One Point More, One Decision Short: The John Heitinga Paradox at Ajax

On 6 November, John Heitinga left the De Toekomst training complex in the morning. There was no long press conference, no staged farewell, no wreath at the training ground gate. A few hours later, Alex Kroes cleared his desk on the administrative floor. Two men who had sat side by side at an introductory press conference in the summer left through the same door, in the same direction, on the same morning. Ajax lost a head coach and a technical director in under half a day.

Four months later, on De Telegraaf's Kick-off podcast, a small detail was placed on the table. After seven league matches, John Heitinga had exactly one point more than the current Ajax manager, Míchel Sánchez. One point. Presenter Pim Sedee raised the number, and Mike Verweij, who covers Ajax for De Telegraaf, answered with a short confirmation and then immediately limited it himself.

I sat with this detail for a long time, because it touches precisely the place where my trade gets stuck: the line between a data point strong enough to raise a question and one too small to settle it. The number does not lie, but it also does not tell the whole story.

Context: a club taking itself apart from the inside

To understand why one point became the subject of an entire podcast, you need to understand the stretch Ajax had just come through. After years of domestic dominance, the club entered a cycle in which every part of the machine shook at the same time. The bench changed hands repeatedly. The recruitment office changed hands. The supervisory board changed hands. Each new group restarted the evaluation from scratch, and each restart cost a season.

Francesco Farioli was the last man to hold the team before departing. When he left, Alex Kroes, the technical director, chose John Heitinga as his successor in the summer. It was a highly symbolic choice: Heitinga was not an outsider. He was a centre-back produced by the club's own academy, a former first-team player, a former Netherlands international. For a club losing its identity, bringing a son home was the most popular option available.

But the option that pleases the stands is rarely the option that pleases the corridors. As Verweij described it on Kick-off, neither the appointment nor the dismissal sat entirely in Kroes's hands. Pressure came from Louis van Gaal, adviser to the supervisory board, and Danny Blind also had a significant say in ending Heitinga's tenure. Kroes and Menno van Geelen, the general director, were described by Verweij as having succumbed to that pressure. 6 November was the end point of a chain of decisions nobody wanted to own.

This is the kind of environment I call governance by pressure. The man in the technical chair carries responsibility for results but does not hold full authority over decisions. When results turn bad, people look for a name to replace. When that name has been replaced, they look for another. The club never repairs the structure; it only rotates the people standing in front of it.

Seven matches, one point, and a small paradox

Back to the number. Seven matches, one point more. In football, seven matches is a very short sample for assessing anything. But seven matches is a very long sample inside a boardroom, because media pressure in the Netherlands accumulates weekly rather than seasonally.

It took me three months to realise I had misread a similar position. In 2026 I spent three months analysing GPS data from 37 Serie A matches to show that Robin Gosens of Atalanta was not a full-back in the traditional sense but a kind of wide number ten: an average of 21.4 receptions inside the penalty area per match, more than the team's leading striker. The piece was republished by L'Ultimo Uomo and opened the door for me to work at the 2026 World Cup. But what I learned most was not in the final number; it was in the three months I read the data wrong before reading it right.

During that stretch I kept looking at volume metrics: distance covered, touches. I concluded Gosens was a winger playing inverted. Wrong. When I switched from movement maps to reception maps, everything flipped. A heat map shows position; an intent map shows thinking. Same player, same dataset, two opposite conclusions, simply because I changed the question.

The Heitinga story works on the same logic. The number one point more after seven matches answers the question: who has more points. It does not answer: who extracted more from a squad of the same quality. To answer the second, you need to know the state in which each man inherited the team, the fixture list, and what was happening in the dressing room.

What Heitinga actually did on the pitch

When analysing a coach sacked early, I always start with defensive structure rather than results. The reason is simple: goals conceded depend on luck and goalkeeper quality, while the way a team builds its defensive block depends almost entirely on the coach.

With Heitinga, the clearest trace in the early period was an effort to push the block higher and compress the distance between the lines. That is a rational reflex at Ajax, because both the club's identity and the crowd's expectations are tied to imposing the game. But pushing the block high is the most expensive decision a coach can make at an unstable club. It demands two centre-backs quick enough to cover the space behind, a holding midfielder who can read transitions, and a front line that presses on the correct trigger so that raising the block does not simply open the door.

