My Turn Quotes

“The longer I played in Spain, the more I understood how important a part politics played in the game.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography

“Frank de Boer had gone on performing, and had twice won the national championship with the first team. He had had a fantastic start as a trainer after his success with the youth team, and the current squad were showing great potential. For that reason, the Ajax board had a moral duty to ensure that he didn’t get drowned in bureaucracy, as his predecessors had done, and was allowed to get on with his job.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography

“I knew that there would be major consequences from sticking my neck out like this, and everything that subsequently happened in my relationship with Ajax started with the reaction to that match, but I don’t regret saying it – it was time that someone said something and tried to sort out the mess of a team that Ajax had become.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography

“footballers who come from a poor family, play good football, get rich and go off the rails. Put yourself in their position. Just try to digest it. In fact, hardly any European clubs even look at that kind of issue. Because the worlds are too far apart. The board, the directors and the managers who should be keeping an eye on things like that don’t understand the culture of players from that sort of background. They just don’t have the life experience to be able to imagine themselves in that situation.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography

“As a captain I was sociable, but I sometimes had to be antisocial as well. Kovács’s ‘hands-off’ approach forced me to act when I thought our performance was suffering because of it. I had to be critical, both of the group and of individual players. Perhaps that wasn’t clever at a time when everyone in our team was admired, but I felt professionally obliged to do it as the captain.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography

“I was a bag of bones, I looked like a shrimp, and they took pity on me, which meant that even though I had no business being there, and wasn’t even in the youth team, I was playing with the Ajax team from a very early age.”
― Johan Cruyff, My Turn: The Autobiography