What’s gone wrong for Ajax?

On Tuesday, the footballing world was handed a seeming shock. AFC Ajax, the dominating force of Holland and a long-time power in European football, were upset 3-2, at home, by Austrian side Rapid Vienna in Champions League qualifying. The loss came on the heels of a 2-2 draw in the first leg in Austria, which means that Ajax are out of the Champions League this season.

But is that actually such a huge surprise?

On the surface, it definitely is. Ajax are always in the Champions League, after all, last missing out back in 2009 and not often before that -- and even if they’re not winning matches thanks to some brutal group draws in recent years, they’re always competitive and entertaining. They also win the Eredivisie, the top league in the Netherlands, almost every year, often with ease while the rest of the league struggles to keep pace. They’re an incredible talent factory, with some of the best players in Europe having played in Amsterdam in their younger years. Ajax are one of the historic clubs of Europe -- but they’ve now fallen on hard times.

Last season, they fell short in the Eredivisie, finishing second but a whopping 17 points behind champions PSV. They failed to get out of their Champions League group, winning just once in an admittedly tough field that included Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain. They lost in the Europa League Round of 16. They couldn’t even win the KNVB Cup, the top cup competition in Holland, falling in just the fourth round.

Instead of looking like a challenging team, Ajax just look challenged.

That rough year continued a worrying trend for Ajax, and one that’s been building for several years now. They’ve struggled to make real progress in the Champions League, not making it past the Round of 16 in a decade and frequently failing to make it out of the group stage. Now, they can’t even make it to the group stage. That’s a stark drop for a four-time Champions League winner.

Making things worse is that Ajax have been bleeding talent and their vaunted academy hasn’t been keeping up with the losses like it normally does. Where once it was churning out a lot of good players and a healthy dose of great ones, now they’re only producing decent players with a few good ones mixed in. There have been a few potential greats to come out of De Toekomst, but those few have tended to run into rotten injury luck, like what Viktor Fischer has gone through over the last two years -- a series of hamstring troubles cost him all but four Ajax matches last season and the end of the season before.

It’s a monumental shift from where Ajax were even five years ago. They were challenging for every title in sight, and had a terrifyingly talented team. Luis Suarez. Siem de Jong. Christian Eriksen. Daley Blind. Vurnon Anita. Gregory van der Wiel. Jan Vertonghen. Toby Alderweireld. If that combination of youth and potential could have stayed together for just a few years, they could have developed into something incredible.

But fate and the financial realities of football intervened in a harsh way, and now not one of those players still dons the white-and-red. One after another, their brightest stars all left for bigger paydays elsewhere, and Ajax could never afford to replace most of them properly. In this “cash is king” era in the sport, Ajax have struggled to generate the same kind of sponsorship incomes as other big clubs around them, and as that gap in financial means grew, so did the gap in their squad quality.

Of course, with Ajax’s legendary academy at hand, they could survive the inability to compete financially, right? That was the theory, but the reality is different -- when your academy goes from producing Nigel de Jong, Clarence Seedorf, and Wesley Sneijder to being headlined by Nicolai Boilesen, Joel Veltman, and Davy Klaassen, well, that’s not going to get the job done. All respect to those three players, but they’re guys who are complimentary to bigger stars -- bigger stars that Ajax just can’t afford to bring in, or to keep when they do manage to develop one, as happened when they lost Christian Eriksen two years ago.

A poorly performing academy can be dealt with -- coaching, recruitment, and planning how to bring young players into the senior squad are all things that can be addressed and improved internally. Not having money is much harder to overcome, though, and it’s a problem made all the worse by missing out on the Champions League. Especially playing in what’s widely seen as a “second-tier” league, Ajax can’t make up the massive financial gap with sponsorship money, and losing the valuable TV money that Champions League games bring in is an even bigger blow, one they can’t afford to take for more than one season.

That devastating one-two punch of no financial means and a decline in youth quality saw Ajax transition away from being one of “the” teams in Europe, and that gave PSV and their incredibly impressive home-grown side the chance to take the Eredivisie title last season. That put Ajax into the situation they faced these past two weeks, in which they had to win qualifiers in the Champions League, and they fell short thanks to a resolute Rapid Vienna side. Now Ajax have to win another qualifier to make the Europa League group stage, a position they still really don’t want to be in -- and it might be a long time before we see them get back to the Champions League again.