Team Focus: Explaining Ajax's style under De Boer

The secret of long-term success lies in cultivating a distinctive set of values, as Jim Collins put forward in his bestseller “Good to Great”. This usually means promoting from within and laying down deep local roots. It’s advice that has been followed in Amsterdam; next month Frank de Boer will reach a historic milestone, serving three years as manager of Ajax.

Now to some this wouldn’t be given the time of day, but considering he’ll only be the fourth man to do so since the inception of the Eredivisie (after Rinus Michels, Louis van Gaal and Ronald Koeman), it’s a feat worth commemorating. Under his stewardship he’s kept an ever-changing squad competitive – winning three consecutive championships – and it’s all down to resurrecting their “traditional approach”.

It’s the way they’ve adapted to losing individuals – some of whom were important than others – on a yearly basis, not allowing it to faze them, that has seen De Boer’s profile rise. His first starting ever eleven – against AC Milan (December 6, 2010) – contained four current Premier League players: Maarten Stekelenburg, Jan Vertonghen, Christian Eriksen and Luis Suárez, plus Gregory van der Wiel – a World Cup finalist – and Toby Alderweireld now at Atlético Madrid.

From the onset it was clear that his coaching philosophy of one-touch, combination football heavily based on possession and positional interchange – in other words a modernised / watered down version of totaalvoetbal – had been shaped by Louis van Gaal and Johan Cruyff. He enjoyed success with the former at Ajax and Barcelona, whilst the latter played an important role during his youth career.

In essence De Boer has combined the Cruijffianen and Van Gaalisten Schools – individual and collectivism intertwined. Each individual’s strength combines to make a unified eleven: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – to implement his own vision. Within his system, every position – thereby player – is assigned with several basic tasks to carry out with our without the ball (so if you lose Vertonghen someone like Niklas Moisander can step in and carry out the same duties).

Dennis Bergkamp, current assistant manager, noted in his autobiography that under Van Gaal the system was sacred and every player was equal. This has rubbed off on De Boer. There’s no dependency on one or two individuals. “This is mainly down to the slick collective spirit Frank de Boer has forged,” Sjoerd Mossou wrote in Algemeen Dagblad. Every player contributes collectively. “Football is a team sport,” De Boer would remind you.

Teamwork is fundamental to De Boer. Universality is essential. Players need to be comfortable in multiple positions and roles. A facet integral to their positional interchange game is that once an area is vacated a teammate drops in – maintaining the shape (either 3-1-4-2 or 2-1-4-3) – a style of play familiar to De Boer. Individuality is also important. During each match his players are left to their own problem solving devices. “Players should not just run with their legs, but with their head as well,” as Guus Hiddink once said. Individual-based training (or the ‘Michels model’) has helped.

De Boer, like his mentors, doesn’t believe in adapting to the opponent but rather playing his own game. The aim of each game is to dominate through possession; circulation football is used as a means to not only create goalscoring opportunities but also as a defensive weapon. If you have the ball the opposition can’t harm you. No team boasts a higher average in the Eredivisie when it comes to possession (62.8%) and Ajax have attempted over a thousand more passes than any other side (7917), with an accuracy of 87.8%.

To some keeping the ball is frowned upon. On a few occasions Ajax have even been labelled ‘boring’, but for De Boer it’s everything, and not just because it’s the only way he knows how to play. The simple truth is that without it his side isn’t very good. However, there’s something important which is often overlooked: keeping possession conserves energy. His team seldom passes more than ten metres during a build-up phase, letting the ball do the running, but every pass needs to be precise: it must be a metre ahead, never into feet, this way the circulation is kept flowing. It’s little surprise that Ajax have played a higher proportion of their passes sideways (58.4%) than any other team.