Ajax are a reminder of what Chelsea lost when they lost The Chelsea Way

Ajax defeated Juventus to advance to the Champions League semifinals. The sense of identity fueling their success is a reminder of what Chelsea fans want their club to reclaim.

If someone talks about “The Chelsea Way” these days, it pretty much carries an implied “lol top banter, that.” Overpriced transfer flops, revolving door managers, 30+ players in the loan army and star players coyly playing the will-he-or-won’t-he-leave game in the media all fall under the pejorative of “The Chelsea Way.”

But there was a time, not too long ago, when The Chelsea Way was a point of pride. It represented the spirit of a club build around a spine of era-defining players. Even after Roman Abramovich showed the club what Russian money can buy, The Chelsea Way harkened back to the scrappy west London club that spent most of the last century in the shadow of its neighbors in the north of London and the north of England. The Chelsea Way connected the 1986 Full Members Cup win to the 2012 Champions League win.

Gradually the Chelsea Way eroded in some parts and faded in others. More recent fans may only have ever known the banter and not the substance.

Ajax’s Champions League quarterfinal win over Juventus is a reminder of what Chelsea are missing. Hopefully, it can also spur a restoration of just such an identity at Stamford Bridge.

Ajax are doing many of the things Blues fans claim they want their club to do, and many other things besides. The Dutch side had six players under 23 in the starting XI on Tuesday. Of their 13 players with over 1,500 minutes in all competitions this season, seven are under 23 and one – their captain, Matthias de Ligt, is a teenager.

Ajax’s transfer activity is unthinkable for Chelsea, or any top Premier League club. Their most expensive signing of the past decade was Daley Blind. They paid £14 million for him from Manchester United – slightly less than the amount they sold him to United for a few years earlier. Dusan Tadic, David Neres and Hakim Ziyech all cost about £10 million each. Everyone else in their best XI either cost less or came up through Ajax’s academy.

Yes, Ajax are a selling club. They sold Frankie de Jong for £75 million to Barcelona and De Ligt will join him there this summer on a comparable fee. In recent years they have sold Justin Kluivert to AS Roma, Davinson Sanchez and Christian Eriksen to Tottenham, among others.

On the one hand, this is all well and good but completely irrelevant to a Premier League club. Ajax and PSV Eindhoven hold the duopoly atop the Eredivisie, meaning they can spend very little and still qualify for the Champions League. With six teams in the Premier League competing for four spots, competing in transfer arms race is a matter of survival.

On the other hand, Ajax are through to the semifinals of the Champions League for the first time since 1996/97, and after not progressing past the group stage since 2005/06. They eliminated Real Madrid and Juventus in the knockout stages, and held Bayern Munich to two draws in the group stages.

Ajax’s triumphs over Real Madrid and Juventus were testaments to the belief and trust teammates have in one another when they play together for years. Think of how Chelsea fans react when they see the instinctive rapport Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek have on the pitch. They may not play together very often in Maurizio Sarri’s system, but they have over a decade’s experience of working together in Blue. That transcends whoever the manager is and whatever is tactics are at any given time.

Now expand that to the majority of the XI. Erik ten Hag has only been the manager for 18 months, but his players have decades of combined experience working as a unit. When they get into tight spaces in the final third, they know where the space is and what to do because they can read their teammates better than the opponent can. Ajax regularly found themselves in close-quarters 4v4 situations, and nearly every time they found their way out of it. They knew how to play their way through and they trusted each other to make their way through.

That trust becomes belief on days like Tuesday. Chelsea had days like that in Munich and at Wembley over the years because they had a core of players who knew each other incredibly well and believed in each other equally so. This helped assimilate the new arrivals, making the Blues the footballing machine they were. And because the first team had such a sense of identity feeding their success, the youth teams shared it and set it as their aspiration.

Ajax have undergone a lengthy period of recentering their identity, and this season’s Champions League run is the first manifestation that has caught the attention of the broader football world. The Telegraph detailed last week the leading role Johan Cruyff played in this process before his passing. Cruyff had the experience, standing and motivation to make such a restoration happen.

This is the potential so many Chelsea fans latch onto whenever anyone talks about Frank Lampard and John Terry taking management roles at Stamford Bridge. They have nowhere near Cruyff’s managerial experience and gravitas, but they personify The Chelsea Way just as Cruyff represents all that is the best of Ajax.

Chelsea may have lost their way, but they have not truly lost The Way. They simply need the will to reclaim it. Ajax shows some of the how and all of the why.