Ajax's Midfield Ledger: A Signing Filed in the Wrong Column

The clock at the Johan Cruijff ArenA was crossing ninety when the ball travelled right to left across Ajax's midfield, then back again, then backwards. The noise in the stands dropped a step. Home crowds usually rise at that hour; this one went quiet, because everyone could see the ball moving without going anywhere. Tolu Arokodare had put Ajax ahead in the seventh minute. The Eredivisie match finished 1-1, and NEC carried two points home. I kept the ledger open until the last fax machine went quiet, because a scoreline never explains why a pass was played. The thunder clap did not start in the stands; it started in the chest.

Ajax's identity is its academy. The boys who come through De Toekomst are the club's economics, its image and its resale market at once. In the Eredivisie's revenue structure Ajax cannot outspend the top-five-league clubs, so the model is plain: buy low, develop, sell high. In that model a home draw with a side like NEC is not one match's two dropped points; in a title race those are precisely the points that settle the arithmetic in May. Míchel is a Spanish coach with a training-and-match remit, and how much of the recruitment call is his is not clear from this report.

The criticism Mario Been, an ESPN pundit, aimed at Ajax's summer signing Sofyan Amrabat was written in hard language. In his view Amrabat offered 'zero added value', sideways passes and the ball knocked back and forth, and 'anyone can do that'. The headline is angry. The argument underneath is older, and familiar.

The real question is not about the player's quality but about the role profile. Amrabat is a deep-lying midfielder whose job is to hold the ball, recycle possession and break up attacks. Been's complaint came from a match where the problem lay elsewhere: creativity and one-against-one ability against a deep NEC block. A team that has lost the capacity to create chances cannot be repaired by a man whose job is to stop them. This is a category error in squad-building: a retainer filed in the column where a creator was needed.

The pattern of the match implies NEC sat deep after conceding and Ajax could not unlock them. Possession share, expected goals, none of those figures appear in the report. Only the phrase remains: sideways, backwards. Football has a name for it, possession without progression. A side that keeps the ball for seventy minutes but never finds a way into the box produces pretty statistics and poor results. The longest minute is not measured by the clock but by who stops breathing.

Been's answer came from the club's own academy: the winger Abdellah Ouazane. Been described him repeatedly as a player who can beat opponents, a boy who carries the ball in one-against-one situations. That is exactly the skill needed to break a low block, and Been said his minutes should be far greater in matches of this kind. This is a coherent tactical argument, not merely sentiment. On a day when Ajax dropped two points at home, the creative teenager on the bench became the loudest question in the ground.

Been's sharpest line was probably this: you spend the whole match watching the big names Ajax have signed, while the lad from the club's own academy has more quality in his view. That tension sits deep in Ajax's identity. For a club that built its self-image on producing young footballers, a senior name arriving from outside costs more than money; it costs expectation. The transfer wars between elite clubs are brand races; real value is usually made at smaller clubs, where the patience to develop a player still exists. Ajax is a club of that patience, and senior signings create friction inside the model. Every transfer has a heartbeat, and I listen before the paperwork arrives.

The arithmetic of minutes matters here. When European competition runs alongside the domestic league, two matches a week becomes normal. The real cause of soft-tissue breakdowns is congestion; no medical team can save a footballer from a two-games-a-week schedule. Judging a senior player permanently on one performance is therefore dangerous, and loading the whole burden of breaking blocks onto a teenager is an equal risk.

One thing tends to disappear from this debate: distance covered and high-intensity sprints. They are packaged as effort metrics, yet pointless running also produces handsome numbers. Sideways passing football still accumulates kilometres every match. The simple equation, that the midfielder who sweats most plays best, collapses in matches of this kind. Been's complaint is an eye test rather than a spreadsheet, and what the eye caught was a structural imbalance.

The easy reading is that Amrabat is an expensive failure and Ajax have made another bad buy. That reading is half true. Judging a ball-winner for failing as a ball-creator, then calling him useless, is like asking for answers to the wrong exam paper. The fair question is this: why did a club that knew it lacked creativity in midfield buy a recycler? The fault lies in the recruitment decision, not the player. Second, this pressure is media-led, not fan-led; one influential pundit's television segment spreads on social media faster than any protest in the stands. And while championing Ouazane, the risk should be noted too: publicly anointing a young player means the backlash lands on him if a few games go badly. The sample is a single match; declaring a tactical crisis takes at least three or four.

What to watch inside Ajax over the coming weeks is not goals but decisions. Do Ouazane's minutes actually rise? Who takes responsibility for carrying the ball through midfield? In the winter window, will the club look for a ball-carrier, or return to the market of big names? And the most important question of all: will Míchel hold back the academy's own son while trying to balance the club's investment ledger? For a club that buys low, develops and sells high, the greatest loss is not one dropped match; the greatest loss is stepping one pace away from its own model. The ledger is open. The answer will arrive on the pitch, not on paper.