Johan Cruyff: The Master of Modern Football

As featured on 90min.com

From what I've seen and heard, football came too easy for Johan Cruyff. His mind was Scandinavian in design, his genius lay in the simplicity of his thoughts.

With the one-year anniversary of the Cruyff's death fast approaching, I spent some time studying the great man and to capture his elegance as a footballer, even simply as an athlete, it’s obsolete to look just within the sport.

Whilst all around him were in search of the woods they thought lay beyond the trees, Cruyff could pick out every branch and every leaf, with the clear vision and forethought to see beyond the soil they grew in.

Football can be frantic: the pace; the atmosphere of the crowd; the pressure from the coaches; it takes something special to look at a situation and see things for exactly how they really are on the pitch despite your surroundings.

Cruyff was something special. Special in his originality. Special in his ability to make the obvious seem complex and the simplest of actions seem like magic. Look at the turn to which he has given his name. Just like a magic trick, simple and effortlessly effective in its execution.

The revered moment we’ve watched a million times is sublime in its ease. As Cruyff comes back inside on to his right foot, Sweden’s Jan Olsson, extends his left leg in desperation to block the mercurial Dutchman’s cross into the box. Face contorted by his determination, Olsson's eyes shut tightly, waiting for the contact of the ball on his body. It never comes. Cruyff feigns to strike the ball but aborts the action at the final moment, dropping his left shoulder and dragging the ball back through his own legs and away from his Swedish assailant with the instep of his foot.

Watch it back on the Internet. Pause it at that exact moment. Everything encapsulating Cruyff is right there in those ten seconds of play. That is what Johan Cruyff wanted from football, not just to win but be aesthetically satisfying too. Essentially what he created was art.

"If football is an art form, then the Cruyff turn is from the Cistine Chapel."

There were honours too. European cups? There were four, including three as a player at Ajax and one as manager of Barcelona. League titles? Fourteen of those. He was also the first player to win the European footballer of the year three years in a row in 1971, ’72 and ’73.

Maradona, Pele, Lionel Messi and maybe even Cristiano Ronaldo are pushed to the top of everyone's greatest-ever footballer list, but for his influence on the game itself and the way it’s played today, Johan Cruyff is without peers.

Cruyff implemented a seismic shift in the way we thought about football. With help he smashed the stale rigidity of tactics and philosophies in football and created a much more fluid style that was more akin to that of symphonic orchestra, each section overlapping and intertwining with the others, with Cruyff as the conductor.

His then Barcelona 'Dream Team' were catalytic, inspirational and shone with renaissance brilliance, at a really dark time.

All the way through his career as a player and then as a coach, he thought about the game intensely and his withdrawal from top level management in 1996 can also be held as the start of the decline which has lead Dutch football to the state it finds itself in today. When Cruyff stopped thinking, Dutch football did too.

The true legacy he leaves behind him can be seen at the Nou Camp in Barcelona, the German national side who dominate today and in every side who want to play beautiful football.

In 1979 Cruyff laid the foundations for La Masia, Barcelona’s famed youth academy, where he would copy the system in place at his beloved Ajax, designed to nurture a player from infancy into to the first team by playing exactly the same way throughout their football education. A system which has become a conveyor belt of greatness, individually and collectively.

Even as an outfield player he revolutionised goalkeeping, his dream of a keeper becoming a footballer who wears gloves might be a reality now but his idea is forty years old.

A visionary whose ideas were way beyond his time. Cruyff didn’t just give the world “Total Football”, he gave us football as we know it today. We should rightly mourn the loss of the most influential man football has ever seen, but more than anything we should say “Thank you.” to Hendrik Johannes Cruyff. 1947 - 2016.