The Ajax player who was not allowed to go to Feyenoord, but who indirectly helped the Rotterdam team to the title

Feyenoord also wanted to take over Bennie Muller from Ajax, but the club from Amsterdam did not let him go. That was in 1964, a year after goalscorer Henk Groot had exchanged de Meer for De Kuip (and goalkeeper Eddy Pieters Graafland in 1958), for a Dutch record fee of a quarter of a million guilders – a transfer that Ajax soon regretted: Groot was brought back after one season for an additional 125,000 guilders on the initiative of new trainer Rinus Michels. So ‘Bennie’ Muller continued to do what he was good at in Amsterdam.

Sjaak Swart, just like Groot, who died in 2022, and Muller from 1938, who died this week at the age of 85, called his ‘gabber’ “the best ball grabber” with whom he played at Ajax. “Then they thought they had passed him by, but then hey, he took the ball away with about half a slide from him. He didn’t have a great shot, no pin, but his passing was excellent. And he could pick a ball out of the air very well and very beautifully. He had great technique,” ​​he said Mister Ajax in the book 80 – Sjaak Swart.

They were best friends, less than two months apart (Swart was the eldest), and already played together when they were nine, in 1947, at TDW (Trainen Doet Winnen) in Duivendrecht. And later at Ajax and Oranje. Muller was discovered at the age of eleven, while playing football in the street. A man from the city cleaning service, and Ajax player, asked if he wanted to join Ajax. “I actually didn’t like it, Ajax was a real top club,” he said in 2014. New Israelite Weekly (NAV). “My father and eldest brother then somewhat forced me to go.”

Special debut against PSV

When he played for Ajax, as a defensive midfielder, it took too long for his liking before he was drafted into the first team and he was about to transfer to De Volewijckers, in Amsterdam-Noord. That was in 1957, and the first time that Ajax did not let him go. Mullers made his debut in Ajax 1 in a (won) practice match against PSV in 1957 on Queen’s Day in Soest. As a substitute, the eighteen-year-old Amsterdammer faced Coen Dillen, who would become top scorer that season with 43 competition goals, still a record. Enter Muller NIW: “Afterwards Dillen said that I was very hard on him. But yes, it was my debut and I wanted to show myself.”

Ajax debutant Bennie Muller (18) watches in the background as striker Gé van Dijk receives a cup from Prince Bernhard, after the practice match won by Ajax in Soest against PSV.

He made his debut in the Premier League in January 1958, with MVV – Ajax lost 3-0. It was in the last season that Michels still played and Eddy ‘PG’ was under the bar.

Muller witnessed the rise (from October 1964) of Johan Cruijff as an Ajax player, and was part of the material with which Michels molded the ‘Golden Ajax’ as a coach from 1965 onwards. Provisional highlight: the fog match in 1966 in which Ajax, with Muller, humiliated Liverpool 5-1. Thanks to the national title that Ajax won in 1970, in Muller’s last season, the club returned to the European Cup 1, and subsequently won that tournament three times in a row – after losing the final in 1969. In contrast to Muller, Swart made the big successes in the 1970s as a player.

European final Ajax-Feyenoord

In seventeen seasons with Ajax, Muller won four national titles, two KNVB Cups and one international prize, the UEFA Intertoto Cup, in 1962: in the final, in the Olympic Stadium, Feyenoord was defeated (4-2). That was also the first international prize for Ajax. For Muller, the deciding match on Ascension Day in 1960 for the national title against the Rotterdam team was the most important classic he played, he said in the supporters magazine Ajax Life, also in the Olympic Stadium. “At half time we were 1-0 behind due to a penalty. If I had caused it, I was sick to death because the foul was outside the penalty area. We slaughtered them in the second half.” Ajax won 5-1.

Cigar store

Four years later, Ajax did not want to let him go to Feyenoord, which offered him 15,000 guilders more per year. It was in the days when football players did not have a manager. In Ajax Life, in 2017: “We are talking about a period just before the professionalization drive under Rinus Michels. At Ajax we earned almost nothing, a maximum of 3,000 guilders per year. Feyenoord was a few years ahead, the players there deserved much better.” Even when Standard Liège wanted to take him over, where they said he could have earned 100,000 guilders a year, Ajax said no. “I had to figure it out on my own. And I couldn’t compete with the club. I was a piece of shit.” Only after he retired from Ajax in 1970, after 426 matches, did the players start earning significantly more thanks to Cruijff. In addition to and after his life as a football player, Muller, with his wife Nel, also had to keep the chimney smoking as a tradesman, just like Swart as the owner of a cigar shop, until his retirement in 2000.

Opposite Pele

Muller played 43 international matches, twelve more than Swart. Long before Muller came to the Dutch team, he went with his brother Jopie on the Solex from Amsterdam to Rotterdam to see the Dutch national team. Then they stood in the Kuip behind the goal.

He was 21 and the youngest on the Dutch side when he made his debut in the national team of national coach Elek Schwartz (three months earlier than Swart), in April 1960 in the Olympic Stadium (where he was once a ball boy), in an exhibition match against Bulgaria. That international match (4-2) was the first in which a black player played for the Netherlands: Humphrey Mijnals from Suriname.