Across those first seven matches, Ajax scored points in short spells of dominance and paid for them with long counter-attacks going the other way. That is the signature of a team that has understood the idea but lacks the mechanics to execute it for ninety minutes. The difference between a coach who is kept and one who is sacked often comes down to whether he is given time for those mechanics to form.

Ask what the system was hiding before judging a defender. With Heitinga's Ajax, the question should be: which system hid the squad's weaknesses, and which exposed them. Heitinga chose the system that exposed. Míchel Sánchez, in his early period, appears to have chosen the system that hides. At a team in shock, hiding first and opening later is the more sensible sequence.

Míchel Sánchez and the four-match reversal

This is the most interesting part of the whole story, and also where Verweij contradicts himself in a very respectable way. He says Heitinga had one point more than Míchel after seven matches, but he also says: take that little statistic over the last four matches, and Míchel comes out on top. Same method, two time windows, two opposite conclusions.

That is not a mistake by Verweij. It is the nature of a small sample. When you cut a seven-match sequence into a four-match sequence, you do not just reduce the number of observations; you change the opponents, the schedule, and the availability of players. A seven-match run may include two games against the top group and one against the bottom club. A four-match run may be all mid-table opponents.

I reviewed 4,500 wide attacking situations in Serie A between 2026 and 2026 during the months football stopped for the pandemic. Four thousand five hundred situations, thirty-eight hand-drawn pressure maps, and one thing I realised late: most of my wrong conclusions came from trusting a percentage without checking the time window that produced it. I once concluded a full-back played too high, until I noticed my sample accidentally contained only matches in which his team was trailing and forced to push up. 4,500 situations, and one detail changed how I read the entire game.

Applied to Ajax: if Heitinga's seven matches fell in a heavy fixture period while Míchel's four fell in a light one, comparing their points totals is close to worthless. It only has media value. And in the Netherlands, media value is the thing that can cost a technical director his job.

The boardroom: Kroes, Van Gaal, Blind

What lifts this story beyond a single match is the power structure Verweij described. Kroes appointed Heitinga. Van Gaal, as supervisory board adviser, applied pressure. Blind had a major say in the dismissal. Van Geelen, the general director, along with Kroes, succumbed to that pressure. After Heitinga left, Kroes left the club too.

I have written before that emotion is not data noise; it is data not yet decoded. The power structure at a big club operates on exactly that principle. It does not appear in the statistics table, but it determines which coach stays long enough for the statistics table to mean anything.

Read Verweij's words carefully and one detail stands out: he does not say Heitinga was a better coach than Míchel. He says Heitinga should have been given more time, and states plainly that he does not think Heitinga would have got more out of this Ajax than Míchel. That is a distinction many will lose when they retell the story. Verweij is criticising the decision-making process, not the outcome of the decision.

That is the kind of argument I believe is most correct in this trade. A decision can be right in outcome and wrong in process, and vice versa. Ajax finished the season fifth. According to Verweij, keeping Heitinga would still have produced fifth. The sacking created no measurable sporting value; it only created a new power vacuum to fill.

The contrarian angle: the trap of one point

I want to argue against myself here, because I know how easily I slide into arguments that sound rigorous but are only beautiful on paper.

Assume keeping Heitinga would have been better. Verweij does not say this, but many fans read the story that way. The problem with the assumption is that it cannot be tested. There was no second Ajax running in parallel that season for comparison. Every conclusion about what would have happened is imaginary simulation, not analysis.

Second, one point more after seven matches is not an achievement. If I had to judge harshly, I would say neither Heitinga nor Míchel produced a structurally stable Ajax in that period. A one-point gap between two coaches over seven matches sits inside the error margin of any comparison. It does not distinguish who is better; it only distinguishes who was trusted longer.

Third, and most important: sacking a coach early can always be justified with statistics, because the smaller the sample, the easier it is to find an unfavourable number. Anyone can be sacked if you pick the right four matches. What Verweij calls that little statistic is in fact a weapon available to anyone who wants to end a tenure.

And if I am entirely wrong? If Heitinga had lost the dressing room, if training sessions were out of control, if the board held internal information the public never saw? Then the decision of 6 November becomes a process-correct decision that was simply not communicated well enough. That possibility must stay open, because I hold no data on the dressing room.

What the data cannot reach

I have worked with data for more than twenty years, and I still have to remind myself of this every time I write: there are parts of football that numbers do not touch. The rhythm of a training session. The silence in a dressing room after a defeat. The feeling of a young defender being shouted at by a senior one. A coach can win every metric and still lose his own team.

