There is a clip you can still find online. Lucas Moura, ninety-sixth minute, the Johan Cruyff Arena gone silent. Ajax 2, Tottenham 3, away goals, semi-final, the door of the European final closed in a single second. May 8, 2019. The boys on the pitch — De Jong, De Ligt, Tadić, Van de Beek, Ziyech — had been the best story in football for nine months. They had eliminated Real Madrid at the Bernabéu. They had eliminated Juventus in Turin. They had a 3-0 aggregate lead with thirty-five minutes to play.
Then Lucas Moura scored three goals.
That is the moment people remember. They remember it because it was beautiful, in a brutal way, and because it was the last time Ajax mattered to anyone outside the Netherlands. Watch the clip again now and what hits you is not the drama. It is the squad list. Six of the eleven Ajax players who started that night were academy graduates. Three of them would play Champions League finals for other clubs within five years. The team had cost, in net transfers, almost nothing. It had been built the Ajax way, the way that for sixty years had been the league’s calling card and its survival mechanism.
Six and a half years on, Ajax sit fourth in the Eredivisie, on their fifth head coach since Erik ten Hag left, with a squad whose two oldest leaders are Jordan Henderson and Steven Berghuis, and a head coach — Óscar García — who was promoted from the youth team in March because nobody else was available. The academy still works. The club, in any meaningful sense, does not.
This is the story of how that happened, and what it tells you about the football economy.
The 2019 High Point
Ten Hag arrived in January 2018 from Utrecht. Within eighteen months he had built the most coherent attacking team in Europe. The pattern was unmistakable. A back four with De Ligt as the line-breaker. Frenkie de Jong as a deep playmaker who could turn into half a centre-back when the team built up. Hakim Ziyech drifting from the right half-space. Tadić, restored to a false nine after years as a wide man at Southampton, dropping to combine with Van de Beek’s late runs. Quincy Promes and Neres providing speed in transition.
It was, structurally, Total Football done in a 4-2-3-1 — every outfield player capable of playing two positions, every defender obliged to step into midfield, every forward obliged to defend. The team won the league and the cup. They were, briefly, the most-watched club neutral in world football.
What made it work was not the system itself. Plenty of clubs in 2019 played some version of positional football. What made it work was that Ajax could field eight academy graduates without any drop in technical quality. The journey from De Toekomst to the Cruyff Arena was, by 2019, almost frictionless.
The squad was sold across the next eighteen months. De Ligt to Juventus. De Jong to Barcelona. Ziyech to Chelsea. Van de Beek to United. The model said: replenish from below. The academy was producing — Antony, Gravenberch, Timber. The model held, just about, until Ten Hag himself walked.
The Post-Ten Hag Turbulence
He went to Manchester United in May 2022. What followed has the quality of farce, except that farce usually has a comic structure.
Alfred Schreuder, his assistant, took over and lasted six months. Replaced by John Heitinga, the club’s youth coach, on an interim basis. Heitinga was told at the end of the season he would not continue. Sven Mislintat, the new sporting director, then made what is now an infamous appointment: Maurice Steijn, fresh from Sparta Rotterdam, with no top-club experience and no continental track record. Steijn presided over the worst start to an Ajax season in club history. He was sacked in October after 131 days. His assistant Hedwiges Maduro held the job for a fortnight before John van ‘t Schip — a club legend, retired from coaching, recalled essentially out of compassion — took it on as interim until the end of the year.
Mislintat himself was dismissed, eventually, for governance failures around player recruitment. The club spent eighteen months in institutional collapse. They finished fifth in 2023-24, the worst result since 1965.
Read that sentence again. The worst result since 1965. The Beatles were still recording.
The Farioli Interlude
Francesco Farioli arrived in summer 2024 from Nice, thirty-five years old, an Italian intellectual coach in the Sarri-De Zerbi tradition who had read philosophy at university and spoke about football the way French chefs speak about réduction. The appointment was inspired. Within months Ajax were playing recognisable football again — a 4-3-3 with structured pressing triggers, careful build-up, the kind of midfield rotations that had been missing for two years.
By March 2025 they were nine points clear of PSV with five matches to play. The title was, in any reasonable reading, theirs.
What happened next is one of the great collapses in European football history. Ajax lost 4-0 at Utrecht. They lost 3-0 at NEC. They conceded a ninety-ninth-minute equaliser at Groningen. PSV, sensing blood, won seven on the spin. On the final day Ajax beat Twente 2-0 at home; PSV beat Sparta 3-1 in Rotterdam; the title went to Eindhoven by a single point.
No team in the top seven European leagues had lost a nine-point lead with five matches to play since 1995-96. The Opta Analyst piece on it ran to three thousand words and was essentially an autopsy.
Farioli did not survive the summer. He stepped down in May 2025, citing a “difference in principles” with the management — a polite phrase that meant, in plain Dutch, that he had asked for a serious transfer budget and been told he would not be receiving one. Six weeks later he was unveiled as Porto manager. He has won sixteen of his first seventeen Primeira Liga matches.
This is the part of the story that should embarrass the Ajax board: the coach who took them to within a point of the title, in his first season, walked away because the club’s owners would not back him. The club he walked to is now playing the best football in Iberia.
