Ajax fall at Hajduk Split: Amrabat and Klaassen sound the wake-up call

The flares were still hanging in the air above the Poljud stands when the referee stopped the match for a few minutes. In that silence, one small detail stayed with me: not a single Ajax player said a word to anyone. They stood scattered across the pitch, hands on hips, eyes on the grass. Then the ball rolled again. And in a moment I suspect we will revisit many times this season, Jofre Torrents and Youri Baas stepped up together, looked the same way together, and left the same empty space behind them together. Ajax's second goal conceded was born in that space. It did not come from a spectacular counterattack or an unstoppable shot. It came from a misunderstanding.

I stayed in my seat long after the final whistle. Read only as a scoreline, this was a 1-2 defeat in the opening matchday of the Conference League league phase. Three points gone, one game played. But I have watched European football long enough to tell two kinds of defeat apart: the kind that costs three points, and the kind that costs something harder to name. Split was the second kind.

A giant standing a tier below itself

Ajax have won the European Cup and Champions League four times, in 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. Every professional in this trade knows that number by heart, and because we know it by heart, we tend to forget something else: this season, Ajax are playing in the Conference League.

Hajduk Split are a serious opponent in the truest sense. The club from the port city of Split was once the leading force of Yugoslav football. At Poljud, the Torcida supporters, founded in 2026 and regarded as one of Europe's oldest ultras groups, still produce a sound nobody else can imitate. Playing there, under drifting smoke, against a home side flying out of the blocks, has never been a comfortable trip.

But Ajax's standard is not set by Hajduk. Ajax's standard is set by the name Ajax. And that is the first thing I want to say to the people who called me last night: when a club that once taught Europe how to play has to drop into the continent's third-tier competition, the problem is no longer form. The problem is position.

Based on my experience covering matches across many seasons, I have come to believe football has two kinds of decline. The first is decline because the opponent is better. The second is decline because you have forgotten who you used to be. The second is far more dangerous, because it leaves no visible wound. It leaves a habit.

Two turnovers, not a system overrun

Ajax's first goal conceded came from a turnover in midfield. The second came from a misunderstanding between Torrents and Baas, two very young defenders, in a phase where one sentence would have been enough.

Reading those two goals closely, I see a familiar pattern: the system was not overrun, individuals were. This is the point I want to sit with, because it runs against instinct. When a big club loses, our first reflex is to hunt for a systemic fault: the wrong shape, an outdated idea, a coach out of answers, a board out of touch. At Poljud, both goals belonged to what I call administrative concessions. The kind born from a wrong decision in a split second, from a careless pass, from two pairs of eyes failing to meet when they should have understood each other without speaking.

Amrabat said the team gave the ball away far too often. The head coach said Ajax lacked energy, could not apply enough pressure in the first half, and conceded two goals from two mistakes. Klaassen spoke about moments in both boxes. Three different sentences pointing the same way: the problem in Split was decision-making, not structure.

People score with their feet, but I write with my scars. And the scar at Poljud has the shape of a young back line that has not yet learned how to talk to itself.

One thing about that first half deserves saying plainly. Ajax failing to press was not an attitude problem. It was a legs problem. A squad sharing its strength across a congested calendar usually walks into the first half with heavier legs, and when the legs are heavy the first press arrives half a beat late, the first pass travels half a metre long, and the first decision comes half a second slow. At the elite level, half a second is everything.

A better second half, and that is the worrying part

Ajax were better after the break. Klaassen, a man now at an age where every run has to be budgeted like an expense, scored the equaliser. The head coach insisted his team deserved more. Amrabat delivered a line I have heard hundreds of times in this job: we create enough chances and still do not win.

I have to be honest. That is the most dangerous sentence in football.

It is dangerous because it is half true. True in that a team creating chances usually has a foundation to believe in the process. Dangerous in that it turns every defeat into luck, and turns repair into waiting. A team that loses because it creates nothing knows what to fix. A team that loses because it was unlucky usually fixes nothing, and drifts through matchday after matchday, month after month, season after season.

I have seen this many times from press boxes and stands across more than three decades. The ball rolls on grass, but really it rolls through human fates. Teams that tell themselves they deserve more than reality gives them are usually the teams that take the longest to return to what they actually are.

The contrarian view: wake up is the wrong diagnosis

Amrabat said the team needs to wake up. I understand the feeling, and I respect the way he said it, bluntly, without diplomatic padding, exactly like a man who has just arrived and has not yet learned when to stay quiet. But I do not believe the diagnosis.

Someone who overslept can be woken. Someone who has changed address will not answer no matter how long you call. What is happening to Ajax is not sleep. It is a quiet shift in tier, accumulated over years, a little more each season, unnoticed until it surfaced as a competition name on the fixture list.

A club that won Europe four times playing in the Conference League is not the accident of one season. It is the sum of many, produced by a football model in which Ajax must develop, must sell, and must still compete with clubs that sell nobody. You cannot be an academy, a shop and a title challenger at once without eventually paying for it.

