Ajax, Two Newcomers Short of Fitness, and the Price of a Chequebook Opened Too Wide

About thirty minutes from the end, Viktor Tsygankov came off the bench. In that spell he lost the ball clumsily during a build-up, then dropped into the wrong position in the duel chain that produced the goal making it 1-3. Ajax lost to PSV. A four-million-euro signing from Girona, arriving in the final days of the transfer window, and those thirty minutes instantly became the whole of his ability file in the eyes of part of the Dutch public.

I watched that footage back four times. Not to hunt for errors, but to see whether anything existed beyond the conclusion already written for me. Football never lies, but it only whispers to those willing to sit still. And in Tsygankov's thirty minutes, what I heard was not a poor footballer, but a body that had not been loaded enough to carry the tempo of the biggest fixture of the round.

This story does not begin in Amsterdam. It begins with an opinion column in Voetbal International, where pundit Hans Kraay junior called players arriving at a new club short of fitness 'truly unbelievable'. Goal.com aggregated it, and two names were framed: Marcos Leonardo and Viktor Tsygankov.

I started from bewilderment at the 2026 World Cup, and it turned out to be the only way to understand a match. This time the bewilderment sits elsewhere: an article about fitness is being read as a verdict on recruitment quality. Those two things are not the same, and the gap between them is where I want to sit down and look.

Context: a big fixture, two transfers, four names in one window

Ajax met PSV in a fixture framed as a top-of-the-table confrontation. This is the kind of match where the points value is highest, and where every physical shortfall is exposed fastest. Ajax lost 1-3. The third goal came from a duel chain Tsygankov entered and lost.

On the transfer side, the source material contains four names. Marcos Leonardo arrived from Al Hilal for twenty million euros. Viktor Tsygankov arrived from Girona for four million euros in the closing days of the window. Julian Brandt and Tolu Arokodare are also mentioned, but from the opposite side: both are praised, and Tolu is clearly a fan favourite.

The most structurally interesting name is not a player at all, but Jordy Cruyff, named directly as the man who 'opened his wallet wide'. In an article where four signings are mentioned, two criticised and two praised, tying spending to one individual is a governance signal worth pausing on.

Steven Berghuis, thirty-four years old, appears as a fitness benchmark: an older player judged fitter than a newly arrived signing. A small detail that says a great deal about internal expectations at a club where starting places are decided by current physical output, not by transfer fee.

Analysis: two different failure modes collapsed under one label

This is where I want to separate things. The Marcos Leonardo case and the Viktor Tsygankov case are not the same illness, and folding both under 'not fit enough' does both men a disservice.

Marcos Leonardo: twenty million euros, missing plenty of chances, and already displaced by Tolu Arokodare. This is a failure of finishing rhythm and box confidence. A striker missing chances is not necessarily slower than his teammates, nor necessarily losing duels. He is out of phase with his own decision timing: half a beat late choosing the angle, choosing the contact foot, choosing the moment to attack the space. That is fixable with volume of minutes at low pressure, not with a running programme.

Viktor Tsygankov: four million euros, roughly thirty minutes, beaten in the duel chain that led to a goal. This is a failure of physical foundation. A player short of fitness makes two errors at once: he holds the ball longer than he should because he does not trust his own acceleration to escape pressure, and when he loses it he lacks the energy to recover into the correct defensive position. Those two errors added up to a goal. On the footage, Tsygankov receives on the flank, takes one touch too many, and is stripped from behind. In the next phase of the same sequence he is two or three metres from the hot zone. At elite level, two or three metres is the distance between an interception and a goal conceded.

The notable thing is not that they arrived short of fitness, but that the coaching staff still sent a player short of fitness into the biggest match of the round. That is a bench decision, not a player error. If a squad has alternatives and still chooses an unready player, the problem lies in risk management, not in that player's ability.

A tactical shape is not an answer, it is only a way of asking questions about space. Here, the spatial question is this: what does Ajax need from a striker, and what does it need from a wide player? Reading how Tolu Arokodare is used, one can infer Ajax are operating with a focal-point striker who can take long balls, hold with his frame and finish cleanly. If so, Marcos Leonardo is being measured against a different metric from the one that brought him to Amsterdam. A forward who needs volume of chances to score will struggle in a system favouring a striker who holds and finishes in few touches.

