Johan Cruyff to have Ajax stadium named for him posthumously

On what would have been his 70th birthday, Ajax, the Amsterdam ArenA and the City of Amsterdam have announced their intention to file paperwork to rename the stadium the Johan Cruijff ArenA within the next six months in honor of the deceased club icon, after signing a proposal to that effect.

“With the name change, the three parties want to give the best footballer Amsterdam and the Netherlands have ever known a worthy honor,” read a statement on Ajax’s website.

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Cruyff died on March 24, 2016, five months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had been a chain smoker during his playing days. But when his illness was made public, he was typically brash and brazen about his survival fight, even though he knew privately that the cancer had spread. “I feel like I’m ahead 2-0 in the first half of a game that isn’t over yet,” he wrote in a statement. “I’m certain I will win in the end.” He passed away a month later.

Cruyff’s son Jordi, a former Barcelona player, like his father, announced that the family is “overjoyed and honored.”

A contract on the name change will be drawn up within half a year and presented to the Amsterdam city council and the boards of the stadium and Ajax itself. Changing the name some two decades after the ArenA opened is complicated because it’s an independent entity and its official moniker is tied up in all manner of commercial dealings.

“The parties involved are convinced that justice will be done to the remembrance of Johan Cruijff through these means,” the statement read. “And they hope that the Johan Cruijff ArenaA will be an inspiration for footballers all over the world.”

There’s also talk of naming a street, square or bridge for Cruyff within the city of Amsterdam.

Cruyff made Ajax famous as a player in the late 1960s and early 70s as the on-field executor of Rinus Michels’ influential Total Football, before leaving for Barcelona in 1973 after three straight European Cup titles. Then he returned as manager from 1985 through 1988 and won the UEFA Cup before again taking a job with Barca. Later in his life, he was an Ajax club advisor or board member on several occasions.

Still, Cruyff had a complicated relationship with his boyhood club. He joined when he was only six and while his father had been its greengrocer and his mother sometimes volunteered in the club cafeteria, he would leave a handful of times amidst some conflict or other. He was famously stubborn and inflexible in his vision for the club, and if others didn’t comply, he’d leave. From afar, he’d lob verbal grenades at the club through his columns in the national tabloid. Then, invariably, a peace would be brokered and he’d return.

He won his final battle, though, pushing through reforms that bore fruit when Ajax claimed four straight league titles from 2011 through 2014 and laid the foundations for the current Europa League run to the semifinals.

All his life, Cruyff retained plenty of enemies both within the club and in its orbit. But renaming the stadium for him will make for a fitting and rightful ending to a lifelong love story.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.