Hoe Cruijff denkt en spreekt volgens de taalkunde

What is “Cruijffiaans” (Cruyffian Dutch)?

A linguist unpicks how football legend Johan Cruijff talked, and the man himself names the engine of it: «ik sneller denk als praat» (“I think faster than I speak”, note the colloquial “als” for “dan”). His tangled, paradoxical style even has a name: Cruijffiaans (Cruyffian).

Cruijffiaans is full of looping logic and famous one-liners, above all “elk nadeel heb z’n voordeel” (“every disadvantage has its advantage”). The clip’s theory: he starts a sentence before he’s finished thinking it, just as, with the ball, he moved before deciding what to do. Half nonsense, half genius, wholly Dutch.