Ajax and De Toekomst: the academy that can't keep them

Jorrel Hato joined the Ajax academy in 2018, aged eleven. He signed his first professional contract in 2022, at sixteen, made his first-team debut in February 2023, went on to become the youngest captain in the club's history and, in the summer of 2025, left for Chelsea for around €40m including add-ons. He was 19. Seven seasons passed between his arrival at De Toekomst and his departure for the Premier League; between his debut and his sale, barely two.

That sequence sums up the current state of the most famous academy in Europe rather neatly. The Netherlands, a country of 18.15 million people according to the central statistics office CBS in mid-2026, keep producing top-level footballers at a rate that neither their size nor their budgets can account for. What has changed is not the factory. It is how long the products stay at home.

De Toekomst: the future, literally

The complex opened on 14 August 1996, after three years of building work, replacing the old Voorland facilities. It sits in Ouder-Amstel, on the eastern edge of Amsterdam, right next to the Johan Cruyff Arena that had gone up shortly before. The name is not a laboured metaphor: De Toekomst means the future in Dutch, and that is exactly the job it was given.

The idea in 1996 was to bring every part of a player's development onto one site. Not just training pitches, but classrooms for schooling, recovery and physiotherapy rooms, and a video analysis suite for tactical work. A thirteen-year-old can spend most of his day there, go to lessons and train without leaving the grounds. That is the model half a dozen European academies later copied, with varying degrees of fidelity.

The TIPS model: four letters to judge a child

The classic framework Ajax has used to assess talent is known as TIPS, an acronym built from four Dutch words: Techniek, Inzicht, Persoonlijkheid and Snelheid, or technique, game intelligence, personality and speed. It is not a closed scoring system but a way of looking, applied by scouts from the youngest age groups upwards.

Techniek covers control, dribbling and passing in tight spaces. Inzicht is the reading of the game: knowing before anyone else where the ball is going to be. Persoonlijkheid takes in mentality, leadership and the ability to handle frustration. And snelheid is not just speed of legs but speed of decision. What makes the approach distinctive is the order of priority: Ajax scouts have historically rated vision, personality and speed above pure technique, on the argument that technique can be coached and the other three are far harder to teach.

How players are found and how they are developed

For decades the pattern was the same: very early entry, between the ages of seven and nine, and almost always from Amsterdam and the surrounding area. Kenneth Taylor and Ryan Gravenberch arrived in the under-8 side in 2010, alongside Brian Brobbey; Daley Blind came in at eight; Justin Kluivert, also at eight, in 2007. The pyramid was narrow at the bottom: few chosen, and chosen very young.

The other piece of the system is Jong Ajax, the reserve side, which has played in the Eerste Divisie, the Dutch second professional tier, since 2013-14. It cannot be promoted and does not enter the KNVB Cup: it exists purely so that players aged 17 to 21 rack up competitive adult football rather than youth tournaments. It is the only reserve side to have won a professional league in the Netherlands, the 2017-18 Eerste Divisie.

In September 2025, though, Ajax announced they were breaking with their own tradition. The club scrapped the under-8 side, added a second under-12 group to allow later entry, and brought in two new structures: Ajax Regionale Trainingen, weekly sessions for under-11s at partner clubs in Hoorn, Bussum, Almere and Haarlem as well as a site in Amsterdam, and the Ajax Voetbalschool as a staging post before the academy proper. Director of football Marijn Beuker set out the reasoning plainly: they would rather know a lot of players well than make too narrow a selection too soon, because picking at eight means picking whoever matures physically first, and some qualities, game intelligence among them, sometimes do not show up until nine. The reference models cited were Atlético Madrid, Athletic Club and Real Sociedad.

Who has actually come out of there

The historic list is the one everybody knows: Johan Cruyff, Dennis Bergkamp, Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Edwin van der Sar. Seedorf made his debut at sixteen years and 242 days, the youngest in the club's history at the time; Kluivert scored the goal that won the 1995 Champions League final as a kid off the academy production line.

