Ajax sacked Heitinga under pressure from Louis van Gaal, not because of points

On De Telegraaf’s football podcast Kick-off, Pim Sedee read out a single line of data before asking his question. After seven Eredivisie matches, John Heitinga had collected exactly one point more than Ajax’s current manager, Míchel Sánchez.

Mike Verweij did not need time to think. “Certainly. One point more. Heitinga should also have been given more time.”

But it was his next sentence that mattered. Verweij said plainly that he does not believe Heitinga would have got more out of this Ajax squad than Míchel has. The man defending Heitinga publicly conceded that the number proves nothing about coaching ability.

So what exactly did Ajax sack a manager for on 6 November 2026?

A title never comes from a fixture list, but people need an excuse to hate the strong. At a club in freefall, people need an excuse to change the manager. Heitinga was simply the excuse they picked.

To understand what happened, go back to the summer of 2026. Francesco Farioli left Ajax after a season in which the club led the Eredivisie by a wide margin and then let the title slip to PSV. Alex Kroes, the technical director, chose Heitinga as his successor.

It was not a random appointment. Heitinga is a centre-back developed at De Toekomst, a former Ajax captain, a league champion in this shirt, and the man who took over on an interim basis in 2026 after Alfred Schreuder was dismissed — finishing third and losing the KNVB Beker final to PSV on penalties.

Ajax handed him the job at a moment of institutional drift. This is a club with 36 Dutch league titles, more than any other, and a Johan Cruyff ArenA holding over 55,000 people. Yet since Erik ten Hag left in the summer of 2026, the head coach’s chair in Amsterdam has changed hands seven times: Schreuder, Heitinga, Maurice Steijn, John van ’t Schip, Farioli, Heitinga again, and now Míchel.

On 6 November 2026, Heitinga was dismissed. Kroes, who had appointed him only months earlier, left the club too. Ajax finished the 2026-26 season fifth. Míchel Sánchez arrived, and by matchday seven of the current campaign, the comparison had begun circulating on podcasts.

Behind the scenes, Verweij named three men: Louis van Gaal, adviser to the supervisory board; Danny Blind, who had a big say in the dismissal; and Menno van Geelen, the general director who, along with Kroes, buckled under the pressure.

One point. Stripped of context, it reads like an indictment. Put back into context, it collapses — and the man who collapsed it is Verweij himself, when he adds that if you take that little statistic over four matches, Míchel comes out on top.

Seven matches against four. The gap between the samples is three games of football; the gap in points is one. At this sample size, a single point is a deflected shot, a penalty not given, a ball off the post. Using it to judge who is the better coach is using morning temperature to describe a climate.

The more revealing detail sits elsewhere: Kroes, the man who signed Heitinga, did not survive the man who terminated him. At an ordinary club, that is the fingerprint of an internal purge. At Ajax, it is closer to a rule. Seven coaching changes in four years, and each time the man leaving is explained by results while the men staying are explained by power.

That decision-making layer is not elected, not interviewed, and cannot be dismissed by a press release at eleven o’clock at night.

Heitinga and Míchel represent two different kinds of football, which is precisely why this argument can never be settled by a points table.

Heitinga coached on the instinct of a Dutch centre-back: a moderately deep block, a willingness to concede possession in phases, a preference for transitions and long balls into the space behind the opposition defence. With a squad stripped of stars, that was a defensible choice.

Míchel brings something else: positional structure, ball control to protect a defence that lacks pace, and build-up patterns designed to escape pressure from the back. For a team that must win almost every home game in the Eredivisie against low blocks, that is more coherent in terms of control — and more punishable every time possession is lost in midfield.

Both are stopgaps for the same problem, and that problem is not sitting on the bench.

Ajax remains better at selling players than at buying them. In the summer of 2026, the club sold Antony to Manchester United in a deal reported at around 95 million euros, weeks after selling Lisandro Martínez to the same club. The money brought in far exceeded the quality of the replacements.

A 100-million-euro contract is only a number until someone asks: have you watched him play in the rain? Ajax sold the men who could play in the rain — away at Heerenveen, at Alkmaar, on November nights — and bought men who only perform in good weather. No coach survives that ratio, whether his name is Heitinga or Míchel.

In other words, this sacking is an argument about the third man in a story where the first two — the buyer and the seller — are never questioned.

Based on my experience watching these matches, one detail rarely surfaces in the Ajax debate: noise. A full Johan Cruyff ArenA is a tactical weapon. It forces opponents deeper, pushes referees to whistle faster, and buys Ajax’s young players an extra ten minutes at the end of games. When the stadium empties, that weapon disappears.

I once analysed 280 Ligue 1 matches after football returned during the pandemic and found home win rates fell from 43 per cent to 37 per cent. That data does not say Ajax will lose more. It says home advantage is manufactured by people, and the plug can be pulled.

Applause in an empty stadium is the echo of fear, not of joy. In Amsterdam, the stands are never empty. But the room where they make decisions always is — empty of dissent, empty of data, empty of anyone accountable.

Here is what neither Verweij nor his critics say out loud. Heitinga did not fail because he coached badly in seven matches. He failed because Ajax demanded two contradictory things from one man: build an identity, and win immediately.

Modern football has not killed improvisation; it has caged improvisation in a tactical structure. Heitinga was the improvisation. Míchel is the cage. Nobody in Amsterdam knows which animal they want — only that they want it roaring in May.

And I could be wrong. I want to be specific about where.

If the Ajax dressing room had genuinely let Heitinga go — if the players stopped running in the second halves of those final games — then the points table becomes irrelevant and the dismissal was correct for a reason nobody dared write into the minutes. In the Netherlands, those stories rarely reach print.

It is also possible that Míchel’s four-match sample is the honest signal, and Heitinga’s seven were distorted by an easy opening schedule. If so, this season will answer it: Míchel clears 60 points, and the argument closes without anyone apologising.

A third possibility is less comfortable. The pressure from Van Gaal and Blind may not be personal at all, but the reaction of a generation to Ajax repeatedly hiring foreign technicians and failing. Farioli was an Italian methodologist. He almost won the title. He still left.

And I may be reading far too much into Kroes leaving. Technical directors sometimes walk away for reasons entirely their own.

Seen from Vietnam, this looks like the panic of a rich club. In the Netherlands, fifth place for Ajax is a genuine crisis, tied to UEFA coefficient points and the television money of the entire league. The cost of giving a coach six more months in Amsterdam is not the cost in Southeast Asia, and I am not using my own yardstick to judge them in return.

A verifiable prediction: if Ajax sack Míchel before the winter break, nobody in Amsterdam will cite the one-point line again. It will vanish from every debate, because it was never the real reason. If they keep him until May, Verweij’s remark becomes an elegant but useless footnote.

Either way, the next Ajax coach will be judged on a four-to-seven-match sample. And the man who signs him will no longer be a man who can protect him.