For Tsygankov, the spatial question sits in the wide channel. A winger in a high-tempo system must do three things in a single phase: stretch the width, receive facing goal, and instantly switch to pressing on losing the ball. A player short of fitness manages two of the three, and the third is the one most severely punished.

Financially: twenty-four million euros bet on two people

Twenty million euros for one player sits in the upper bracket of Eredivisie spending. For a young Brazilian forward, this is structured as an appreciation-phase asset: buy, develop, resell. But a striker missing chances and already displaced is precisely the profile that generates book-value impairment risk if the slump persists. For a club whose traditional financial engine is trading profit, a twenty-million asset sitting on the bench is an engine stalled.

Four million euros for a player with an established European profile is a strong signal of a discounted deal. Such a low fee usually comes from one of three causes: a short remaining contract, a return from injury, or a selling club eager to move him on. The source does not say which. But if the first or second applies, Ajax bought availability risk rather than performance certainty. Financially the downside is small. Sportingly, the price was paid in the very first match.

Based on my experience watching matches, deals of this type in the Eredivisie usually come with a large gap between the individual training regime at the previous club and the actual match tempo in the Netherlands. A player arriving on deadline day almost certainly misses the entire pre-season with his new team. Without that phase, there is no physical base, and everything afterwards is a race to catch a train that has already left.

One geographic detail stands out: Ajax recruited from Al Hilal, from Girona, and from German football. That is a diversified, cross-market recruitment profile, unlike their classic model of buying young from South America or from the Dutch feeder circuit. Competing in markets where Ajax is not the dominant financial actor explains both the fee levels and the adaptation and fitness problems. When you are no longer the biggest buyer in the room, you usually accept less favourable terms, including players whose physical condition is incomplete.

Contrarian angle: thirty minutes is not a sample, and a column is not a verdict

The greatest unfairness here is not about who is criticised, but about the ratio between evidence and the weight of the conclusion.

For Tsygankov, the entire match data in the article is roughly thirty minutes off the bench. Thirty minutes. That is not a sample. It is a slice. In football analysis we normally need several hundred minutes across different opponent types, match states and scoreline contexts before saying anything with weight about a player. Yet here a single opinion column has turned thirty minutes into a complete verdict. The 'flop' label is being applied before the player has had a chance to prove anything.

With Marcos Leonardo, the situation is different. He has been criticised for weeks and has lost his starting place to a lower-profile teammate. That is a genuine accumulating sample, and the pressure on him is professionally legitimate. But even here, there is not a single number to verify: no expected goals, no chances created, no touches in the box. Nothing.

There is a media mechanism at work here that I have seen repeat itself many times: an opinion column is aggregated by a large outlet, and from there becomes the dominant narrative frame. Not an investigative reporter, not club data, not an analytics department, but a man watching a screen and talking. That does not make the opinion wrong. It simply means the opinion carries no warranty beyond the personal credibility of the speaker.

I no longer believe in victory, I believe in the moments a match opens up in front of me. The moment worth examining here is the moment someone at Ajax decided that a player who arrived on deadline day, short of fitness, was the right option in the biggest match of the round. That is the decision worth questioning.

In Vietnam I learned that a team can play with its heart before it plays with a shape. But a heart cannot run for the legs in the eightieth minute. Fitness cannot be shouted into existence, cannot be inspired, cannot be fixed by a dressing-room speech. It can only be built, and it is always built before the ball rolls.

Takeaway

In one window, Ajax signed four players named in this article. Two are praised, two criticised. That ratio is not a failed transfer window; it is a mixed one, and a headline focusing only on the criticised pair is an editorial choice, not an honest portrait. The deeper worry is structural: if Marcos Leonardo cannot become a genuine alternative, the forward line depends on Tolu Arokodare alone — the quietest risk in a congested calendar. If Ajax give Tsygankov a dedicated conditioning block, avoid top clashes for a few weeks, and hand him minutes at lower pressure, would the label applied after thirty minutes still hold? And if it does not, who answers for applying it so early?