four years in the Ajax first team, then go to the first team of Madrid or Milan or Man United. It’s still good, but the standard has gone down a bit. They go
to lesser teams now, and sometimes they don’t even get a first-team position in those teams. It’s not what it was. So we have to do something else because we want to be different, we
want to be unique. The idea now is that we are trying to create complete, exceptional players.

‘We’d run into a wall. Wim Jonk had started doing individual training already, working with Ruben Jongkind, and it was accepted – but only in a very limited way, with only
three or four players. Wim would work intensively with these guys on, say, finishing or controlling the ball or passing. He was very excited about this. He was saying: “This is the way
forward!” He wanted to take it further. But the club would say: “We don’t do it like that because it’s a team sport and that’s not our way of thinking. Maybe someday
in the future . . .” These were guys who’d been in the Ajax Youth Development since just before 1995. They simply wouldn’t change. It helped when Johan made a few comments, and
the fans were unhappy, too, because they saw a lot of bad things on the pitch. Ajax wasn’t recognisable as Ajax any more, the way we played. It had to change.’

People complain that Johan continues to live in Barcelona and leaves the club to guys like you and Frank de Boer and Jonk. They say Johan doesn’t take responsibility.

‘But he does take responsibility. He has always been interested in Ajax, and always spoken about it. I don’t see that as not taking responsibility. He puts his opinion out there
again and again. That is taking responsibility by itself. People attack him for it. But he really says things the way he sees them. How many people in the world are brave enough to say: “This
is wrong, you have to do it differently and I know how to do it differently”? Holland is a small country, so how can we succeed? And how did we succeed in the past? We succeeded by bringing
exceptional talent, exceptional football to the world. As you said, it becomes almost a religious thing, being the best the Dutch can be. It’s our philosophy.

‘I believe in what we’re doing here. And I believe that we in Holland should stop worshipping The System. For years we’ve talked and taught too much only about tactics. When I
went to Italy for two years and to England, for thirteen years – eleven years’ playing – I experienced other ways of thinking and playing football and I was like: “This is
interesting.” So now I want to bring that here too, to Ajax.’

So you’re a bit of a heretic?

‘Ha ha! Well, the old thinking was too narrow. What I liked about the things I saw was that they were new, they added something. And what we are doing now with Ajax is new again.
It’s
totally
new. And we believe – and it started with Cruyff again – that in the future teams, clubs, countries will copy this. We will be in the forefront again.

‘When Todd Beane first came to us he talked about the high jumper Dick Fosbury. Until Fosbury, every high jumper had always jumped forward. Then Fosbury jumped backwards. They said he was
crazy. He was doing something totally new. “Is he out of his mind?” Now no one jumps forwards. That’s a little bit like our philosophy. Everyone says: “What are you doing?
It can’t be done.” Our idea is: don’t think about teams any more, just think about individuals. It’s a team sport, but you’re going to make individuals better.
It’s all about developing the individual.

‘The only team that needs to win trophies is the first team. The youth teams don’t need to win, they just need to make their players better. So what does the
individual
need
at a certain age? Should you talk tactics to a player before the age of fourteen? At that age it goes in one ear and out the other. It really doesn’t mean anything. So we start with that now
after
fourteen. Before fourteen, it’s just playful skills and everything. And we have new ways of measuring and developing those skills, and developing good habits, like controlling
the ball, and passing and positions, and we’re also thinking a lot about the mental side. So in the end you have not just a complete football player but a person who is good for others, who
means something in the world. He’s not just a stupid football player, but someone with a good story to tell, who is outgoing; someone who is genuinely interested in helping or changing the
world, for example, not just interested in girls and cars. A more intelligent person so everyone says: “Yes, that’s an Ajax player!” That’s the philosophy.’

J
OHAN
C
RUYFF
is also optimistic about the future – and about Dennis. In a cramped and paper-stuffed room at the offices of
the Johan Cruyff Foundation at Amsterdam’s renovated Olympic Stadium, he draws up two chairs opposite each other. The foundation helps youngsters and the disabled to play sports. Cruyff takes
the initiative, as he did as a player and as a manager, hurtling off on tangents in answer to some questions, answering others that haven’t been asked. His words slalom, dribble, turn and
shoot. It’s fascinating and boils down to the following: 1) Dennis Bergkamp is
incredibly
decent, both as a person and as a man of football; 2) Cruyff is
incredibly
proud
that his club is now being run by a group of former top footballers. It even makes him emotional; and 3) Ajax is on the right road, but that road will be a very long one.

What is your working relationship with Dennis now? Do you tell him what to do? Is he, as the victims of the revolution say, your ‘executioner’?

Cruyff: ‘No, Bergkamp, Jonk and the others in the technical heart call me. To confer. I’ve warned them never to blindly implement anything I say. They should listen to me and then
make their own decisions.’

And what if those decisions are not what you want?

‘That doesn’t happen. We’re too much on the same page for that. Their decisions will never be very different from the way I think about things, because we think exactly the
same way about the main principles.’

But they do have to listen to you?

‘Yes, of course, just like they have to listen to other people at the club who want their opinion heard. In football, you’re dealing with a dictatorship within a democracy.
Initially, everyone gets to give their opinion, but subsequently the decision is taken by whoever’s in charge. He’s the dictator. And that’s not me. I don’t have any
responsibilities, I don’t have an official job. At Ajax the technical heart and the executive board are in charge of their own turf. They are the dictators, and they only have to listen to
me, those dictators.’

Where will the revolution take Ajax?

‘All the way to the top.’

Which is what?

‘The last eight of the Champions League on a regular basis.’

Is that possible, given football’s completely unequal financial playing field? Don’t you need financial fair play first?

‘No, not necessarily, because if you have the eleven best-trained footballers in Europe in your team you will automatically reach the European top.’

And will Ajax train their footballers better than anywhere else?

‘Yes, of course, there’s no better place in the world to be a young player than at Ajax. Who can you learn more from than from great footballers like Dennis Bergkamp, Frank and
Ronald de Boer, Jaap Stam, Wim Jonk, Richard Witschge, and the list goes on? I’m proud of guys like that. They were written off as ignoramuses. We were supposedly the nitwits who were
incapable of anything, but we won out in the end. In the global history of football what has happened at Ajax is unique. As a group of footballers, we stood up against an executive board and a
board of directors. And we won. I’m proud of what happened, incredibly proud, so proud that it makes me very emotional. And all those guys are doing this because they want to, not because
they desperately need jobs or anything like that. They’re not doing it for themselves, but for football, and they all think the same way about it. There’s now enormous football know-how
at all levels of the club, including the highest levels, and that is going to generate progress.’

And what about Dennis?

‘Dennis sees everything. He maintains connections and drives people. You could call him a Jack of all trades, but I prefer to call him the playmaker within the technical heart.’

Cruyff won’t say it directly, but it’s clear that Dennis is the main man at Ajax now. At least
his
main man. ‘Dennis keeps things in balance, because he’s in
balance himself. You can’t pressurise Dennis Bergkamp. No matter how loudly people around him shout, he always remains calm and thinks. And Dennis is able to think more broadly, so he sees
connections. He’s always on top of everything, and when he has to he can pressurise other people. Then he gives loud and clear instructions: “First this, then that.” Dennis
Bergkamp is a truly amiable man, until he gets angry. Then you see genuine anger, but also intelligence. Then his comments are incredibly incisive, even hurtful, but always well considered. So when
someone like that becomes prominent within an organisation, maybe even the most prominent individual, it makes sense. It happens automatically.’