John Heitinga, Seven Eredivisie Matches and a Points Table Misread at Ajax

In the studio of Kick-off, De Telegraaf's football podcast, presenter Pim Sedee put a very small piece of data on the table: after seven VriendenLoterij Eredivisie matches, last season's John Heitinga had exactly one point more than this season's Míchel Sánchez. Mike Verweij, the newspaper's Ajax watcher, answered almost instantly: "Certainly. One point more." The second half of his answer is where things get interesting: Heitinga should also have been given more time. In Amsterdam, a sentence like that is never only about a coach.

A season decided in a meeting room

Reconstruct the timeline the way De Telegraaf tells it: Francesco Farioli left the Ajax job, and technical director Alex Kroes appointed Heitinga in the summer of 2026. On 6 November, the board terminated Heitinga's contract. Kroes left the club not long afterwards. The season closed with Ajax in fifth place, an outcome that, for a club with 36 Eredivisie titles, a league record, is a scrape rather than a cut.

Verweij does not hide where he thinks the blockage was. He says Kroes and general director Menno van Geelen succumbed to pressure from Louis van Gaal, an adviser to the supervisory board. Danny Blind also had a big say in that dismissal. Read that sentence carefully: Verweij is describing a personnel decision taken in a meeting room and then justified with a points table. He does not say Ajax sacked the wrong man. He says Ajax decided under pressure, not under data.

That makes the story harder to close, not easier. If the conclusion is "Heitinga was sacked because of seven matches", there should have been another measurement standing behind those seven matches. If the conclusion is "Heitinga was sacked because of pressure", then all the data brought into the argument is just paint over a decision already made. Verweij chooses the second reading, and the way he chooses it matters: he is not defending Heitinga's coaching, he is defending Heitinga's process.

The market context belongs here too. Ajax sit in the middle of a transfer whirlwind, and every decision about the dugout in Amsterdam carries an invoice. A squad profile built for one coach does not automatically fit his successor. The wage bill is fixed, contracts are signed, release clauses are written. When a board changes coach in November, it is not only changing a name on the bench. It is handing the January window to a man who never placed the order for that squad.

A seven-match table does not measure a system

Now the technical part, which is the part worth arguing about.

Look at the instrument in use. Seven Eredivisie matches are 21 available points. The gap between Heitinga and Míchel is one point out of 21. A corner in the 89th minute, a shot against the post, a red card in the 70th minute: any one of those events is enough to flip the entire argument. Seven matches do not measure the quality of Ajax's system; they measure the system's margin of error. At that sample size, two teams of different quality can produce the same number.

Verweij tightens the loop himself at the end of the conversation: if you take that little statistic over the last four matches, Míchel comes out on top. One instrument, two time windows, two opposite conclusions. This is the oldest lesson in reading numbers: the narrower the window, the easier it is to pull out the answer you wanted. Seven matches say Heitinga is one point ahead. Four matches say Míchel is. Both are true, and both are meaningless for judging a coach.

So what should be measured? When Ajax lose the ball, the thing worth watching is not the ball but the space the midfield leaves behind it. How many seconds until the team recovers its shape? How many metres does the gap between the two centre-backs widen in the first three seconds after losing possession? Those are the things that separate a team with a language from a team with only a formation.

I have run this exact measurement in another context. In late 2026, when Liverpool lost home game after home game inside the COVID bubble, I spent three days building a table of pressure metrics after losing possession and found their PPDA had risen from 9.8 to 13.4, a delay of nearly four seconds in their reaction. The data source then was StatsBomb, and the conclusion was not about any centre-back's injury; it was about the space between two specific names on the left channel. Ajax did not collapse because of a coach. The machine in Amsterdam forgot the language it runs on, and the right question is not who sits in the chair, but when that language was lost.

Based on my experience of watching matches, one detail in this story matters more than those seven matches. Verweij says Ajax finished the season fifth, and that fifth place would still have been achieved with Heitinga. If that is true, the dismissal cannot be justified by results, because the result does not change. It can only be justified by process. And if it is justified by process, someone has to produce process evidence stronger than seven matches. In the Kick-off conversation, that evidence does not appear.

Both sides are holding a broken instrument

The counter-intuitive point is here: Verweij never says Heitinga is better than Míchel. He says plainly that he does not think Heitinga would have got more out of this Ajax than Míchel. So this is not a debate about coaching ability. It is a debate about decision standards.

Seen that way, both sides reveal the same flaw. Those defending the dismissal use seven matches to say Heitinga was not good enough. Those opposing the dismissal use the same seven matches to say Heitinga was not worse. The two camps face each other while holding the same broken instrument. Nobody in that room asked what football Ajax actually played across those seven matches: how high the line pushed, how stretched the midfield became, where the young players were placed. The public debate in Amsterdam is running on a single metric, and that metric has a margin of error larger than the gap it is trying to measure.

There is another layer few people mention. A dismissal in November at a big club is not only about the current season. It changes the buyer, the target list, the criteria for assessing young players. For a club that runs on its academy like Ajax, the damage does not show up on the points table; it shows up two or three years later, when people look back and ask why a whole generation stopped developing.

What would confirm it, what would refute it

The only way out of this loop is to change the instrument. If someone builds a chart of Ajax's reaction time after losing the ball, match by match, under both coaches, and the two curves sit almost on top of each other, the answer is clear: the man in the chair was not the variable. If the curves separate clearly, the real argument can begin.

At this point, public data does not allow a conclusion either way. But one thing is close to certain: a seven-match points table is not a map. It is a photograph, and it has just been read as though it were a map.