Boxing the Wings: the Key to Ajax's Ordered Fluidity
Erik ten Hag is injecting excitement into a tactical theory that frequently produces staleness.
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If you haven’t been paying attention, Ajax are absolutely crushing everyone in their path — so much so, that FiveThirtyEight’s Global Club Soccer Rankings rate them as the fourth-best team in the world. Now, that’s probably an overestimation of their actual quality, but I don’t need to get into that. Ryan O’Hanlon already did the work for me when he asked us to jump on the bandwagon way earlier than most (September 28, to be exact).
The point is that Ajax seem to be legit — something that was further affirmed by their 4-0 dismantling of Borussia Dortmund this Tuesday in the Champions League.
But why are they legit?
Ajax’s Uniqueness
Per usual, there are a variety of interconnected reasons, starting with the player quality available to Erik ten Hag. Nevertheless, the names on the team sheet vs. the Black and Yellow don’t exactly pop off the page like the ones in that 18/19 side (i.e. Frenkie de Jong, Mathijs de Ligt, Hakim Ziyech, Donny van de Beek, etc.).
Nevertheless, Ajax seem nearly as impressive as the team that was seconds away from a Champions League final appearance, suggesting that there is something else at work: tactical brilliance.
On the surface — and due to the whole Cruyff thing — Ajax seem like your garden-variety positional play side that likes to press and possess, but such an oversimplification drowns out the uniqueness they’ve brought to the whole concept.
It’s very easy for positional play pretenders to design teams that quickly devolve into laborious controllers. This can be caused by a number of factors, whether that be a lack of creativity in bringing the theory to life, an absence of players of the right profile, or a conservative mentality.
Thomas Tuchel might arguably be the best coach in the world but he has continued to struggle to turn Chelsea into a reliable destroyer of low blocks (and he was brilliant at it with Dortmund), achieving his Champions League success last season through defensive mastery.
Even Pep Guardiola appears to have taken a safer route after the scintillating displays of City’s Centurions, taking the failures of 2019/20 and Covid-ball as signs to slow things down, make everything more structural, and get solid against the ball.
Ajax stands in stark contrast to these trends. They play in a manner that is more reminiscent of a chaotic transition approach, emphasizing high-tempo distribution and lots of verticality. Yet, they don’t seem to incur the disadvantages that come with this, managing to control the ball like the most dominant territorial machines in the world while remaining stable defensively.