Johan Cruyff: How will ‘militaristic' Louis van Gaal manage all the egos at Manchester United?

At the Olympic Stadium, walking around an arena that has been taken over for the day by his Foundation, this is an exercise in the familiar art of being Johan Cruyff. The 67-year-old reacts to the adoration, and even being cuddled by a grown man dressed up as a "Cruyffie" mascot, with a wry smile. This is how it feels to have been a football superstar for five decades. Alongside his earliest hero Alfredo Di Stéfano, who died this summer, Pelé and Diego Maradona, Cruyff belongs to a giant quartet who illuminate football with their almost mythic reputations. Cruyff stands out in even sharper relief for, while Di Stéfano succeeded as a coach, only the Dutchman can claim a sustained impact on the game from the touchline during his years in charge of Barcelona. Di Stéfano once complained of football management that "apart from working with the young, it's the most horrible profession that could exist". Cruyff has always thought differently. During his remarkable tenure at Barcelona, from 1988 to 1996, he used the speed, space and tactical fluidity of Total Football, which he and Rinus Michels, his coach at Ajax, conjured up together, to transform a moribund team and build an enduring legacy, Kazinform quotes the Guardian. Barcelona's masters of tiki-taka, such as Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta, always stressed everything they did was based on the Cruyff template. From his creation of the youth academy at La Masia to the whirligig of training rondos [piggy-in-the-middle routines], which perfected their purity of possession, to the relentless pressing of the opposition, Barcelona and Spain used Cruyff's model to dominate European and world football. That era has faded, reaching its symbolic end on a World Cup night in June when Holland, coached by Louis van Gaal, with whom Cruyff shares a mutual antipathy, destroyed Spain 5-1. Of course Van Gaal is now at Manchester United, struggling to overcome the problems of the post-Ferguson regime, while Cruyff is unshackled from the pressures of football. The life of Cruyff is still exhausting - and he explains wearily he has to fly back to Barcelona, his other "home", that night. Yet, right now, being Van Gaal is much more difficult. We retreat to a secluded lounge overlooking a typical Amsterdam canal. Cruyff, who is friendly and animated but reluctant to start another war with Van Gaal, with whom he has admitted to "a bad chemistry", can afford to take a laconic view of his fellow Dutchman's travails. Asked if he expects Van Gaal to succeed at Old Trafford, Cruyff shrugs. "We hope so because it would be good for Dutch football and other Dutch managers. But how it will go? You never know. It will take time." In 2011 Cruyff, who was then on the board at Ajax, went to court to block the re-appointment of Van Gaal at the club they supported as boys. They were also part of the Ajax squad in the early 1970s when, as his understudy, Van Gaal had no chance of replacing Cruyff as the star forward. Cruyff established himself as the finest player in Europe while Van Gaal laboured in relative obscurity at clubs such as Royal Antwerp and Sparta Rotterdam. Full story