Johan Cruyff is the "concrete village" boy who changed football forever and is gone

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The ball bounces off concrete walls and floors in the "Bitondorp" neighborhood in the Dutch capital Amsterdam, which was built in the 1920s as an experiment to build housing for low-income people using cheap new building materials, especially concrete, which caused the residential complex to be called "the concrete village."

In this neighborhood, the late Johan Cruyff was taming the ball that bounces in the concrete walls, which helped him a lot in building his style of taming the ball, while the fear of falling on the concrete floor helped him to know how to maintain his balance because any fall means ugly wounds will not leave his body easily. He managed to learn to stand up.

Not a day went by without Cruyff even touching the soccer ball as it was his favorite game until he was called "the ball boy" because he was even taking the ball to school.

The legend, a three-time Ballon d'Or winner, says in his autobiography: "We used to put the ball under the seat and pass it between us during the classroom, that would annoy the teachers sometimes and expel us from the classroom."

The legend was described as "invisible", which is the word that critics used to describe him on the field, and say that no one was like Johan Cruyff and that no one else appeared to influence football more inside or outside the stadium, neither in Europe nor in the whole world because he was He changed this sport forever. He was described as unique, brilliant, rebellious and even arrogant at times. He would enter into conflict with everyone who tried to stand in his way or oppose his ideas, whether his colleagues or club presidents, and he devoted his life to football and to his three girlfriends: “Ajax, Barcelona and the national team. orange".

"It is only one ball on the field, so it must be possessed," summarizes his firm saying, the change he caused in football, as he set up a football philosophy that relies mainly on preparation through passes, possession of the ball, control of the course of the meeting, collective pressure and retrieving the ball from the opponent as soon as possible.

"You don't need to run a lot, you have to play football with your mind," says Cruyff, who led Barcelona's victory to four successive leagues from the 1990-91 season to the 1993-94 season.

The Dutch legend remained faithful to the new football before he died in March 2016 at the age of 68 after a struggle with lung cancer as he was a heavy smoker, but he quit smoking after a heart operation that he underwent in 1991 by heart bypass surgery.

After his death, it became clear that Cruyff had obstructed efforts to convert his childhood home into a museum and demanded that the apartment be returned to the neighborhood council in order to make it available to low-income families.

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