Johan Cruyff’s My Turn: The Autobiography is a remarkable reflection on football, philosophy, and personal evolution. The book vividly captures what passion for the sport truly means, portraying Cruyff as a complex, sometimes contradictory figure — both as a player and as a visionary coach. His reflections span football management, coaching philosophy, and the changing nature of the game itself.
The narrative follows Cruyff’s development alongside the evolution of football rules and governance, revealing how his struggles to gain coaching legitimacy mirrored the sport’s global institutional changes. This work serves as an essential starting point for anyone seeking to understand the modern European football paradigm.
Key Ideas
1. Distributed leadership and shared responsibility
As a coach, Cruyff strongly advocated for task distribution, embracing a managerial approach akin to macro-management — setting broad objectives while empowering assistants to handle micro-level execution. This model fostered shared responsibility, recognizing assistant coaches as integral to achieving team success.
2. Understanding the diversity of coaching roles
Cruyff emphasized that not all coaches are the same. Some excel at rescuing clubs from relegation, while others thrive in building title-winning teams. Likewise, youth coaching requires entirely different skills from managing adults. The distinction, he argued, lies in mentality and knowledge — recognizing that successful management depends on aligning coaching style with the club’s context and objectives.
3. The detail-oriented nature of elite performance
Analyzing football at the highest level requires attention to detail. Cruyff highlighted the importance of timing, positioning, body orientation, and first touch in shaping performance. Mastering these fundamentals allows a coach or player to anticipate actions two or three steps ahead, and more importantly, to communicate these insights effectively to others.
4. Football as the foundation of player development
Cruyff believed that football itself is the core driver of player development. He argued that when players genuinely enjoy the game, their mental and physical obstacles — fatigue, stress, or frustration — fade into the background. Joy, in his view, fuels focus and performance.
(A reviewer’s note: perhaps joy alone cannot prevent injury — discipline and preparation remain equally vital.)
5. Bottom-up hierarchy and communication challenges
Cruyff’s ideal football hierarchy is bottom-up:
- Players
- Coaches
- Managers
- Directors
He warned that problems arise when communication flows in the opposite direction — when directors, lacking technical understanding, reject sound ideas from coaches. This dynamic, he noted, is not unique to football but a universal challenge in organizational leadership.
Selected Citations from My Turn: The Autobiography
- “For me, two things are important: in principle, your players have to be able to play 120 minutes and they’ve got to have a laugh.”
- “The third man decides where the ball goes. It is not the person with the ball who decides where the ball goes. Players without the ball determine the action.”
- “If you’ve got someone who dribbles too much, you do not stop him from dribbling. Instead, you put him up against a big, physically strong opponent.”
- “The club that’s at the top, mid-table, or bottom often requires three totally different types of trainers.”
- “Top-level football is about Technique, Tactics, Training, and Finance.”
- “At least two players are involved in any move, but too much attention is placed on how they play individually when it’s really about how they play together.”
- “From the pitch upwards, right to the boardroom… Top-down attitude. People who think that way often feel superior and compelled to convince others that they are right.”
- “The difference between good and bad players’ technique is agility.”
- “The most important thing for a player is that he knows how to do the simple actions — passing, receiving, controlling with the chest, using the weaker foot, and heading.”
- “Learning to pass the ball correctly is simply a matter of repeating it over and over.”
Reference
Cruyff, J. (2016). My Turn: The Autobiography. London: Pan Macmillan.