From a practice match that summer in Curaçao, Muller always remembered that there were black people behind one goal and white people behind the other. Three years later he was part of the Dutch team that defeated world champion Brazil, with the young Pelé (22), in a friendly match in Amsterdam.

Muller became captain of the Dutch team, but in a strange way he lost his captaincy. The clubs that supplied internationals and the KNVB were often at odds with each other at that time, and Muller said that this also cost “quite a few international matches”. He was captain in 1967 when Piet Keizer was sent off against Yugoslavia and was suspended from Ajax for five matches by the KNVB.

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Bennie Muller in 2011 about a dispute within Ajax with the Cruijff camp

Muller: “A year earlier, Cruijff had also been sent off during the Netherlands-Czechoslovakia match. At Ajax they were fed up with the fact that playing for the national team could lead to a suspension from the club. Then Ajax no longer allowed us to participate as an international team. I came back in 1968, but I lost my captaincy.”

Under Georg Kessler, the then 30-year-old Muller played his last international match in the autumn of 1968, just like his debut against Bulgaria, this time a World Cup qualifier in Sofia. Bulgaria wins and, unlike the Netherlands, does qualify for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

Turkish mud puddle

A month after his last international match, Ajax player Muller still plays an important role in the first of two matches against Fenerbahçe, in the second round of the European Cup 1. After a cross from Keizer, he makes the final score 2-0. Two weeks later, Ajax qualifies for the quarter-final against Benfica in a Turkish quagmire, and Muller and his teammates advance to the Amsterdam club’s first European Cup 1 final. In that match, in Madrid against AC Milan, Ajax, with Muller, lost without a chance 4-1 in May 1969.

Party in the dressing room: Bennie Muller and Sjaak Swart embrace after the 2-2 draw at Liverpool in December 1966, Ajax goes to the quarter-finals of the European Cup for national champions. Tonnie Pronk on the left, chairman Jaap van Praag on the right and Johan Cruijff in the background.

Michels thinks it is time to make further selection: Ton Pronk, Theo van Duijvenbode and Klaas Nuninga are put aside. The trainer tells Muller that he still needs him, but the midfielder hardly gets around to playing anymore. “It was mainly his fault that things went wrong against AC Milan, but in practice he blamed some of the players,” Muller said. 80 – Sjaak Swart. “I have never forgiven Michels for how he treated me afterwards.”

The midfield at Ajax became the work area of ​​Nico Rijnders, Gerrie Mühren, Arie Haan and Johan Neeskens, Muller left for Holland Sport in The Hague, to end his career in Amsterdam with Blauw-Wit a year later.

The war

Although Muller’s transfer to Feyenoord did not happen in ’64, he did indirectly contribute to that club becoming champions a year later, and DWS, also from Amsterdam, did not prolong the title. In the DWS-Ajax competition match in January 1965, a riot broke out when DWS goalkeeper Jan Jongbloed called Muller a “dirty bastard” after the Ajax player had gotten in his way. In a reconstruction, football journalist Matty Verkamman wrote Fidelity what referee Piet Roomer noted in his statement at the time: “Something must have been said, but I was too far away to hear what. I did see that Muller got very angry and approached Jongbloed. I jumped in and shouted: ‘Muller, what are you doing?’ He replied: ‘Mr. Roomer, he calls me a dirty, rotten Jew.’ I stopped the game and called Jongbloed to account. In front of Muller, Jongbloed stated: ‘I didn’t say anything.’ Therefore, I could do nothing.”

After an investigation, Jongbloed (who died last year) was suspended for two matches by the KNVB – the goalkeeper admitted that he had insulted Muller, but not with an anti-Semitic statement. For example, Jongbloed missed the away match against the other title candidate, Feyenoord, which had recently crushed Ajax 9-4. DWS lost both matches and thus forfeited the title.

Muller later said that he was often mocked because of his Jewish background. “They wanted to take me out of my game and when they said that I was also taken out of my game.” Things never worked out between Muller and Jongbloed, who had played together for the Dutch Juniors and in the Dutch national team.

‘The vacuum cleaner with the Yiddish heart’, like it New Israelite Weekly mentioned him, had seen as a little boy – Muller was one and a half when the Germans invaded the Netherlands – how his mother was taken from their house by “two Krauts and an SD man”. “They only came for my mother, because my father was not Jewish. As children – I have four brothers and sisters – we screamed and cried. There was great panic, but she was simply taken away,” he said NIW. “In the consternation, those Krauts have forgotten our upstairs neighbors, a large Jewish family of eleven. They also survived the war. Fortunately, my father was able to get my mother released from Westerbork after three and a half months by proving that he was not Jewish. As a little boy that had an incredible impact on me.” A large part of Muller’s family on his mother’s side was gassed during the war.

In better times, long after his own career, family man Muller also saw his son Danny go to Ajax. He played with the youth team and left for Barcelona in 1988 with Johan Cruijff (as coach), where he played in cup matches and practice matches. In addition to Ajax, Bennie Muller was until recently in the stands at AFC, the Amsterdam amateur club of his two grandsons (daughter Petra’s children) who will play Vitesse in the cup tonight.

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