Cruyff is 60, his words stay young

Cruyff, born April 25, 1947, is even the subject of articles in the Dutch Onze Taal (Our Language) magazine. “Cruyff the speaker slices and turns, accelerates and slows down in his language just as easily as he used to on the field,” linguists Guus Middag and Kees van der Zwan wrote.

The triple European Footballer of the Year (1971, 1973 and 1974), and the European Footballer of the Century, is not just a famous ex-player but a football oracle in his own right whose opinions on the game are at once enormously insightful and startlingly simple.

His analysis are often rambling stream-of-consciousness remarks like “Italians cannot beat you but you can lose to them”. The Dutch love it.

“It had the power of paradox that comes with an air of deeper insight. It was slightly funny as with everything that could either be obvious or nonsense,” they said.

After a successful run coaching Ajax and Barcelona, Cruyff became a football analyst for Dutch public television. It was there that his strange use of language, coupled with his insights, propelled him to the status of resident oracle.

His so-called Cruyffian language is very popular with his “every disadvantage has its advantage” becoming a modern catch phrase.

In a poll commissioned by Dutch news agency ANP for his 60th birthday that phrase was voted most popular ahead of other classics as “If we have the ball, they can’t score” and “it doesn’t matter if the opposing side scores a goal as long as you score one more than them”.