The Men Who Made Modern Football #19 - Rinus Michels

At the risk of hagiography this week I will continue to look at the development of the Dutch game and its wider impact. However following pieces on Reynolds, Buckingham and Happel, I will this time focus on a Dutch native. Rinus Michels was the man who not only exploited some of the greatest footballing talents the Netherlands has ever produced but also led them to their greatest triumphs.

Michels had a long playing career with Ajax in the post war years, playing 15 years as a striker noted for his strength rather than his flair.  During a period which saw the Dutch game make the transition to professional status he won the title and five caps.

His coaching career began in the amateur ranks before returning to Ajax as Vic Buckingham's (TMWMMF #17) replacement in 1965. In six years he transformed a struggling team into one that would win four titles, three cups (including two doubles) and finally a European Cup, a period which saw the word Ajax become a byword for intelligence and modernity.

The success and critical acclaim was due to his system of Totaalvoetbal (Total Football). This was a culmination of the pioneering ideas of the Austro-Hungarian school and the influence of Jack Reynolds and Vic Buckingham to create a 'carousel' style of play summed by defender Wim Rijsbergen as "The defenders went forward, the forwards came back. We played football. He even used the goalkeeper as a libero, playing outside the area."

However although Michels was anti-catenaccio he was very much an architect who painstakingly planned then trained his players relentlessly, borrowing from Herrera the idea of the 'retiro' training camp to embed his ideas. His players had to be able to switch to any role in the team at any time depending on the situation of the game, and thus had to be technically and physically supreme. This led to his nickname of the 'General' a label reinforced by his comment: "Professional football is something like war. Whoever behaves too properly, is lost."

This was reflected by winger Sjaak Swart who said: "We did everything with the ball. At the beginning of the season we had one week of very hard training: five training sessions a day. It was like a military camp."

Central to his philsophy was the creation and utility of space. Applying the Dutch concept of maakbaarheid, of shaping and controlling your environment, he prioritised tactics such as overlapping full backs and strikers dropping deep to retrieve the ball, to live up to his maxim that “space is important in football, but Dutch space is different.”
His relationship with his best player Johann Cruyff was intrinsic to his success. Cruyff was just 18 when Michels took over at Ajax and their careers progressed hand in hand for the next decade.  Notionally a centre forward, Cruyff would roam wherever he saw the best opportunity to exploit his opponents’ weakness. This required his team mates to mould their game around him, taking up the position he was leaving. Cruyff was Michel's voice on the pitch defender Barry Hulshoff explained that he: "always talked about where people should run and where they should stand, and when they should not move. It was about making space, coming into space, and organizing space-like architecture on the football pitch".

The system was not perfected overnight. It required evolution through collaboration. Thrashing Bill Shankly's Liverpool 5-1 in the second round first leg of the 1966/67 European Cup revealed its attacking potential but a 4-1 defeat in the 1969 final to AC Milan showed its defensive shortcomings. 

This led to the signing of box to box midfielder Johan Neeskens in 1970 and a year later Michels had led Ajax to their first European Cup victory. 

He then elected to again follow in Vic Buckingham’s footsteps by taking over at Barcelona leaving Romanian coach Stefan Kovacs to build on his foundations in Amsterdam and lead de godenzonen to become the second club to win three consecutive European Cups.

Cruyff arrived at Camp Nou in 1973 and now reunited with his star player, Michels led Barcelona to their first Spanish title first since 1960. He then spent the summer with the Dutch national team at the World Cup in West Germany. 

With Cruyff in the ascendant, Holland stunned the world with their revolutionary style of play, defeating Argentina and holders Brazil to reach the final with five wins and one draw, conceding just the one goal.

It appeared that Michels’ team had reached perfection when they took the lead against the hosts after just eighty seconds of the final without a single German player touching the ball. However Cruyff's influence was progressively stifled by the man marking of Berti Vogts, allowing a midfield led by Franz Beckenbauer to gradually  dominate, overturning the early Dutch lead to win 2-1.

