Photo by Winston Tija
In the summer of 2018, when an ungodly sun pummelled the creaking cobbles of Amsterdam, Edwin van der Sar and Marc Overmars gathered several young Ajax players together at the club’s training ground. The director of football and CEO had hatched a plan to convince this sensational cohort of youngsters, which included the Dutchmen Frenkie de Jong, Donny van de Beek, Justin Kluivert, and Matthijs de Ligt, to stay one more season.
To do this, they edited together a video in which each of the players' performances were directly compared to those of an Ajax legend who played in the same position. The message to the players was simple: you have the potential to ascend to levels of similar greatness; just give the club a chance to take you there.
It worked. Everyone bar Kluivert stayed for the following season in a team that also included wonderful talents such as Andre Onana, David Neres, and Kasper Dolberg. It would go on to be one of the best seasons in the club’s recent history, winning a domestic double and reaching a Champions League semi-final.
That European run set the country and much of the continent alight with gasp-inducing delirium. I was living in Amsterdam during this period, and after both of the miraculous, devastating defeats of Real Madrid and Juventus, empty streets were suddenly packed as people tore from their houses; their joy was such that it couldn't be contained within four walls.
Of course, when the euphoria of victory is cosmic, the despair of defeat is equally vast. When Lucas Moura sent Ajax out in the 96th minute, a devastating silence descended over the city. It was genuinely eerie; an entire landscape had swallowed its screams, and a hush gripped it like dense fog.
Six years after that brutal night at the Johan Cruijff ArenA,1 the Dutch national team opened their Euro 2024 campaign with a 2-1 win over an impressive Poland side. What was truly remarkable, though, wasn’t the player’s on the pitch putting a decent shift in, but those who didn’t feature at all. Of the Dutch players who were part of the remarkable Ajax generation, of which Ryan Gravenbach could also be included, not one played a single minute.
Frenkie de Jong, who suffered an injury before the tournament, would have been a guaranteed starter. But the rest were either relegated to the bench or, in the case of van de Beek and Kluivert, didn’t even make the 26-man squad at all.
In 2018, it wouldn’t have been hyperbolic to suggest we were witnessing the emergence of a fourth Dutch Golden Generation. As van der Sar and Overmars tried to impress upon them, this group had the potential to sit alongside Neeskens, van Basten, Seedeorf, or de Boer in that gilded pantheon of Dutch footballing greats. Yet Ronald Koeman, one of those icons and the current Netherlands manager, isn’t convinced enough to play any of these players in what they would consider their easiest group match.
Of this generation, only de Jong, a mainstay of the Barcelona midfield, has reached anywhere close to the potential the 2018–19 season suggested. Since joining Man United four years ago, Donny van de Beek has only played 77 games, with a majority as a substitute. At Ajax, he was a direct, dominating, slayer of an 8. He burst through defences like a high tide through a seawall of silk. Now his career has been perhaps fatally poisoned by the plaugue pit that is Manchester United Football Club.
Matthijs de Ligt has had a more mixed experience since leaving Ajax for Juventus for a reported €75 million in 2019. By his own admission, he struggled to settle in Turin and was unfortunate to join Juventus just at the point where they seemed to get bored of winning the league and decided to be shit for a while. He has regained form since joining Bayern Munich in 2022 and is still only 24, but to be left out of the opening game of a European Championship for a 32-year-old Stefan de Vrij is testament to his struggles.
Similarly, Gravenberch has struggled to cement himself as a top-class player since leaving Amsterdam in 2022, initially for Bayern Munich and then for Liverpool the following season. He didn’t exactly help his cause by declining a call-up to the under-21s in November in order to ‘focus on his new club’, a decision condemned severely by Koeman.
These four players should be the backbone of the Dutch national team, all heading into Euro 2024 in their mid-20s and approaching the peak years of their careers. Now we have the odd situation of the Netherlands central midfield being occupied by two PSV players with only 20 Champions League games between them.
Despite them all being relatively young, this is a lost generation of Dutch footballers and a national team that could have been very different than the one that is seeking to win the Oranje’s first trophy since 1988. With the exception of de Jong, this is a generation of players that have struggled to survive in the ruthless insanity of football’s super club era. Where, even if you are a €50 million player, if you don’t perform the instant you walk through the door, you’ll be thrown into the wastebin like two day-old poffertjes.
This isn’t a typo, that is how Ajax spell it. Yeah, I know.