How Ajax made us believe

Ajax’s run to the Champions League semifinals upended the dominant financial-tactical dynamic of the modern game.

Underdogs all tend to be grouped under the same banner, especially these days, when money tends to win. So it has been with Ajax, whose run to the Champions League semifinals was sold primarily as a triumph of talent development over financial might.

But while this familiar narrative helped make sense of a story unfamiliar to most fans, throwing Erik ten Hag’s 2018-19 Ajax side into a generic container marked “Champions League surprises” would be to grossly under-appreciate their style of play.

More than Frenkie de Jong, Mathijs de Ligt or any of their other young stars, Ajax’s ability to overcome the economic structure of the contemporary game and its imposed tactical norms is what should earn them a larger chapter in the history books.

It would have been shocking to see them beat teams with far greater financial resources under any circumstances, but it was the way they dominated matches against the likes of Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Juventus that made the Dutch giants so endearing. A far cry from the valorized, last-ditch defending of teams like Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid, Ajax flipped the customary tactical approach of the underdog on its head. And while their tactical setup was interesting in itself, it can only be fully appreciated in the larger financial context of the modern game.

Possession football has — over the past 20 years — become a privilege only the richest teams can afford. You need good players to keep the ball, and when you have more good players than your opponents, they tend to let you have it. With an ever-smaller group of teams stockpiling an ever-larger percentage of the world’s best players, we’re seeing fewer and fewer clubs outside the financial elite adopt a possession-heavy approach, at least when they’re playing clubs inside it.

Conventional wisdom suggests the best approach when playing super-teams is to batten down the hatches, limit space and try to capitalize on the inefficiencies of possession-heavy systems. Furthermore, football’s economic determinism helps propagate a particularly vicious cycle for clubs, like Ajax, who tend to be one of the best teams in their domestic league, but sit at the lower end of the financial spectrum in Europe.

These teams dominate play at home (where they have better players), but are then forced to abandon their normal style in the Champions League (where they have the worse players). While a team like Barcelona only have to make small tweaks to their approach against a team like Lyon to account for one or two exceptional individuals, Lyon are incentivized to contort into an entirely different side, lest they get completely blown away. The underdog’s slim chances get that much slimmer.

The underdogs that have been successful in Europe over the past several years, like Leonardo Jardim’s 2016-17 Monaco side, Simeone’s Atletico Madrid or even Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool of last season, have done so in part because they were already set up to play largely without the ball. In other words, the way they played against the very best coincided with the way they played against the rest.

It’s with this dynamic in mind that Ajax shaped their approach this season. After convincing de Jong, de Ligt, David Neres, Hakim Ziyech and Kasper Dolberg to commit to just one more year at the club, they closed the gap in quality to Europe’s elite by some distance. So while a large part of their success owed to their tactical setup, their tactical setup only made sense because of the quality of their players. As much as, say, Red Star Belgrade may have wanted to go toe-to-toe with Thomas Tuchel’s PSG in the group stage, the talent disparity between the sides made that all but impossible.

With a significant number of starters good enough to play for Europe’s elite, Ajax were able to test their modernized game against the very best. Nathan Clark’s analysis of ten Hag’s use of “variable pressing” offers great insight into how Ajax used their press both to create chances and to establish a degree of control in games. If Klopp’s Liverpool press to create chances and Pep Guardiola’s City do so to regain possession, Ajax can be found somewhere in between. Forcing play toward players or areas of the pitch in which their opponents are vulnerable — like to Hugo Lloris in the first leg of the semifinal against Tottenham — is as much a practice of active defending as it is a way to create attacking opportunities both on and off the ball.

Ajax’s proficiency in both these areas sits at the core of ten Hag’s interpretation of Cruyffian ideology. It was tempting to invoke Total Football whenever Ziyech or de Jong wandered away from their area of the pitch, but they did so only for specific reasons. Aiding an overload on the opposite side of the field or stepping back to help progress the ball when opponents press is all part of a more holistic system. Ajax’s pressing and counter-pressing informed how much possession they held and how secure that possession was, in the same way their players’ positioning and understanding of when to abandon it allowed them to maximize their attacking opportunities.

Of course, this tactical fluidity wouldn’t have been possible without familiarity. Aside from the aforementioned core of academy stars having played with one another for a number of years, ten Hag’s coaching over the past season and a half has helped instill this unity.

Rarely, if ever, did a moment arise when the players looked unsure of what they were supposed to be doing; the structure of their 4-3-3 / 4-2-3-1 provided a blueprint for their philosophy in and out of possession. The three lines of players offered a perfectly spaced series of pressing triggers off the ball, and the width across the field allowed the team to occupy the necessary spaces to attack and create overloads. Ajax’s youthful core never had to doubt their approach because, unlike other teams, it wasn’t dependent on the talismanic attributes of a few, but the concentrated effort of a collective.

Attributing Ajax’s unprecedented success as a European outsider to intangibles like “the concentrated effort of a collective” may seem at odds with both the nature of a tactically-minded review and the team itself, but the happiness they gave so many fans was a by-product of a team that operated outside the norm. One that worked despite a system that is stacked against clubs of their financial means.

The combination of a large contingent of world-class players, the club’s ability to keep them together while breaking away from their own antiquated traditions and the modernization of practices that have made them who they are is as close to magic as the Champions League has ever been.

It’s a particularly cruel irony that the team to end Ajax’s fairytale run haven’t purchased a player in two consecutive transfer windows, but their heartbreaking semifinal loss to Tottenham shouldn’t, when considered in the larger context of their season as a whole, devalue their achievements. Against the odds, despite the frustratingly money-driven logic of the modern game, Ajax made us believe.