Dutch giants Ajax hope Europa League can spur escape from historic crisis

Two months and counting: that’s the time since Ajax Amsterdam, the most decorated club in the Netherlands, last won a competitive football match, Ludogorets Razgrad of Bulgaria the beaten club on that distant outpost on the timeline of startling decline.

It’s a while, too, since Ajax managed consecutive fixtures without interruption. Pitch invasions by fans, or fireworks and other missiles thrown on to the pitch have been a regular part of the club’s angry theatre, causing games to be suspended.

Thanks to that win over Ludogorets, in a play-off for the Europa League, Ajax find themselves at Brighton and Hove Albion on Thursday evening, seeking a first group stage victory in a competition that, in normal times, they would regard as below their status.

Ajax have won the European Cup, or Champions League in its modern guise, four times in their distinguished past. They were in its semi-final, and minutes away from going further than that, as recently as 2019.

Viewed from second bottom in the Eredivisie, to where Ajax sunk after the weekend’s 4-3 loss to Utrecht, that seems a remote past.

Ajax are enduring a historically poor start to a campaign and can only wonder how much more reshuffling at executive level it will need to slow down the plunge. Last month the director of football, Sven Mislintat, was fired. This week, it’s been the turn of the head coach as Maurice Steijn’s tenure ended on Monday.

Steijn’s replacement, at least in the interim, is Hedwiges Maduro, 38, and a former Ajax, Valencia, Sevilla and Holland midfielder, promoted from within to take up a senior first-team position for the first time in his career. Maduro is the fourth different man in charge since Erik ten Hag accepted an offer from Manchester United