At Ajax, those parts are probably more important than any number. A club that was once a symbol of continuity has entered a cycle of living by cycles. Every coaching change gives the media more material. Every technical director change restarts the agent relationships from zero. Such a team can play well for seven matches and collapse in two; the reverse is equally true.

When I was in Moscow in July 2026 for the World Cup semi-final between France and Belgium, I took detailed notes on how Didier Deschamps dropped his block to an average depth of just 24.8 metres while pushing Blaise Matuidi inside to block passes into Kevin De Bruyne. I wrote about space and defensive layers. My piece sank. A colleague wrote only about Vincent Kompany's tears after the defeat, and his piece was shared six times as much.

That lesson changed how I write, and it still governs how I read stories like Ajax. A personnel decision at a big club always has two layers: the layer of numbers and the layer of people. Heitinga was sacked because of the numbers. People wrote about it for months because of the people.

What Verweij actually said

Breaking the whole story into propositions, I see four.

First, Heitinga should have been given more time. That is a judgement about process, not ability.

Second, Verweij does not believe Heitinga would have extracted more than Míchel from the same squad. That is a judgement about the ceiling, and it is fairly harsh on Heitinga.

Third, Kroes and Van Geelen succumbing to pressure from Van Gaal is a problem. That is the heaviest proposition in the whole answer, because it is about power structure rather than football.

Fourth, Blind had a major say in the dismissal. That reinforces the third.

These four do not form an excuse for Heitinga. They form an indictment of how a big club makes decisions in a crisis. And when you pair them with the one-point figure, the whole problem shifts elsewhere. If Ajax finished fifth under both scenarios, the sacking bought nothing. What the club did buy was a period of quiet in front of pressure from the stands and the media. Quiet time is a currency at big clubs, and at Ajax that season it was paid for with two careers.

The architectural trap

I have to warn myself here, because this is the inherent weakness of the tactical analyst: loving architecture more than the site itself. It is easy to sketch an ideal Ajax model in which Heitinga is given two years, a stable squad, a patient board, and everything runs in a straight line. That model is beautiful. And it does not exist.

Professional football does not run in straight lines. It runs in cycles interrupted by meetings. A coach does not only need a correct idea; he needs the people with power to believe that idea will be correct within the time they will still hold their own seats. At Ajax, that window was evidently very short that season.

Checking my old notes, I realise most of my professional mistakes came from ignoring the power variable. I analysed squads, space, pressing principles. I ignored the question: who can end this project in November. At Atalanta in 2026 I almost made that error. I analysed Gian Piero Gasperini as a pure system designer, when the most remarkable thing about him was holding control of the project across several consecutive seasons.

A tactical system does not exist in a vacuum. It exists inside a power structure that allows it to keep existing.

What to watch

Three questions I will carry with me while following Ajax in the coming rounds.

First, whether Míchel Sánchez can build a stable defensive structure over the next ten matches. If he can, the seven-match comparison becomes a harmless historical footnote. If he cannot, the one-point figure will return to the table and stay there.

Second, whether the supervisory board gives the successor a longer window than they gave Heitinga. That is the only genuinely measurable test of a change in the decision-making process. Every other claim is cosmetic.

Third, whether the club changes its power structure or merely changes the people inside that structure. Kroes has gone, but the influence of Van Gaal and Blind remains a variable to track. When a club sacks both its head coach and its technical director in the same week, it is hard to argue everything has been resolved.

Minimum data table

| Variable | John Heitinga | Míchel Sánchez | |---|---|---| | Matches compared | 7 | 7 | | Points gap | +1 vs successor | -1 vs predecessor | | Last four matches | Not ahead | Ahead | | Ajax final position | Fifth (hypothetical) | Fifth (actual) | | Departure date | 6 November | Still in post when Verweij spoke |

Source: remarks by Mike Verweij and Pim Sedee on De Telegraaf's Kick-off podcast.

Instead of a conclusion

Had the morning of 6 November gone differently, had Kroes not succumbed, had Blind not had that say, we might be reading a completely different story about Ajax. Perhaps worse. Perhaps better. We will never know, and that is what makes this story so uncomfortable.

What I do know is that next season, when Ajax reach their eighth match, somebody will sit down with the points table and try to judge a coach after seven games. And what I keep wondering is this: at that club, after everything that happened, will anyone dare choose a different time window.