Michels spent the rest of the 70s with second spells in charge at Ajax and Barcelona and a brief stay in the US with Cruyff at LA Aztecs. In the early 80s he moved to West Germany to manage FC Koln before returning to the helm of the Dutch national team in time for the 1988 European Championships.

Again leading his nation to a finals hosted by the Germans, his squad featured the prodigious talent of Ruud Gullitt, Marco Van Basten and Frank Rijkaard. In the semi-final Michels took his revenge for 1974 by beating West Germany, a win laden with wider national symbolism. They then went on to win the Netherlands only trophy to date by beating the USSR 2-0 in the final with unforgettable goals from Gullitt and Van Basten.

Michels finished his club career at Bayer Leverkusen in 1989 then had one last stint with the Dutch national team at Euro 92 which ended in semi-final defeat to eventual winners Denmark.
Named FIFA's coach of the 20^th century he was the master of total football which would go on to be moulded by his protégé Cruyff into the tiki-taka style that would win Barcelona and Spain garlands galore.

The Men Who Made Modern Football #17 - Vic Buckingham

The previous instalment in this series looked at the way Helenio Herrera ended the era of free flowing passing football derived from the Austro-Hungarian school of the inter war years, with his catenaccio tactic. Although remaining a dominant influence on the Italian game for a generation or more, it was quickly challenged by the Dutch system of total football, a revolution that was sparked by an Englishman.

Vic Buckingham was a former Tottenham Hotspur team mate of Arthur Rowe (TMWMMF #15) in a playing career cut short by World War Two. Buckingham admired Rowe's appreciation of the art of passing, and with Rowe's encouragement went into management in Post War England. A deep thinker and articulate speaker a spell coaching at Oxford University led to a prestigious appointment to manage Pegasus before re-entering the professional game at Bradford Park Avenue. He then took over at West Bromwich Albion, almost winning the first modern double with the Baggies in 1954 when an FA Cup win was matched with runners up spot in the League.

With a side containing future managers Don Howe and Ronnie Allen, it was one of their team mates Graham Williams who came up with a delicious metaphor to describe West Brom's style of play:

‘He wasn’t interested in defending. He wanted to see tricks and goals and push and run. He said he didn’t want us to go ‘da di da di da’, passing for the sake of passing. He always said he wanted us to play like ice cream and chocolate. That was his phrase. Just flow, like ice cream and chocolate.’

This was push and run in the style of Rowe's Tottenham, but like his mentor his team only shone briefly, overshadowed in a more physical footballing era dominated by local rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers.

In 1959 he moved to the Netherlands to manage Ajax, where the professional game was in its infancy. He found a club redolent with the influence of Jack Reynolds (TMWMMF #8), Buckingham explaining: “Their skills were different. Their intellect was different and they played proper football. They didn’t get this from me, it was there waiting to be stirred up. I influenced them but they went on and did things above that which delighted me."

Taking the opportunity to develop ideas discussed years previously with Rowe, who had spent time in Hungary, he sowed the seeds of the system which would make Ajax champions of Europe a decade later and establish Dutch football as a major force in the game. This was nothing short of a philosophy which would envelop the whole club in terms of technical development and positional play. Buckingham won the Eredivise title and the Dutch Cup, in his first two year spell in Amsterdam, when he also spotted a talented 12-year-old in the junior section called Cruyff.

By 1961 Buckingham was back in England with Sheffield Wednesday but with his reputation tarnished by a match fixing scandal which engulfed the Owls he returned briefly to Amsterdam in 1964 in time to give a debut to a teenage Johann Cruyff around whom the great Ajax team would be built.

Following a controversial spell at Fulham he returned to the continent when Barcelona, remembering an Inter Cities Fairs Cup tie at Sheffield Wednesday in the early 60s, harked back to the time of Jack Pentland (TMWMMF #9) by turning to Buckingham to rejuvenate a team that had fallen to the lower reaches of La Liga.

