Christ, where to start?
Indisputably a great player. A great dribbler, a fantastic passer, extremely quick. A phenomenal athlete, capable of jumping high for a header and scoring goals feet above the pitch (one for Barcelona really stands out). Wiry and short, but very strong on the ball. Tough too, a man who could belt a defender's shin and leave his mark if he felt wronged.
A superlative tactician on the pitch. To me, the iconic image of Cruyff/Cruijff (using ij just sounds cooler) is not of him scoring a goal, or dribbling the ball, or even passing. It's
pointing. You go here, you go over there. Overlap the midfielder, you come up and play behind me. At 58, he came on as a substitute with Marco van Basten (!) in Dennis Bergkamp's testimonial, and spent the entire time directing traffic. I think it's fair to say no great player ever thought as much about the game and how it should be played.
That thinking influenced his coaching career. He gave Dennis Bergkamp his start in the Ajax team, meaning Dennis won a European Cup Winner's Cup winner's medal at the age of 17. He helped Marco van Basten become the best striker in the world. Then he went to Barcelona and built the Dream Team, playing an attacking 4-3-3 with Ronald Koeman, Pep Guardiola, Hristo Stoichkov and others and won Barcelona's very first European Cup.
The single most responsible person for the Netherlands transforming from a footballing backwater into one of the world's football powers (Euro 2016 aside). He bought Ajax from nowhere to European Cup winners in 1971, 1972 and 1973, playing football so masterful they would sometimes not bother scoring (they went up 1-0 in the first five minutes in the 1973 final, and just didn't bother to do anything after that...because why?).
He had his faults. He liked money, and his father in law negotiated for him one of the first big sponsorship deals with Puma, which is why his 1974 Adidas-manufactured World Cup shirt had two stripes versus the three of his teammates (the first openly branded World Cup jersey, by the way). He was stubborn as fuck, and seemed to sometimes cross a line in advancing his views. The 2010 Dutch team went to their first World Cup final in 32 years by playing some rather tough football that offended Johan, and in losing to a Spain team so clearly influenced by his vision of the game that they might as well have given him the trophy, he came out with some cryptic comments in his Monday column for the Telegraaf that indicated he may not have been as heartbroken to lose the World Cup final as a lot of other Dutch people.
He seemed to constantly be returning to Ajax, the club of his life (who will probably name their stadium after him now), trying to implement his vision (which never changed even as the game changed and as Ajax's economic position declined), and then stomping out in a strop to return to Barcelona when he met resistance for one reason or another.
He married a pretty strong woman in Danny, who seemed unusually prominent in his decisions. As time goes by, you wonder if it's sexism, but she supposedly kept him up all night in an epic phone conversation after the German tabloid Bild published a story (which wasn't true) about the Dutch team cavorting with some nude frauleins in the run-up to the 1974 final and some people blame this for his rather tepid performance in the final (he famously dribbled through the entire German side in the first minute, but was in Berti Vogts' pocket after that). She seemed to talk him out of going to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, a tournament the Dutch likely win with him. It's likely the heart attack he suffered in 1994 - a consequence of the smoking which has now killed him - caused Danny to say quit managing or quit me.
He had that internecine rivalry with Louis van Gaal. The two greatest Dutch thinkers on the game hated each other, for who knows why. With van Gaal responsible for building the second Gouden-Ajax in the 90s, both wielded enormous power at the club and the Cruyff vs. van Gaal battlelines have caused Ajax to punch below their weight.
But a lot of that is forgotten now. What a man, what a player.
Oh, and he liked his baseball too:
(I took this at a book market in Amsterdam - that's Johan on the left in the catcher's gear for the Ajax youth baseball team)