Ajax is widening its horizons and turning towards Indonesia. The Amsterdam club has reached an agreement with the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) to develop a national programme for the training of players and coaches. The project is built around Ajax’s principles and methods, with a clear aim: to improve the quality of grassroots football in one of Asia’s biggest and most passionate football markets. The formula is interesting because it does not simply involve opening another academy. Ajax will instead send its coaches to different parts of the country to work directly with local coaches. In this way, the club’s methods can reach a much wider network of coaches and players, with potentially greater impact than a single facility could offer.
As Inside World Football reported, the PSSI has long identified youth development as one of the areas that needs attention. Indonesia has an enormous appetite for football, but its development system has yet to turn that following into a consistent supply of talent. “Football is the number one sport in Indonesia, but we have to recognise that we still face challenges in our youth development system,” said federation president Erick Thohir. Yes, that Erick Thohir: the former president and owner of Inter. According to Thohir, Ajax’s experience can help improve both coach education and player development.
The choice of Ajax is hardly accidental. Youth development is one of the central elements of the club’s identity and, for decades, Amsterdam has been regarded as one of the world’s leading centres for developing footballers. Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank Rijkaard, Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Wesley Sneijder and, more recently, Matthijs de Ligt and Frenkie de Jong all came through De Toekomst, the home of the Ajax academy. The value of the Ajax brand in this field comes above all from its ability to turn a football philosophy into a system for developing players. It is that system the club now wants to export.
Indonesia will become part of Ajax’s international network, which already includes projects in Mexico, Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, Uzbekistan and Japan. For the club, it is a way to expand internationally while also making commercial use of one of its most important assets: its expertise in developing young players. Indonesia, in this sense, offers a combination of scale and opportunity that is difficult to overlook. The country has almost 300 million inhabitants and is one of the most populous in the world. Football is by far the most followed sport, while the national team has built an increasingly ambitious project in recent years, including efforts to draw on the large Indonesian community in the Netherlands.
The relationship between the two countries, of course, goes back much further. Football arrived in the archipelago during the period of the Dutch East Indies and initially developed within the European community. Gradually, though, the game also became a means of bringing the local population together. The Indonesian Football Association, the PSSI, was founded in 1930, at a time when the nationalist movement was gaining strength. The first major international milestone came in 1938, when the Dutch East Indies took part in the World Cup in France. They were the first Asian national team to play at a World Cup. Their experience was brief: Hungary beat them 6-0 in the first round, but the appearance nevertheless remained a landmark moment in the history of football in the region.
Today, the relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands can also be seen in the players. The federation has invested heavily in footballers of Indonesian descent who grew up in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, in an effort to raise the level of the national team. In recent years, several players born or developed in the Dutch football system have chosen to represent Indonesia, strengthening the ties between the two systems. The new partnership with Ajax therefore fits into a process that was already under way. The PSSI wants to improve development at home, while Amsterdam is looking for new markets in which to take its model. “We want to maintain our position as one of the best talent developers in the world and share our knowledge in markets that are relevant to us,” Ajax CEO Menno Geelen said.
The project will not be limited to activities in Indonesia. There will also be an exchange of coaches: Ajax staff will work in the Asian country, while some Indonesian coaches will have the opportunity to take part in training programmes in the Netherlands. The aim is to build local expertise that can remain in place after the Ajax coaches have finished their work. For Indonesia, the agreement is above all an investment in the foundations of the game. For Ajax, it is another step in building a global network around its academy. The ambition is to turn Indonesia’s love of football into a more structured development system, through a model that in Amsterdam has been part of the club’s identity for more than half a century.