FotMatch Insights · HistoricalWhy Ajax Still Defines the Gold Standard — Even When Ajax Itself Cannot Meet ItAjax has sold its best players to Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester United, and Liverpool for four decades. The academy still produces more elite professionals per capita than any institution in football. The question is not why Ajax sells, but why the system that produces the sellers is still the model everyone copies.By FotMatch Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-06 · 6 min read

In 2019, Ajax reached the Champions League semi-final with a squad whose average age was 24. Three months later, they had sold Frenkie de Jong to Barcelona for €75 million, Matthijs de Ligt to Juventus for €75 million, and Hakim Ziyech to Chelsea for €40 million. The semi-final team was dismantled. The academy that produced it was not.

The doctrine: what Ajax actually teaches — and what it does notThe Ajax academy, De Toekomst, sits on the edge of Amsterdam and has operated since 1900. Its curriculum is not a collection of drills but a philosophy: the "Ajax way," which descends directly from Rinus Michels' Total Football of the 1970s and was codified by Johan Cruyff in his later years as a coach and administrator. The core principle is positional fluidity. Every player is taught every position. A defender must be able to carry the ball into midfield; a midfielder must be able to drop into defence; a winger must be able to play as a striker. The system does not produce specialists. It produces players who understand the geometry of the pitch well enough to adapt to any tactical system.What Ajax does not teach is winning at all costs. The academy's competitive record — its under-17 and under-19 teams win Dutch youth titles regularly — is a by-product, not a priority. The priority is technical development in a specific sequence: ball control at age 8, passing patterns at age 10, positional rotation at age 12, and tactical decision-making in small-sided games from age 14 onwards. Matches are played on smaller pitches with fewer players to maximise touches per minute. The Dutch youth league structure, which does not have a national academy league like England's, allows Ajax to organise its own competitive schedule against local clubs, ensuring that players face varied opposition rather than the same elite academies repeatedly.The result is a player profile that is immediately recognisable to European scouts. Ajax graduates are technically secure in tight spaces, comfortable receiving the ball under pressure, and capable of playing in multiple positions within a possession-based system. They are not necessarily the fastest, the strongest, or the most athletic. They are the most spatially intelligent. This profile is not an accident; it is the deliberate output of a system designed to maximise decision-making speed rather than physical dominance.

The production line: how the academy funds the clubAjax is not a wealthy club. Its annual revenue in 2023-24 was approximately €220 million — roughly one-fifth of Real Madrid's, one-quarter of Manchester United's, and one-third of Borussia Dortmund's. The club cannot compete for established stars. Its business model is built on two assumptions: that the academy will produce one or two elite prospects per year, and that the first team will qualify for the Champions League group stage often enough to generate the broadcasting and commercial revenue that covers the operating deficit between player sales.The numbers are striking. Between 2015 and 2024, Ajax sold academy graduates and first-team players for a cumulative €850 million. The largest single sales — de Jong (€75m), de Ligt (€75m), Ziyech (€40m), Donny van de Beek (€39m to Manchester United in 2020), Lisandro Martínez (€57m to Manchester United in 2022), Antony (€95m to Manchester United in 2022), and Mohammed Kudus (€43m to West Ham in 2023) — funded the club's operations, stadium renovation, and the recruitment of younger replacements. The model is not unique; Porto, Benfica, and Salzburg operate similar "buy low, develop, sell high" strategies. What distinguishes Ajax is that the majority of its sellable assets are homegrown. Porto and Benfica recruit extensively from South America. Ajax recruits from Amsterdam.The academy's cost is modest by elite standards. De Toekomst operates on an annual budget of approximately €10 million — less than the annual salary of a single Premier League star. The return on investment is extraordinary: a single sale of a first-team regular, produced entirely through the academy, can generate thirty or forty times the academy's annual cost. The economics are so compelling that Ajax has resisted the temptation to sell the academy model itself. It has not franchised its curriculum, licensed its methodology, or opened satellite academies in Asia or the United States. The system works because it is embedded in a specific football culture — the Dutch emphasis on technique, the Amsterdam talent pool, and the Eredivisie's willingness to give teenagers first-team minutes — that cannot be exported as a package.