Where Ajax Is Now
Farioli was replaced by Heitinga — yes, again — in summer 2025. Heitinga lasted until January 2026. He was sacked after a 4-0 defeat to PSV that Ajax fans booed off their own stadium. Fred Grim, another youth-team appointee, took over on a caretaker basis. Grim lasted until March, when Ajax lost 3-1 at Groningen and the patience of the new technical director — Jordi Cruyff, son of, returned to the club in January after years at Barcelona and in Israel — finally expired.
Óscar García, the Catalan coach who had been running Jong Ajax in the second tier, was promoted to the first team on March 8. He has a contract until June 2027. He won league titles, eight years ago, at Maccabi Tel Aviv and Red Bull Salzburg. He is now Ajax’s seventh head coach in three and a half years. The current squad, par contraste, is fourth in the league, twenty-two points behind champions-elect PSV, sixteen behind Feyenoord, and on course for a third-place finish that will get them into the Champions League play-off round and nothing more.
The squad is not without quality. Mika Godts, the twenty-year-old Belgian winger, has fifteen goals and is the league’s most-watched young player. Jorrel Hato, the academy centre-back, will be sold this summer for a number that begins with five and may begin with six. Kenneth Taylor remains. Berghuis, at thirty-four, is still producing. Henderson, at thirty-five, is still leading. The age curve of the squad tells its own story: the under-twenties are excellent and the over-thirties are competent and there is almost nothing in between, because everyone in between has been sold.
The Wider Eredivisie Picture
PSV will win their third title in four years. Peter Bosz, who returned to the Dutch league in 2023 after stints at Bayer Leverkusen and Lyon, has built the most consistent team in the country. His football is recognisable Dutch football — high line, possession, full-backs as the highest wide players — but it is calmer than Ajax’s used to be, more patient. He has signed a contract until 2028.
Feyenoord are second. Their story is its own version of Ajax’s. Arne Slot won them the league in 2022-23 with a model that was, by Eredivisie standards, sophisticated: rest-defence built around Hancko, a Brazilian-style number ten in Stengs, a coordinated press triggered by the centre-forward’s shadow on the deepest centre-back. Slot left for Liverpool in summer 2024. Brian Priske, the Dane who had built FC Midtjylland into a Danish champion, succeeded him. Priske lasted until February 2025. He was sacked, two days before a Champions League knockout against Milan, after a series of inconsistent league results. Robin van Persie — oui, le Robin van Persie — took over, having coached Heerenveen for one season. He has, against most expectations, stabilised the club. Feyenoord finished second in the Champions League play-off round and are second in the league.
Two of the three traditional Eredivisie powers, in other words, are managed by men whose previous head-coaching résumés would have been considered insufficient ten years ago. The third is being managed by an interim youth coach.
This is what the league looks like now.
The Youth-Pipeline Economics
Here is the problem, and it is not a Dutch problem so much as a Dutch instance of a structural problem.
For sixty years the Ajax model — and by extension the Eredivisie model — depended on a particular bargain. The academy produced players at a rate no rival could match. The first team played them for two or three seasons. The bigger leagues bought them for transfer fees that funded the next cycle. The cycle continued. Crucially, the bigger leagues did not poach the academy graduates before they reached the first team. There was a window, two or three years long, in which Ajax could enjoy the labour of the players it had produced.
That window has been closing for a decade. Frenkie de Jong was twenty-two when he left for Barcelona. De Ligt was nineteen. The trend has accelerated. Jurriën Timber went to Arsenal at twenty-two. Antony went to United at twenty-two. Hato will be sold this summer at nineteen. Ryan Gravenberch left for Bayern at twenty.
A youth-pipeline economy works only if the supplier gets to use the product before the wholesaler buys it. Ajax now functions, more and more, as a finishing school for which the wholesalers pay a finishing fee. The fee, by international standards, is small. Hato will go for forty million; the equivalent player from Brighton, who would never have produced him in the first place, would go for ninety. The Eredivisie’s broadcasting deal — under a billion euros across five years — is roughly one-tenth the Premier League’s domestic deal alone. The cost of running a top-end academy has not fallen. The cost of competing in European football, in transfer fees and salaries, has risen vertically.
You cannot square this circle. PSV are squaring it temporarily by being well-managed. Feyenoord are squaring it temporarily by having one of the best sporting directors in Europe in Dennis te Kloese. Ajax stopped squaring it three years ago, and the academy alone — magnificent as it remains — cannot compensate for institutional drift, governance failure and a board that will not back a coach who took them to within a point of the title.
A Closing Note from Lyon
I write this from a country whose national league has its own structural problem — one club’s owner has spent fifteen years distorting Ligue 1 in pursuit of European trophies — and the Dutch story rhymes with ours in unwelcome ways. Ligue 1 at least has a permanent giant. The Eredivisie has three clubs taking turns to fail upwards, against a financial reality none of them, individually, can change.
What the Dutch had, for sixty years, was an idea — that football could be taught from the age of eight in a particular way, that the teaching itself was the competitive advantage. The idea is not wrong. It is being tested against an economy that no longer respects ideas, only revenue. The academy that taught the world Total Football is still teaching it. The world has stopped paying attention, parce que it can simply buy the graduates and put them into systems built around oil money.
Ten Hag’s 2019 team was the last great Ajax team. Whether there is another one depends not on the academy, which will keep working, but on whether anyone running the club is willing to admit what the model can no longer deliver. Óscar García, on a caretaker contract, will not solve this. Whoever comes next will inherit a problem that is bigger than coaching. Plus grand que le football, as we sometimes say. Bigger than football itself.