AMSTERDAM -- Ajax wanted their 125th year to be memorable. Unfortunately, this campaign will remain tattooed brutally into the team's soul.
It will be remembered as the year Ajax threw away a nine-point lead with five matches left, which became the greatest title collapse in recent European football history.
Ajax headed into Sunday's match against FC Twente one point behind PSV Eindhoven. They needed a favor from Sparta Rotterdam, who hosted PSV, and to win themselves. They did what was required, beating FC Twente 2-0, but PSV secured the Eredivisie with a 3-1 win in Rotterdam.
Moments after the full-time whistle in Amsterdam, the atmosphere was funereal. Ajax's players looked haunted. Supporters young and old clasped each other, shoulders wet with tears. Manager Francesco Farioli walked around the pitch tears flowing down his own face, Kian Fitz-Jim broke down and Wout Weghorst slapped away a camera. Anyone connected with Ajax compartmentalized this footballing devastation in their own way. While elsewhere in the Netherlands, the majority of non-Ajax supporters reveled in their collapse.
All season the small margins were going Ajax's way. They were the ones getting late winners, they were the team who managed to eek out points when it looked like they were going to drop them. But then those margins tilted the other way at the pivotal point. . "Today I feel the tank is empty," Farioli said afterward.
PSV take the title but will wonder how. They had their own mid-season collapse having been eight points ahead at Christmas. Ajax prospered, building their own gigantic nine-point lead. After Ajax won 2-1 at Willem II on April 13, Opta calculated that they had a 99.3% chance of winning the title. They needed six points from their final five matches. All this with a team many perceive to be one of the poorest in recent Ajax history, playing an un-Ajax-like brand of football, under the team's first foreign manager. Total Football this was not; it was as far away from the club's Johan Cruyff-influenced DNA of stylish, attacking football as possible. But if you win a league title, who cares?
But then came the trips and tribulations. First came the 4-0 defeat to Utrecht, when a victory would have extended their lead to 12 points, then the 1-1 draw with Sparta Rotterdam. Any plans for title celebrations were altered: dates for planned processions moved back, and further back, as the supporters waited for what was surely an inevitable Ajax title. Then came a crushing 3-0 defeat at home to NEC Nijmegen, while PSV hopes grew as they won 3-2 at Feyenoord thanks to a 99th-minute goal.
Ajax's collapse was attributed to poor individual performances, the system and general misfortune. On Wednesday when they travelled north to Groningen, Ajax still had the fate of the league in their hands, sitting top of the table. But that deep-set neurosis played havoc again -- Ajax conceding a 99th-minute equalizer against 10-man opposition, meaning PSV held a one-point lead heading into the final matchday.
Against FC Twente, supporters in the Johan Cruyff Arena had a split focus. They watched their own side play patient football, while keeping an eye on their phones, monitoring events south as PSV faced Sparta. The atmosphere was tense, and hinged predominantly on events elsewhere but Amsterdam erupted as Jordan Henderson flicked in their opener after 28 minutes. That joy lasted just 10 seconds as PSV scored.
In the 39th minute, Ajax supporters celebrated a phantom Sparta equalizer, but Tobias Laurtisen's header had only found the side-netting. All the while Ajax pressed and prodded, while their 41-year-old keeper Remko Pasveer kept out goal-bound headers.
Then at 3:42 p.m., news broke through that Sparta really had levelled. The Arena erupted, celebrations were back on. But such joy lasted six minutes, as PSV retook the lead.
It felt like the air had been sucked from the Arena, a balloon popped, a glass smashed. Hope extinguished and from there, despite the F-Side (Ajax's ultras) doing their best to keep the team going, Ajax faced their fate. When PSV scored a third, the only noise you could hear in the Arena was from FC Twente's small group of fans as they reveled in Ajax's dismay.
Weghorst scored a second in the 90th minute, but it was marked like a late consolation goal. At full-time, the three points were forgotten, just a footnote in this sorry story. The players all stood alone, bemoaning missed opportunities and clouded in bemusement as they tried to figure out exactly how they'd blown the title.
Unfortunately, they are now bracketed with the greatest chokers in sports history. In football, there were infamous teams who had let leads slip: Manchester United in 1997-98 (seven points clear, with four matches left), Newcastle United in 1995-96 (12 points clear), Real Madrid's Galacticos 2003-04 (eight points clear, 12 matches left) and Juventus in 1999-2000 (leading by nine points with eight matches left). But this Ajax group are now in a league of their own of letting success slip agonizingly through their anxious fingers with only five games to play.
In time, they will try to look for the positives. Farioli's feat of guiding this club to within a whisker of winning the Eredivisie is a remarkable achievement. Getting Ajax back into the Champions League after their fifth-place finish last term, against a backdrop of political infighting and abysmal transfer dealings is truly incredible and testament to their young manager's ability. "Eleven months ago the walls were white and not with a lot of life," Farioli said. "We asked to repaint and put some colors there." That he did it playing controlling, unimaginative, counter-attacking football jarred with what they expect here, but that can be forgiven given the acceptance of the hand Farioli had been dealt.
But niggling away the whole time they led the Eredivisie was this feeling that there was an iceberg on the horizon: even with the nine-point lead, Farioli never talked about the title, never accepted their dominant position. The narrative remains about the next match, the next challenge. "I'm good at seeing the storm before it comes, it's one of my main qualities," Farioli said. "I always avoid speaking about things very far before they happen. I know who we are and how much it costs." Ajax have always been a team that played with their chest stuck out, an arrogant strut, but not under Farioli.
On April 25, in between Ajax's 4-0 defeat to Utrecht and their match with Sparta, the King's Day celebrations were kicking off in Amsterdam. As the city was whipped up in some hedonistic fervor, Farioli was on the sixth floor of Amsterdam's library. He was one of the speakers at an event called "A Night of Philosophy." There was poetic wine tasting, a room with a talk on Japanese philosophy. And there was Farioli. He spoke about how his fondest memory of Ajax to date was Kenneth Taylor's 94th-minute winner for Ajax against Feyenoord on Feb. 2: "When you see how we as a staff are going crazy. ... How can you say it's just a game?"
After the draw with Groningen in midweek, as Ajax faced the grim reality of having thrown the championship away, Farioli turned to Roman philosopher Catullus, and recited part of his poem. "I hate and I love," Farioli said. The rest continues: "Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured." Ajax felt this collapse happening, knew their lead was slipping away, and were powerless. You could see it after that draw with Groningen, as Weghorst sprinted from the field at full-time straight into the privacy of the dressing room. Belief had gone, and this group wouldn't join the other Ajax immortals in winning the Eredivisie.
There's success everywhere you look at Ajax -- around the stadium are reminders of their past triumphs, including the 36 Eredivisie shields. The inner confines of the ground are covered in images of yesteryear, legends in red and white clasping silverware, smiling and celebrating success. But on Sunday afternoon, those in red and white were desolate, and inconsolable. They'd somehow achieved what was previously impossible in football. And in the 125th year of this storied club, they wrote themselves another slice of history. But this is one they'll be desperate to forget.