Back in the Big Time: How Ajax Engineered Their Champions League Revival

The journey that took Ajax back to the UEFA Champions League knockout rounds for the first time in 13 years began on a warm Amsterdam evening last July.

Facing Austrian side Sturm Graz in the first leg of a second qualifying round tie at the Johan Cruijff ArenA, Erik ten Hag's team prevailed 2-0 courtesy of goals from Hakim Ziyech and Lasse Schone.

In the second half, two players came off the bench to make significant appearances. Dusan Tadic, a summer signing from Southampton, made his debut, and Daley Blind played his first game since returning to Ajax after four years at Manchester United.

Tadic cost a reported initial fee of €11.4 million, while Blind set Ajax back around €16 million, making them two of the most expensive players the club has ever bought.

The sums pale in comparison beside the €86 million Frenkie de Jong could ultimately cost Barcelona when he signs from Ajax this summer. Matthijs de Ligt, the Dutch club's teenage captain, is likely to command a comparable fee whenever he leaves.

For those who watch Ajax closely, though, the influence Tadic, 30, and Blind, 28, have had on their young team-mates should not be underestimated.

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"One of the main reasons why Ajax have made it [into the Champions League knockout phase] this year is that they had the money and the courage to buy experienced players like Tadic and Blind," says Mike Verweij, who reports on the club for Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. "The mix is better than in all the years before."

With 22 goals and 13 assists across all competitions, Tadic is enjoying the best season of his career. Including qualifying matches, the Serbian winger has found the net eight times in the Champions League and was the standout performer as Ajax emerged unbeaten from a group that included Bayern Munich, Benfica and AEK Athens, notably starring in an unfamiliar centre-forward role in his side's two draws against the German side.

Blind has spent more minutes on the pitch than any other Ajax player since returning to the club where he took his first steps as a professional over 10 years ago. He has been an experienced foil to 19-year-old De Ligt in central defence and has even shown an eye for goal, scoring his first career hat-trick in December's 8-0 rout of De Graafschap. (Ten Hag's ultra-attacking team have also recorded winning margins of 7-1, 6-0, 5-0—twice—and 5-1 in the league this season, giving Ajax their best goals-per-game average since the 1985-86 campaign.)

For all the contributions Tadic and Blind have made on the pitch, their efforts behind the scenes have been just as telling.

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"The main thing they gave the squad was the absolute focus on winning every game and doing everything to win," says Verweij. "Because in Holland, young players can play three good games and lose the fourth. But with Daley and Dusan, everybody is sharp and everybody knows that if you win four games, it doesn't mean you'll win the fifth as well. They helped their team-mates to realise what the life of a professional football player is."

Nicolas Tagliafico is another player to have brought some top-level know-how to the Ajax changing room. The 26-year-old Argentina left-back joined from Independiente in January 2018 in an example of the Eredivisie club's policy of signing players from South America in the winter transfer window and giving them time to get up to speed with a view to the following campaign.

Brazilian forward David Neres signed from Sao Paulo in January 2017 and finished as Ajax's top scorer in 2017-18. Argentinian centre-back Lisandro Magallan is being eased into action following his €9 million switch from Boca Juniors last month.

There was more evidence of Ajax's transfer smarts last summer. With the exception of Justin Kluivert, who left for AS Roma, Ajax retained all their major players and managed to tie up incoming transfers well before their Champions League qualifying campaign began.

Ajax's ability to invest in experienced players such as Tadic, Blind and Tagliafico reflects the large sums of money they have amassed from the sales of players such as Kluivert, Davinson Sanchez, Davy Klaassen and Arkadiusz Milik, all of whom have departed for fees exceeding €20 million during the last two-and-a-half years.

That sporting director Marc Overmars and chief executive Edwin van der Sar, both former Ajax stars in their own right, decided to invest in proven players in their mid-to-late 20s rather than up-and-coming prospects was tacit acknowledgement that youthful promise can only take a club so far.

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Ajax seemed to stand on the brink of a major breakthrough in 2017 when a team with an average age of under 23 reached the final of the UEFA Europa League, where they lost 2-0 to Manchester United. But they crashed out of both the Champions League and the Europa League in the qualifying rounds the following season and then came up short against PSV Eindhoven in the Dutch title race.

Last season's second-placed finish in the Eredivisie means it is now five years since Ajax last topped the pile in the Netherlands. They have not won a trophy of any kind during that period and that, too, is likely to have influenced transfer strategy.

"After four years without winning a trophy, I think Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Sar felt obliged to invest more money than they used to do," says Sander Zeldenrijk, the chief editor of fanzine Ajax Life.

The emergence of De Ligt, who joined Ajax at the age of nine, and De Jong, who signed from Willem II when he was 18, emphasises the club's ability to attract the best young Dutch talent. Ajax invests above €10 million in its academy every year, and Zeldenrijk says the club likes to present itself to potential recruits as "the Harvard of football education."

Yet with Europe's leading clubs always sniffing around, not everyone is prepared to wait until graduation. Timothy Fosu-Mensah (Manchester United), Daishawn Redan (Chelsea) and Ki-Jana Hoever (Liverpool) are among the youth prospects who have opted to inspect the grass on the other side of the fence in recent years.

As De Jong's move to Barcelona after only two seasons as a first-team player demonstrates, not all those who make it into the starting XI are prepared to stick around either.

In an ideal world, players such as De Jong and De Ligt would give Ajax four or five seasons of service before looking elsewhere, but Van der Sar is enough of a realist to know that cannot always be the case.

"Because of the strength of other competitions—or the weakness of our own competition, you could also argue—there are opportunities for those [foreign] clubs to attract players," he wrote in a recent De Telegraaf column.

"At Ajax there is of course a limit. We look closely at the composition of the squad, because we play football to win prizes and perform as well as possible. ... We want to keep our boys and if that turns out to be really difficult, there must be a hefty price so that we can attract good replacements and invest even more in the youth."

Some fans expressed dismay in January when 21-year-old Austrian centre-back Maximilian Wober was allowed to join Sevilla, but in general there is a pragmatic acceptance of Ajax's place in the grand scheme of things.

"People know how it works," Zeldenrijk says. "You have the big European leagues, then the Dutch Eredivisie. Ajax are not in a position to spend the money on salaries that other teams spend."

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The players who have made the step up from Jong Ajax (the Ajax reserve team) in recent years, among them De Ligt, De Jong and Donny van de Beek, have benefited from the decision made in 2013 to allow the club's second string (along with their counterparts at PSV and FC Twente) to compete against professional players in the Netherlands' second tier.

Jong Ajax won the Eerste Divisie for the first time last season, although as a reserve team, they cannot be promoted to the top flight. Things are looking good higher up the chain as well. Ajax's under-19s topped their UEFA Youth League group this season, and last April the under-17s successfully defended the Future Cup, an international youth tournament staged every year at the club's De Toekomst training facility.

Ajax were always going to start as outsiders in their Champions League last-16 tie against Real Madrid, which starts Wednesday in Amsterdam. Chances of an upset seem even more remote in the wake of a worrying run of league form that has seen Ten Hag's men fall six points below leaders PSV following a 4-4 draw with Heerenveen, a 6-2 thrashing by Feyenoord and a 1-0 defeat by mid-table Heracles.

But thanks to some canny transfer dealings, some wise older heads and that steadily rolling academy conveyor belt, they at least have a dog in the fight again.