There isn’t much about Johan Cruyff that hasn’t been said in the last week. A wonderful artist, revolutionary coach, four-time European Cup champion, three time Ballon d’Or winner, possibly Europe’s greatest ever footballer, stalwart defender of Catalonian self-determination, once marked by Jimmy Calderwood – just about any accolade going was bestowed upon him, and re-celebrated in the days since his early death.

But as Cruyff’s remarkable CV has been recited in his obituary, it has been without a degree of context. That Cruyff the magical player went on to become Cruyff the exceptional coach is regurgitated almost matter-of-factly. Yet it is wildly anomalous, and it is in this – excelling in two completely different roles within the game – that Cruyff was a unique, superstar talent.

For the very greatest players hardly ever go on to become even decent coaches. Most are too apprehensive to even try it; those who have attempted it coached the way they played – Platini laconically, Keegan frenetically, Gascoigne drunkenly, Gullit flamboyantly, Keane confrontationally, Maradona wild-eyed, Matthaus gradually dropping ever further backwards, Bobby Charlton with his few strands of tactical acumen flailing pointlessly in the wind – to conspicuously little avail.

But Cruyff too coached like he played, and nailed it. His was a surface artistry disguising a foundation of science: sound, rational principles masquerading as maverick genius. His roaming of the pitch and renowned escapology may have looked, to the uninitiated, like a virtuoso playing off the cuff, but they were actually merely a logical response to a simple truth: that in a field of two acres containing only twenty moving players, somewhere must be a gloriously open pasture in which the footballer can do his work. The key is in finding it, and getting the ball into it.

With that in mind, then, it is arguably Cruyff the coach who was the more important of his two footballing incarnations. We live in an age where everyone wants to play – and watch – football in what has become known as the Barcelona way, beautiful yet deadly, but it is only relatively recently that this has come to be the accepted modus operandi. Until the Spanish national side’s six-year domination of major tournaments, both they and Barca had at least as many detractors as supporters, naysayers queuing up to bray ‘all they do is pass’ as if it were some kind of insult. But at last, much like many of those patient attacks which look to be going nowhere before suddenly delivering a knockout blow, the strategy floored the world at the promptings of Pep Guardiola, self-confessed devotee who learned at Cruyff’s knee. Make no mistake, the coaches promulgating today’s received wisdom are all reading directly from the playbook of Johan Cruyff.

We should not forget how the landscape of contemporary football looked when Cruyff laid the foundations of the new way in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the dugouts of Ajax and Barcelona. The game was throttled by fear of losing. The 1990 World Cup was a jamboree of negativity and passbacks, two red cards highlighting a truly dreadful final; 1991’s European Cup final saw Red Star Belgrade shamelessly stonewall for penalties for two hours of the dullest football ever recorded. Sinisa Mihajlovic, then a 22-year-old midfielder, recalls that manager Ljupko Petrovic instructed the players to lose possession on purpose to minimise the chance of being hit on the counterattack. Then along came Cruyff, the liberal logician. Don’t lose the ball and you won’t lose the game. His 1992 Barcelona side of Koeman, Laudrup and Stoichkov wrested the European Cup from those cold Serbian hands, and suddenly it was clear that the Earth, like the ball, is round, not flat like Petrovic’s iron curtain.
Though the redemption of football took time to germinate, it was unquestionably Johan Cruyff who planted the seed. Johan Cruyff is the father of the beautiful game we know today, and the child mourns his passing.

Thank you, Johan.