Do we like them?Do we like Johan Cruyff?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and the foundation does real good, but one contested 2011 row and a thin readable record keep it from the top.
Johan Cruyff is the Amsterdam kid who became the face of Dutch football: a star at Ajax, a hero at Barcelona, then a coach whose ideas still shape both clubs. He died in 2016, and the tenth anniversary in March 2026 had Spanish and Dutch outlets reassessing how much of his vision is still alive in the game.
His shadow is still very much in the building. In January 2026 Ajax named Jordi Cruyff as its new technical director, with Reuters reporting a contract running to June 2028. Whatever you think of the hire, it shows how much the name still carries at the club where it all started.
The one proper stoush on his record is the 2011 Ajax row. Ajax's then supervisory board chairman alleged on Dutch TV that Cruyff told Edgar Davids he was on the board only because he was black. Cruyff denied it and said the comment was about Davids' role. Davids himself played the label down, but was still asking for an apology a year later, so it never really got settled.
On the harm check, we came up empty in a good way. Searches on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants and the climate turned up nothing damaging from Cruyff himself, and his best-known fights were about football and the Ajax boardroom. That's a thin record rather than a glowing one, and we couldn't open every article we wanted to, so treat it as a solid pass on what we found.
The real good is the Johan Cruyff Foundation, which he started in 1997 to get kids playing sport, with a strong focus on children with disabilities. It is still expanding: the first Cruyff Courts in France opened in Paris in February 2025, and a court opened at Anfield in Liverpool in May 2025 with Ryan Gravenberch cutting the ribbon.
Put it together and you get a bloke who was famously stubborn and not shy about a fight, but whose name now mostly stands for play, kids and a better way of doing football. The Davids row is the asterisk, and it's an old one. We found no pattern of anything worse.