And here is the blind spot of collective memory. The collective memory of Ajax is beautiful: total football, wingers like birds, teenagers raised at De Toekomst walking straight into the first team and making Europe look up. That memory has one fatal flaw. It makes people judge the present with the ruler of the past, then feel disappointed, then look for a culprit. The real culprit is nobody in particular. The real culprit is time.

I learned something in Kazan, on the night of 27 June 2026, sitting in the stands as Germany lost 0-2 to South Korea and went out in the group stage: machines do not break from a single blow. They break because they have been rusting for a long time and nobody wanted to look. The German machine broke down, and I saw a generation cry without making a sound. Ajax at Poljud did not break that way, but the sound of rust is the same pitch.

The other side deserves a note too. The flares caused a brief suspension. Under UEFA practice, incidents of this kind usually land on the host club rather than the visitors, so disciplinary risk sits with Hajduk Split. For Ajax it is a footnote. It is also a fair, if incomplete, explanation for how slowly they started.

Where the pressure actually sits

Klaassen said something telling: do not hit the panic button. The fact that he had to say it tells you how many hands are hovering over that button.

The contrast between the two statements is worth thinking about. Amrabat said the team needs to wake up, the voice of a newcomer not yet used to losing at a club that used to take winning for granted. Klaassen said do not panic, the voice of a man who has lived through several cycles of this same club and knows panic at Ajax is an old illness that returns on schedule, and that the only cure is winning the next match.

Both are right in their own way, and both are describing the same thing: this team is performing below its own standard, and nobody in the dressing room is certain where that standard now sits.

I do not think this is a crisis. I think it is a pressure-building phase. But the fixture list ahead is not kind: a domestic trip to FC Groningen, then a home Conference League tie against Atalanta. Two matches, two weeks, two chances to turn pressure into crisis or into fuel. Windows like this often decide a season, and sometimes a coach's future.

On the financial side, I hold no figures and I will not invent any. But one piece of logic needs no spreadsheet: a Conference League season generates far less broadcast and matchday revenue than a Champions League season. For a club built on selling players, dropping a tier is not only a matter of prestige. It is a matter of value. And when a club's value falls, the value of every player inside it falls with it, in a spiral that is very hard to resist.

My long-standing view on the transfer market holds: paying one hundred million euros for a player with fewer than fifty top-flight appearances is a naked gamble, and the clubs forced to sell in order to survive are the first to pay when that gamble turns. Ajax are not in the spending group. Ajax are in the group that absorbs it.

In the Eredivisie landscape, Ajax's position has not been that of the automatic front-runner for several seasons now. PSV and Feyenoord have taken most of the time at the summit, AZ and Twente have moved into the European places, and Ajax have been fighting to return to their own address. A defeat in Croatia does not change that picture. It simply makes it sharper.

On data, and on something I will not pretend

I am a man who does not love numbers. For years I have told younger colleagues in the newsroom that football does not live in spreadsheets, it lives in trembling legs and bowed heads in the tunnel. But I have also learned something at this age: data is a foreign voice, and a serious professional has to be willing to listen to foreign voices.

This match offered no data to listen to. No expected goals, no possession share, no pressing count. Which means Amrabat's claim that Ajax create enough chances cannot be verified, and I will not behave as though it has been. It is possible this team really does create chances and is being betrayed by results. It is equally possible they produce plenty of balls into the box and no clear chances at all. Klaassen mentioned moments in both boxes, and the way he leaned on the word moments makes me lean toward the second reading.

The difference between those two readings is the difference between a team needing more time and a team needing more quality. Without data, all we can do is wait for the next match.

What I will remember most

In the press conference, everyone asked about the mistakes. Nobody asked about what I found most memorable: that when Klaassen equalised, the scorer was a veteran and the errors belonged to two young players. One generation carrying, one generation learning. And between them, a gap, exactly the gap Torrents and Baas left behind their backs.

In 2026, in Binh Duong, I interviewed a nineteen-year-old player named Nguyen Xuan Tung. He came off the bench, scored in the 90+3rd minute, and in the press room could only manage one sentence: I just heard my heart beating, and then the ball found my foot by itself. I wrote a long piece with no statistical table in it, and that night he called me: uncle, I read it and I saw myself in it.

I tell that story not to compare a young Vietnamese player with a young Ajax defender. I tell it because I believe this: finding the human voice inside the sound of the ball is the hardest part of this trade. At Poljud, two boys made mistakes in front of tens of thousands of people and the whole of Europe. How we narrate those mistakes will decide whether they dare to step up again.

At fifty-four, I understand that stadium floodlights illuminate an entire life. They shine on the scorer and the one who erred, on the man screaming in the stand and the man staring at the floor in the tunnel. Ajax will walk into many more tunnels like that this season. The only thing I want to know is what they carry out with them: the memory of a club that once taught Europe how to play, or the memory of a club trying to remember who it used to be.

And I wonder: if a team has to keep telling itself to wake up, is it because they are asleep, or because the alarm clock has been set to a different time zone?