2012 - 2013 Football Thread! - Page 221

Hehe thanks for the tweets!

And yeah it's a shame but that's what's football is about these years. Players go where the money is. Whenever a player in Ajax gets to be the best player (or one of the best) he transfers to a bigger club for a decent sum of money. Good thing is though that after they do leave, they usually become great players and in some cases absolute monsters at their new club. Last decade for example Ibrahimovitz, vd Vaart, Sneijder, Vermaelen and in more recent history Suarez, Vertonghen. So it's fun to follow them around and cheer for their new clubs and feel a bit of proudness that they do so well.
Also, the players that are now pulling the cart (so to speak) are de Jong (scored like 3 goals against ManC in CL this year), Eriksen and Alderweireld and it's highly likely that they'll transfer out next year.

There's an interesting time coming up though. They recently had big chances done to the management. The entire management and club culture has changed for the better after the Cruijff revolution as media call it here. Basically Cruijff said that the club should be led by people who know their football and were in contact with professional football in the past accompanied by people who know the business side of it. The last decade though, the club was in major decline with only people from the business world at the steering wheel. Huge investments were made into players that didn't bring anything to the table. It took 7 years before they finally won the league in 2011 again.

The idea behind the club being led by football players is most prominently visible in the youth academy. There's a golden amount of retired top players training these kids now right up to the first team. Frank de Boer and Dennis Bergkamp as the ones to manage the first team and then you have old players like Michel Kreek, Jaap Stam, Wim Jonk, Ronald de Boer, Bryan Roy, John Bosman and more players from the golden 1995 Ajax era training in all levels of the club. Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Sar are in the directing seats as well. This way the youth academy should shine once more and that way they want to reach the European top again in like.. 5 years. As long as they can keep the players until they're like 24ish they should be able to reach some of their goals even though the budget is sometimes 6-8 times smaller than that of the big European clubs.

Anyway, that's enough insight for my own lil' club for now . It's a good development and other clubs are also following the same philosophy here in Holland, like Feyenoord. They've been struggling a lot as well most of the past decade but I'm glad to see that they're doing better now and they're going to be serious title contenders again very soon. Yay go Holland! Should be good for the national squad as well.