Drawing a club of Ajax’s prestige and pedigree in the Europa League was a dream for Brighton but on Thursday they host a team in the midst of a nightmare.
A season of historic low points plunged to new depths on Sunday when a 4-3 defeat to FC Utrecht nudged Ajax into 17th place in the Eredivisie, the club’s lowest-ever league position.
The statistics paint a grim picture. Ajax have taken only five points from their opening seven league games, they are 22 behind the early leaders PSV and their last win of any description came nine games and over two months ago.
During the international break, an article on Opta Analyst asserted that Ajax’s league place – they were 16th at that point – was a false one based on expected goals; according to the data they should have been bottom.
Sunday’s loss marked the end of the short and not-so-sweet Maurice Steijn era with the summer appointment from Sparta Rotterdam dismissed on Monday. Steijn won as many matches as he presided over abandoned games (both two) during his 11 matches in charge.
“Everyone who knows me knows I have done everything to take Ajax back to the place where this club belongs,” Steijn said in a statement. “But I failed to do so.”
Speaking on Dutch TV after the defeat which sealed Steijn’s fate, former captain and one-time Tottenham No 10 Rafael van der Vaart advised his old club to start thinking like a relegation team.
“Ajax has to play like Excelsior, you are no longer Ajax,” he said. “You have to assume that you are not better than your opponent, because they simply do not have the qualities for that.”
The poisonous atmosphere surrounding the club made Steijn’s position untenable.
Sunday’s match was paused in the 89th minute after supporters hurled plastic cups onto the pitch, the second time that has happened this campaign after De Klassieker against Feyenoord was abandoned in the second half last month when fireworks were launched from the stands with Ajax 3-0 down.
The final 34 minutes plus added time were completed three days later in front of an empty Johan Cruyff Arena with Feyenoord adding a fourth goal for good measure.
“They are extremely passionate but it can boil over but I think that’s because of the rich history of this club,” says James Rowe, an Amsterdam-based journalist who has covered Dutch football for almost two decades.
“They are just finding it very difficult to accept where their club is at this moment in time.”
The easy conclusion to make is that years of losing their best players to wealthier clubs around Europe has eventually caught up with Ajax. Since reaching the Europa League final in 2017, they have sold approximately €850m [£740m] worth of talent. Every member of the starting XI that faced Tottenham in the Champions League semi-final second leg four years ago has moved on.
But the issues run deeper than that. There has been significant upheaval at boardroom level over the past couple of years.
Former director of football Marc Overmars resigned in disgrace in February 2022 after sending inappropriate messages to female colleagues and ex-CEO Edwin van der Sar stepped down at the end of last season after Ajax slumped to a third-place finish following a turbulent campaign.
Neither has been replaced effectively. Van der Sar’s replacement Jan van Halst lacks pedigree and authority, while Overmars’ eventual successor Sven Mislintat oversaw a calamitous summer transfer window and was sacked in September after just five months in the role.
Of Mislintat’s 13 new signings only Branco van den Boomen has made any sort of positive impact and he was a free signing from Toulouse.
“It was like supermarket sweep,” adds Rowe. “Every other day Mislintat was presenting a new player and people couldn’t keep up.”
Rowe believes that the former Arsenal chief scout’s fatal error was failing to grasp Ajax’s core values.
“By buying primarily foreign players and wanting to come away from the strategy of letting youth players blossom, they were kind of coming away from the club’s roots,” he says. “The club has always been about when one player leaves the door opens for another young player to give them an opportunity to blossom.”
According to Ruben Jongkind, Ajax’s former head of talent development, the downfall can be charted back further to the end of 2015 when the club deviated away from Plan Cruyff, a strategy designed to develop homegrown talent using the late Johan Cruyff’s principles of Total Football.
“They got distracted from Plan Cruyff and started to try to compete with the world’s top clubs and you shouldn’t do that,” he tells i.
“Every time Cruyff was involved with Ajax it was always the same pattern: when Cruyff came in he would build something and the club goes up and then when they leave the Cruyff vision they go down again.
“The Greeks have a nice term for it: hubris. The Gods will punish you and that’s what has happened.”
Over the past few decades, Ajax have flitted between being the ideologies of Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, who led them to their fourth and most recent European Cup in 1995. Earlier this month they turned to the latter to advise the board on “football technical matters”.
“We must find our way back up to the top, and we all have to contribute to that,” said the 72-year-old, who was treated for prostate cancer last year.
There doesn’t appear to be any immediate prospect of Van Gaal stepping back into the dugout, with Hedwiges Maduro placed in temporary charge.
With Brighton next and PSV to come on Sunday, things may well get worse before they get better. Ajax then face Volendam, the only club below them in the table where Jongkind now works.
“They have so much quality and such high budgets that it would be very strange if they stay one point away from us. On 2 November we will play Ajax and it will be like a relegation match,” he says with a laugh.
As is always the way when a historic club falls on hard times, Ajax’s demise has delighted fans of rival clubs.
Not everyone is relishing Ajax’s slump, though.
“It’s sad for Dutch football because Ajax is the flagship club,” Jongkind says. “And when things are bad for Ajax it will have repercussions for Dutch football in the long run.”
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/FoP61iC
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