At least when they’re not calling them words like “scum” or “cockroaches”.ĭutch football is stranger, more tragic and much bigger than the typical discussions of techniek en taktiek - technique and tactics - many are used to.
As a reverse, Ajax fans of a particular generation accuse their rivals of behaving like a popular cartoon chicken from the 1960s. Now, if you were to talk to a Feyenoord fan about that, they would tell you that is all bollocks before reminding you that Cruyff spent his final season winning a league and cup double at their club.Ī banner catches on fire during De Klassieker at the Johan Cruyff Arena in March 2022 (Photo: Maurice Van Steen/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)įeyenoord fans, and others, accuse Ajax of being arrogant a club who receive favourable calls from referees and the KVNB and lull ignorant tourists with myths of Cruyff. “Johan Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports,” wrote journalist Hubert Smeets in football magazine Hard Gras in 1997. “I saw Holland’s football as a mirror to - and the most interesting expression of - its culture,” wrote David Winner in Brilliant Orange, one of the finest books on Dutch football.įrom the outside looking in, the Dutch view their football as an art form and much of that is owed to Cruyff, Ajax and the Total Football Dutch National Team of the 1970s. A cultural theorist will tell you that football is the country’s biggest export. Economists will tell you that refined petroleum and machinery are the Netherlands’ biggest exports. Cruyff and Vincent van Gogh would be among the more common answers if you were to poll 100 people on famous names from the Netherlands - one of the greatest artists of all time and a footballer and manager often cited with turning the sport into a form of high art.
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