The recent list is shorter but just as profitable. Matthijs de Ligt, captain of the side that reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2019, joined Juventus that same July for €75m. Donny van de Beek moved to Manchester United in September 2020 for around €39m plus add-ons. Ryan Gravenberch, the youngest debutant in Ajax history, signed for Bayern in 2022. Jurriën Timber, in the academy since 2014, left for Arsenal in July 2023 for €40m rising to €45m. Kenneth Taylor, who had come into the under-8s in 2010, played 184 games for the first team before joining Lazio in January 2026 for around €15m plus bonuses.

One clarification is worth making here, because it almost never is. Not everything that has shone in an Ajax shirt came out of De Toekomst. Frenkie de Jong, who turns up on every list of Ajax academy graduates, was schooled from the age of eight in Willem II's shared academy and arrived in Amsterdam in August 2015, aged eighteen and with Eredivisie football already behind him. Christian Eriksen joined the academy at sixteen, after coming through in Denmark. Mika Godts arrived in January 2023 from Genk. They are good signings, not home-grown products, and folding them in inflates the statistics artificially.

The counterweight: producing is no longer keeping

The side that reached the 2018-19 Champions League semi-finals was dismantled in under eighteen months. De Ligt went to Turin and Frenkie de Jong to Barcelona in the same summer of 2019, and van de Beek to United the following season. That squad never played a second season together, and the pattern has held ever since: the better the generation, the faster it breaks up.

The cause is arithmetic. The 2026 edition of the Deloitte Football Money League recorded that the world's twenty highest-earning clubs passed €12bn in combined revenue for the first time in 2024-25, with nine Premier League clubs among them. No Dutch club goes anywhere near that group. With a structural gap of that size, a club like Ajax is not competing to keep a twenty-year-old: it is competing to sell him well and at the right moment. Selling players is not an accident of the model. It is the model.

The cost on the pitch has shown. The 2023-24 season was the club's worst in decades: after dropping as low as 18th and sacking Maurice Steijn in October, Ajax finished fifth, their lowest placing since 1999-2000, ending a run of 23 consecutive seasons in the top four and shipping 61 goals, the most since 1958-59. There was a response in 2024-25, with second place and 78 points behind PSV, but in 2025-26 they were fifth again on 56 points, out of the Champions League and with nothing better than the Conference League to show for it. The title went to PSV once more, a twenty-seventh championship and a third in a row, sealed on 5 April 2026, the earliest in Eredivisie history.

And here is the honest caveat. The academy has not stopped producing: Hato came in in 2018, Taylor from the 2010 under-8s, and the club still hands debuts to teenagers every season. What has changed is the scale of the return and the timing of the exit. The €75m for De Ligt in 2019 has not been matched since; Taylor left for a fifth of that. And the club implicitly admitted a supply problem when it rebuilt its recruitment system from top to bottom in 2025. Nobody rebuilds the front door of a factory that is working well.

The national-team backdrop does not help the epic either. At the 2026 World Cup, the Netherlands won Group F unbeaten, drawing 2-2 with Japan and beating Sweden 5-1 and Tunisia 3-1, but they were knocked out in the round of 32 on 30 June in Monterrey by Morocco, 1-1 and then 3-2 down in the shootout. It was their earliest World Cup exit since 2006.

"De Toekomst still turns out elite footballers; what it no longer produces is the time to watch them grow up in Amsterdam."

The 2025 reform will take years to deliver a verdict: the children training in Hoorn or Haarlem today will not be making debuts before 2032. In the meantime the Eredivisie will carry on being what it is, the league where you see the footballers everyone else applauds a couple of years later. If you want to play with its scenarios, you can do it with real data in Fut Simulator Pro.

• Simulate a full Eredivisie season and see how the final table shakes out.
• Run the supercomputer: title, European places and relegation odds over 10,000 simulated seasons.
• Edit any result, an Ajax-PSV for example, and watch the table recalculate instantly.
• Explore the 2026 World Cup bracket and its groups, and relive every nation's run.