Ajax, Dutch professional football (soccer) club formed in 1900 in Amsterdam. Ajax is the Netherlands’ most successful club and is best known for producing a series of entertaining attacking teams.
Ajax was promoted to the top Dutch league, the Eredivisie, for the first time in 1911. Under the coaching of Jack Reynolds in three stints (1915–25, 1928–40, and 1945–47), Ajax won eight Eredivisie titles. Yet, by the mid-1960s, the club was struggling near the bottom of the first division until a former striker for the club, Rinus Michels, took charge. Michels turned Ajax’s fortunes around, fashioning an attacking style of play in which talented young players such as Ruud Krol, Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, and Johan Cruyff frequently swapped positions during a game. That playing style, known as “total football,” soon became famous around the world. From 1966 Ajax won the Eredivisie six times in eight years, and in 1969 it became the first Dutch team to reach the final of the European Cup (now known as the Champions League). The club won the European Cup three times in a row (1971–73) and also won the 1972 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Super Cup and the 1972 Intercontinental Cup.
Further domestic success came after the 1980s, elevating Ajax’s total of league championships to 34, to go along with 19 Dutch Cups and 7 Dutch Super Cups. Although success abroad proved more elusive, Ajax did win the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1987, the UEFA Cup in 1992, and the Champions League in 1995, defeating AC Milan in the final of the last. In 1996 Ajax moved out of De Meer Stadium, its home for more than 60 years, to the Amsterdam ArenA, which has a retractable roof—an anomaly for a European football stadium. Ajax is notable for producing many talented young players who are often sold to elite foreign clubs. Among those players who went on to greater heights were Frank Rijkaard, Dennis Bergkamp, and Marc Overmars in the 1990s and, later, Ryan Babel, Wesley Sneijder, and Rafael van der Vaart.