Number 5: Johan Cruijff Not merely a great player, Cruijff was also a great thinker on soccer, as if he were Edison and the light bulb in one. Cruijff( his real name, though foreigners generally call him“ Cruyff”) was born in Amsterdam in 1947 a few hundred meters from the Ajax stadium. He began hanging around the club as a toddler. His father, Manus, a grocer, supplied Ajax with fruit, and after Manus died when Cruijff was twelve, Cruijff’ s mother cleaned Ajax’ s locker rooms.
The skinny waif debuted for the first team at 17. Ajax was then a semi-professional club, barely known outside the Netherlands, but within a few years Cruijff and Ajax’ s manager Rinus Michels turned it into the world’ s best team. The duo invented a new kind of soccer, which foreigners called“ total football.” Players swapped positions at great speed, creating an unprecedented fluidity of play. In the midst of it was Cruijff, constantly changing position, pointing and shouting directions at others even while he dribbled past opponents.