The first-team bridge: why minutes matter more than trophiesThe most underrated element of the Ajax model is not the academy but the first team. Ajax does not loan its teenagers to second-tier clubs or bury them in under-23 squads. It promotes them directly to the senior squad and plays them in Eredivisie matches from age 17 or 18. Ryan Gravenberch made his Eredivisie debut at 16. Jurriën Timber was a first-team regular at 19. Kenneth Taylor and Devyne Rensch were starting Champions League matches before they turned 21. This is not development in theory; it is development in pressure.The Eredivisie is the ideal environment for this transition. It is technically demanding — Dutch clubs prioritise possession and pressing — but physically less intense than the Premier League or Bundesliga. A teenager who plays thirty Eredivisie matches and six Champions League group-stage matches in a season has accumulated more high-level experience at 19 than most English academy graduates have at 22, after three years of under-23 football and occasional cup appearances. The competitive standard is lower than the Premier League's, but the learning curve is steeper because the player is responsible for outcomes.The Champions League performances of 2018-19 demonstrated the payoff. Ajax eliminated Real Madrid 4-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu in the round of 16, then eliminated Juventus in Turin in the quarter-final with goals from de Ligt and Dušan Tadić. The team was young, fearless, and technically superior to opponents who had spent ten times as much on their squads. The semi-final defeat to Tottenham — a 3-2 loss in Amsterdam after leading 2-0 at half-time — was a reminder that experience still matters in the final minutes of high-pressure matches. But the broader message was clear: Ajax's production model could compete with Europe's wealthiest clubs for ninety minutes, even if it could not sustain the competition over a decade.

Why the copies fail: Ajax without AmsterdamEvery major European club has tried to copy Ajax. Barcelona's La Masia was modelled on De Toekomst and produced Lionel Messi, Xavi, and Andrés Iniesta in a single generation. Bayern Munich's Campus, opened in 2017, hired former Ajax youth coaches and adopted the positional-rotation curriculum. Chelsea's academy, the most expensive in England with an annual budget exceeding £15 million, has produced more professional players than any other English institution. None of these academies has matched Ajax's output of elite first-team players per euro spent.The copies fail because they cannot replicate the cultural ecosystem. Ajax operates in a city where football is the dominant public sport, where street football still exists in a form that develops close control and improvisation, and where the club's identity is so deeply embedded that parents send their children to the academy for social and cultural reasons as much as sporting ambition. The Dutch education system, which ends formal schooling at 16 for vocational students, allows teenagers to commit to full-time football training earlier than in England, where the compulsory education age is 18. The Eredivisie's financial structure, which cannot afford to buy foreign stars, forces clubs to play young Dutch players because there is no alternative.The English academy system, by contrast, is structurally different. The Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP), introduced in 2012, funds academies generously but categorises them into tiers that create competitive inequality. Category 1 academies like Chelsea and Manchester City have budgets that dwarf Ajax's, but they operate within a youth league system that prioritises winning over development. Players are rotated less, positions are specialised earlier, and the pathway to first-team football is blocked by expensive foreign signings. The result is a paradox: England produces more professional footballers than the Netherlands, but fewer elite ones. The English system is a production line for Championship and lower-league players. The Ajax system is a production line for Champions League starters.

The future: can Ajax survive its own success?Ajax's model has a structural vulnerability: the better the academy works, the faster the first team is dismantled. The 2018-19 Champions League run was followed by a fire sale that left the first team depleted and the Eredivisie title race uncompetitive for two seasons. The 2021-22 season, in which Ajax won the Eredivisie and reached the Champions League round of 16, was followed by another exodus: Martínez, Antony, and Sébastien Haller were sold for a combined €210 million. By 2024, Ajax had fallen to fifth in the Eredivisie, their worst league position in fourteen years. The academy was still producing. The first team could no longer retain the products long enough to compete.The club's response has been to invest in its scouting and analytics departments to identify undervalued players who can be developed and sold on the same cycle, buying time for the next academy generation to mature. The signings of Steven Bergwijn from Tottenham, Steven Berghuis from Feyenoord, and Davy Klaassen's return from Werder Bremen were attempts to maintain first-team competitiveness without abandoning the youth-first philosophy. The results have been mixed. Bergwijn was sold to Al-Ittihad in 2024 for a profit, but Klaassen and Berghuis were ageing players whose resale value was limited.The ultimate question is whether the Ajax model is sustainable in an era of football financial polarisation. The Premier League's broadcast revenue — £2.7 billion annually — allows its mid-table clubs to outspend Ajax on wages and transfer fees. Saudi Arabian clubs, operating outside UEFA's financial regulations, can offer salaries that Ajax cannot match even for its most loyal academy graduates. The market for young talent is globalising: clubs in Brazil, Argentina, and increasingly the United States are producing players with similar technical profiles at lower cost. Ajax's advantage — its cultural ecosystem and its first-team bridge — remains real. But the financial gap between Ajax and the clubs that buy its players is widening. The academy that defined the gold standard may soon become a museum piece: admired, studied, and ultimately unable to afford its own excellence.