Johan Cruyff, the man who reinvented football, dies aged 68

Johan Cruyff, who has died aged 68, wasn’t merely the best footballer of the 1970s, he also reinvented football. It was as if he was the lightbulb and Thomas Edison in one. “Football is a game you play with your head,” he said in a typical bon mot. Though he had little grasp of grammar in either Dutch or Spanish, and spoke both in a 1950s’ Amsterdam working-class accent, nobody talked more interestingly about football.

He was born a short walk from the old Ajax Amsterdam football stadium and by age four was a regular visitor to the first-team changing room. His grocer father, Manus, supplied the club with fruit. Manus’ death, when his second son was 12, was the defining trauma of Cruyff’s life. Afterwards Cruyff’s mother earned money cleaning Ajax’s changing rooms.

By 15 he was training with the first team, shouting out instructions to veteran internationals even as he sped past defenders. A fatherless child in a man’s world, he had to be tougher than his teammates, and he always was.

At 17 he made his debut for the first team. Ajax were then a reasonably good semi-professional side in a third-rate football country. Cruyff turned them into the world’s best team, European champions from 1971 to 1973.

A typical postwar baby boomer, impatient to seize power, he helped Rinus Michels, the legendary Ajax and Netherlands manager, pick the team. Together the two men developed a new kind of football. Foreigners — but never the Dutch — called it “Total football”.

It was a sort of cerebral orchestra. Players hit one-touch passes while endlessly swapping positions in search of space. Every player had to think like a playmaker. Even the keeper was regarded as an imaginative passer who happened to wear gloves. Wingers and overlapping full-backs kept the field wide. Cruyff was centre-forward but could go where he liked, conducting the orchestra with constant improvisation.

His footballing brain, touch and acceleration were unmatched. Nico Scheepmaker, his biographer, called him “four-footed” — Cruyff loved curving passes with the outside of either foot.

Cruyff seemed to love conflicts, even claiming they improved performance. In 1973 his Ajax teammates stripped him of the captaincy and he joined Michels at Barcelona in Spain. The following year the two men led Holland to the World Cup final. But the day before the game, the German tabloid Bild published an article headlined, “Cruyff, Champagne and Naked Girls”. It claimed that Dutch players had partied with half-clad women in their hotel pool. Cruyff spent hours before the final on the phone to his wife Danny, swearing that the story was false. It was a terrible moment for a man who had spent his adulthood building the secure family he had lost aged 12.

That Bild story, said his brother Hennie, is why he played “like a dishrag” in the final and Holland lost 2-1. The incident helped persuade him to skip the next World Cup, in 1978. Given the paucity of 1970s’ television coverage, the 1974 tournament is therefore the only time most of the world’s football fans saw Cruyff play.

He retired as a footballer in 1978. (Bayern Munich ruined his farewell match, thumping Ajax 8-0.) But after losing millions in bad investments including a pig farm, he resumed playing in the US and then the Netherlands. The older Cruyff was a walking brain, hitting 30-metre passes so surprising that the TV cameras of the day sometimes missed them. He also explained football in brilliant interviews, sealing his arguments with his trademark: “That’s logical.”

In 1985 he became manager of Ajax. In 1988 he moved — after quarrels — to his second home, Barcelona. He created a house style that both clubs still try to follow: a version of Dutch 1970s’ football, updated in Barcelona’s case but not, unfortunately, in Ajax’s. The Barcelona academy that produced so many great Spanish players in recent years was his design.

Barcelona sacked him in 1996, again after arguments. He never worked in football again. Gradually his thinking became stale. In 2011 he led a coup at Ajax and installed ex-players to run the club but the experiment is collapsing: Cruyffian quarrels, but not Cruyffian football.

When lung cancer struck, nearly 25 years after he had publicly quit smoking, part of him must have been fascinated: he always liked standing in operating rooms watching surgeons at work. Three weeks ago he said he was beating the disease “2-0 in the first half”.

It wasn’t to be. He leaves Danny, their two daughters and son, Jordi, who followed his father into football and played for, among others, Barcelona and Manchester United. His legacy is the Cruyffian football played today by Barcelona, reigning European champions, and World Cup holders Germany.