On April 9, 1975, Leeds United, then the best football team in England, hosted a match against Barcelona, the famous Spanish club, in the semifinal of the European Cup—the precursor to the Champions League, in which Europe’s top clubs compete. That drizzly evening, my father took me to Elland Road, Leeds’s home ground, where Johan Cruyff, the greatest player in the world, led Barca onto the pitch in their famous blue-and-purple-striped jerseys.

From our perch in the east-side stands known as Lowfields, I strained to get a closer look. Of course, I wanted Leeds, my team, to win its two-game series against Barcelona, en route to its first-ever European Cup final. But for a twelve-year-old football nut, to have the privilege of seeing Cruyff, the Dutch master, was beyond thrilling. At the time, I often played soccer three times a day—twice at school, and again afterward. On weekends, I would play all day. Cruyff was, for me, the ultimate footballer.

At Ajax Amsterdam, where he had played from 1964 to 1973, he established himself as a wonderfully creative player. He could gain control of the ball in an instant; he could pass short or long; he could dribble effortlessly, dropping his shoulder to swerve past defenders; he could score with the inside and outside of both feet. And he could do all of this from practically anywhere on the pitch. Nominally, he was a center forward, his team’s primary striker. But in an era when most soccer players, even the very best ones, stuck rigidly to their positions, Ajax’s manager, Rinus Michels, encouraged Cruyff to roam at will. One minute he would dash into the penalty box to take a shot. Then you’d see him picking up the ball from his goalkeeper, or taking a free kick, or directing his colleagues from midfield. His positional sense and ability to read the game were unsurpassed. The sportswriter David Miller called him “Pythagoras in boots.”

But it wasn’t just Cruyff’s solo skills that set him apart: he made his teammates better. Under the leadership of Michels, and later as a manager himself, he helped to perfect the fluid playing style known as Total Football, in which, rather than executing set plays and chasing down long passes, players constantly exchanged positions, moving into open space and making sharp passes in order to flummox the opposing team’s defense. With Cruyff as its orchestrator, this style of play wasn’t just effective: it was beautiful to watch.

Total Football wasn’t an entirely new concept. During the nineteen-fifties, the Hungarian national team had pioneered some of its elements, as had the great club sides Real Madrid, of Spain, and Santos, of Brazil, and also, strange as it may sound, Burnley F.C., which won the English league title in 1960. But it was Michels’s Ajax, with Cruyff as its fulcrum and inspiration, that perfected the free-flowing method of play. Ajax won successive European Cup victories in 1971, 1972, and 1973, making its opposition look leaden and flat-footed. The Dutch team, which was largely made up of Ajax players, adopted the same style of play, and at the 1974 World Cup, which was held in West Germany, it dazzled its way to the final against the host nation, knocking out Argentina, East Germany, and the defending champions, Brazil, in the process.

Now here he was in West Yorkshire, a slim figure with collar-length brown hair. In 1973, he had moved from Ajax to Barcelona in exchange for a record transfer fee of roughly two million dollars. At the time, the Catalan club was overshadowed by Real Madrid, but the money it had spent on Cruyff was turning out to be a sound investment. Barcelona won La Liga in his first season, which had qualified the team for the European Cup and brought him to Leeds.

Thankfully for me and the fifty thousand other Leeds fans who were at the match, Cruyff didn’t have one of his better nights. Rather than playing Total Football, Barcelona adopted a defensive posture, evidently hoping to escape with a tie and win the second leg of the contest back home. Leeds took the match, two goals to one; a few weeks later, it played Barcelona to a draw in Spain and booked its ticket to the final. (Alas, my team lost, two-nil, to Bayern Munich.)

Reviewing that game in Leeds on YouTube today, I was struck anew, despite Barcelona’s loss, by Cruyff’s pace and movement, and his acute sense of what was happening around him. At one point, he appeared behind his own defense to clear the ball. In the second half, he set up his team’s goal and almost created another.

Cruyff never did win the European Cup while playing for Barcelona. But in 1992, as the club’s manager, he led it to its first European title. Indeed, it was as a manager that he cemented his position as one of the most influential figures in football history. First at Ajax, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and then at Barcelona, from 1988 to 1996, he took the strategic principles that Michels had taught him and added some touches of his own—for example, by deploying a diamond formation in midfield. Always, however, he emphasized the basics of Total Football: technical skills (which he believed had to be taught at an early age), movement, pace, and flexibility. “In my teams, the goalie is the first attacker, and the striker is the first defender,” he said.


As Cruyff’s principles proved successful, other coaches copied or adapted them. On Thursday, Pep Guardiola, who led Barcelona to enormous success while managing the club from 2008 to 2012, said that Cruyff “painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since have merely restored or improved it.” The religious metaphor was fitting. “Cruyff’s admirers don’t just like the way he and his teams played. They believe the world could be a better place if his vision of football prevailed. Cruyffian football, they feel, is more beautiful, more fun and more spiritual than other approaches,” David Winner wrote earlier this month, in an insightful Bleacher Report piece called “The Church of Cruyff.”

You can find me in the Cruyffian pews, too, but it is as a player, rather than as a manager, that I will primarily remember him. In the very first minute of the 1974 World Cup final, which was played in Munich, he received a pass near the halfway line. With almost the entire West German team between him and the goal, there was no apparent threat. But after quickly controlling the ball Cruyff accelerated like a hare, swerved past one German player, slipped between two others, and darted into the penalty area, where he was tripped up. The referee called a foul, and Johan Neeskens (another fine player, if not quite in Cruyff’s class) stepped up to the penalty spot and scored. The Dutch were up a goal before a German player had even touched the ball.

After that stunning opening, the Dutch team appeared to slacken, and the Germans, to the horror of my eleven-year-old self, and other Cruyff devotees everywhere, came back to win, two to one. Our hero was named the player of the tournament, though.

Twenty-five years later, the International Federation of Football History & Statistics voted him the European Player of the Century. Was he better than Pelé or Maradona or Lionel Messi? The arguments will go on forever. But he was certainly on their level, and his artistry was appreciated well beyond his sport. “Cruyff was a better dancer than Nureyev,” the Dutch choreographer Rudi van Dantzig once remarked. “He was a better mover.”