Legends of the game part 4: Johan Cruyff part 6
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Article part 6 of 10
"Speed is often confused with insight. When I start running earlier than the others, I appear faster." - Johan Cruyff
Cruyff carried on trying to bring football to the public in the US as Canadian right back Bob Iarusci, who had played with Pele on the Cosmos team and Cruyff in Washington said: "Pele was useless to you outside of the field. He was a self-centred man. Cruyff really wanted to turn American soccer into something big. They said that of Pele too, but with him I question if it wasn't only really about the money." Cruyff was staying back after training, tutoring young American players and asked for reserve teams to be created to give the youngsters a chance to get more games.
Despite all his efforts the Diplomats were struggling and his lack of goals were being called into question as Cruyff operated from a deeper position, trying to pull the strings, rather than being the goalscorer. In June 1980 the Washington Post labelled Cruyff "the biggest disappointment since Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society." While I have absolutely no idea what that is, it certainly does not sound like a compliment and it certainly annoyed Cruyff.
In fact it annoyed him so much that he was being scapegoated by American fans with so little knowledge or understanding of the game, that he said to the Post: "I thought my job was to organise the team when I came here. Sure, I could score goals. I'm not worried about that in the slightest. In fact, that's what I am going to do now. Forget about organisation, I'm going to play spectactularly now. I'm going to play football for the spectator. We'll start winning games. But no championships. If you want to win trophies you have to play organised."
That is exactly what he did, finishing the game with 10 goals and 20 assists, but his team were knocked out of the play offs by a much more organised Aztecs side. However it was an important period for him as he learned to value just how much entertaining the fans mattered, even admitting to trying to hit the bar once when the team was 4-0 up as that was more fun for the fans than scoring another goal.
His time in the NASL had awoken an interest in analysing the game and taught him about philanthropy, how to negotiate with club management and made him realise he should give up on being a business entrepeneur and stick to what he knew better than just about anyone else, football. During that offseason Cruyff told a Dutch newspaper that he had demanded changes to the internal organisation of the Diplomats, practices and the make up of the squad. He was to get none of those demands met as owner Sonny Werblin decided he was no longer willing to cover the team's losses and shut it down.
Cruyff was left without a club, but pleased he had taken on his American adventure: "It was wrong, a mistake, to quit playing at 31 with the unique talent that I possessed. Starting from zero in America, many miles away from my past, was one of the best decisions I made. There I learned how to develop my uncontrolled ambitions, to think as a coach and about sponsorship." Without his time in the NASL we might never have had Johan Cruyff the coach, we might never have had, to paraphrase Graham Hunter, the pound for pound most important man in the history of football.
Written by Ed001