One Point More Than Míchel: Why the Heitinga Sacking at Ajax Still Isn't Closed

Mike Verweij reopens a detail that the Ajax board let slide in silence. On Kick-off, De Telegraaf's football podcast, the paper's long-time Ajax watcher does not begin with emotion. He begins with a comparison. Host Pim Sedee puts it on the table: after seven Eredivisie matches, John Heitinga collected exactly one point more than current Ajax manager Míchel Sánchez. Verweij does not wave the comparison away. He says plainly that Heitinga should have been given more time.

But Verweij does not turn it into a simple indictment either. He states clearly that Heitinga would hardly have got more out of this Ajax squad than Míchel has. What he questions lies elsewhere: that Alex Kroes along with Menno van Geelen, the club's general director, succumbed to pressure from Louis van Gaal, adviser to the supervisory board. Danny Blind also had a big say in the dismissal. A routine news item stops at the scoreline. The flow of power behind it never appears on the scoreboard.

To understand why a margin that thin carries weight, it must be placed in the correct sequence. In the summer of 2026, Alex Kroes appointed John Heitinga as the successor to Francesco Farioli, who had left Amsterdam. Heitinga was no stranger here; he had been a centre-back at Ajax itself during its peak years. On 6 November the club terminated his contract. Immediately afterwards Kroes drew his own conclusions and left the technical director's chair. By the end of the season the capital club finished fifth.

I have sat in press rooms in Amsterdam many times over more than two decades covering Dutch football, and what always draws my attention is not what is said there, but what was prepared in advance. At Ajax, decisions about managers are never purely a football matter.

Back to Pim Sedee's comparison. Seven matches, one point more. That is a small sample, and Verweij knows it. He sets his own second test: narrow it to the last four matches and Míchel comes out on top. Two readings of the same data, two opposite conclusions. The power of a statistic lies not in itself, but in which stretch of the season someone chooses to cut it from. The first seven matches and four mid-season matches do not measure the same thing. Different fixtures. Different fitness. Different opponents. Different media pressure.

Professionally, I do not use xG to judge a manager after seven matchdays. Expected goals has been abused to the point of becoming a tool for legitimising conclusions written in advance. It cannot explain why a defender switches off in the 88th minute, why a midfielder dares not play the pass into space, or why a referee books a man in the tenth minute yet forgives the same act in the eightieth. Based on my experience watching Eredivisie matches, what I observed from Heitinga early on was a side with more structure, but short of solutions when pushed into an organised defensive block. That is a squad problem, not a name on a tactics board.

Ajax is one of the few European clubs listed publicly, its shares traded on Euronext Amsterdam. When a club must publish quarterly results, the pressure on the balance sheet flows straight into the dressing room. A Champions League place is no longer a sporting target; it is a revenue line projected in the accounts, and any shortfall has an owner. With a board under shareholder pressure, patience becomes a luxury. Nine months for a manager at a club like Ajax may sound long in modern football, but it is not enough for one transfer cycle to close.

That is why I always read a sacking as a file, not a headline. Who signed the decision, who did not sign but stood behind it, who withdrew the moment the ink dried. Here, Kroes signed the appointment and Kroes was also the one who left. That contract carries more than a signature; it carries hands pulling back. In the files I once reconstructed on sponsorship and transfers at West Ham and Leicester, the same thing always happened: the man who signs is not the man who decides.

Verweij does not hide that Ajax finished fifth, and he adds that with Heitinga that outcome would still have been achieved. That is the most striking line of the whole conversation. It means the change of manager made no difference to the final points tally. If a costly decision — severance, recruitment credibility, dressing-room stability — makes no such difference, then the measurement was wrong from the start.

Here I force myself to build the opposite hypothesis, because an investigator who only hears the evidence he is looking for is an investigator fooling himself. The innocent hypothesis is simple: Louis van Gaal and Danny Blind operate no shadow force. They are people with a legitimate right to speak inside Ajax's governance structure, and what they said may simply have been a truth nobody wanted to hear — that Heitinga lacked the authority to hold a dressing room at a club losing its way. Supervisory advisers exist to advise, and sometimes the advice is right.

The second hypothesis is harder to swallow. The seven-match comparison may be a statistical trap built to justify a pre-written view. Verweij himself dismantles it by narrowing to four matches. If the comparison holds, people use it to conclude Ajax were wrong. If it collapses, they use it to conclude Ajax were right. Behind every transfer figure there is a story deliberately blurred. With a sacking, that is doubly true.

Yet neither hypothesis touches the real weakness. Ajax's problem is not whose advice the board took. It is that the power structure allows a manager appointed in summer to be removed in November with no one clearly accountable. Modern football does not lack figures dancing in the dark; it lacks someone willing to turn the light on. Kroes appointed, Kroes left, and the club carried on. No explanation. No price paid. The only ones paying are a manager who just lost nine months of his career, and supporters buying tickets to watch an unfinished project.

I once told myself that investigation is not revenge, but a way to keep the small from being swallowed in silence. In this story the small man is not a stadium construction worker in Doha. He is a coach without enough power to protect himself from a supervisory board with a louder voice. Some will call it nitpicking. Perhaps. But if one point more cannot save a manager's job in Amsterdam, then what is being measured there has stopped being football. And the Ajax supervisory board owes one answer: what did those nine months buy?