In a wonderful final flourish as manager Buckingham's style was the perfect match for the Catalan club, and within two seasons repeated his feat from the Hawthorns by almost winning the double.

His team were pipped to the title by Valencia, as despite having the same points and a better goal difference, the Spanish championship was decided by the head to head record between the two clubs. However he achieved a modicum of revenge and wrote his name into the club annals of history by going onto win the 1971 Copa del Rey, then known as the Copa del Generalísimo, 4-3 after extra time against Valencia, a triumph played out in front of deadly rivals Real Madrid's biggest fan, the dictator General Franco, who presented the trophy at the Bernabéu.

Back surgery forced Buckingham to step down but before he did so he worked with Barcelona to lift the Spanish FA's ban on foreign players. He was then replaced by Ajax manager Rinus Michels who brought with him his star player Johann Cruyff.

Buckingham's career then wound down at the likes of Sevilla and Olympiakos, his key role in the development of the game being a connector of football's knowledge network. A man who came into contact with others who had more illustrious careers, soaking up their ideas, first adapting and then passing them onto future greats. A man of sophistication with the ability to boil his philosophy down simply thus:

“Long-ball football is too risky. Most of the time what pays off is educated skills. If you’ve got the ball, keep it. The other side can’t score.”

The Men Who Made Modern Football #8 - Jack Reynolds

The most notable absence from the oligarchy of clubs which currently dominate European football must be Ajax. Revered not just for their success from the 70s onwards, but also their tactical philosophy of total football, the origins of their eminence lie with English coach Jack Reynolds.

Born in Bury, Reynolds’ playing career was similar to that of Jimmy Hogan (MWMMF #7), retiring at the age of 30 after spells in and out of the league with the likes of Burton United, Grimsby Town, Watford and New Brompton (Gillingham Town). Like Hogan he saw a future in coaching on the continent, starting in 1912 with St. Gallen in Switzerland where he impressed enough in a two year spell to be appointed German national manager. Unfortunately this coincided with the outbreak of World War One so he moved to the Netherlands instead and in 1915 started what was to become the first of three spells in charge of Ajax Amsterdam spanning 27 years. By 1919 he had led the club to their first pieces of silverware winning the KNVB (FA) Cup in 1917 and back to back Eredivisie (League) titles in 1918 and 1919, the latter being an invincible unbeaten season. Following the armistice he took charge of the Dutch national team for one match before fellow Englishman Fred Warburton was appointed on a permanent basis.

He continued at Ajax until 1947, apart from three years at Blauw Wit in the mid-1920s, and the Nazi occupation during World War Two when he was interned in a labour camp in Upper Silesia alongside PG Wodehouse where he arranged international football games between other prisoners and laid a cricket pitch.

He won five more Eredivisie titles in the 1930s and an eighth in his final season in charge in 1947. During this time he laid the foundations for the Total Football system with which Ajax would rule Europe under Rinus Michels (MWMMF #18 and coached by Reynolds during the 1940s) in the early 1970s. After his death in 1962 a stand at Ajax’s De Meer Stadium was named after him and when the Godenzonen moved to their current home at the Amsterdam Arena, he was remembered in the Jack Reynolds lobby.

Known by the Dutch as Sjek Rijnols, his greatest legacy lies not in the trophies won but the coaching philosophy introduced whereby all age group teams at the club were coached in the same tactics and style of play. In this way he changed the club forever.

Ajax expert and author Menno Pot said that he:

“really reshaped the club into something professional, even though the players weren't paid at the time. Football was an amateur game, but he introduced professional training methods, professional facilities that really allowed Ajax to make a huge leap forward. He was the man who came up with the idea that every player at Ajax should play the same system and the same formation. He wanted them to play offensively with skill, rather than with physical power."

This became the Ajax tradition which bore such prized fruits in the 1970s that it was seen as the ideal for all other clubs to aspire to. Today the financial muscle of Arsenal and Barcelona has allowed them to become its best exponents. If only Ajax could join them.