A few days ago I came across a quote by Johan Cruyff. I had no idea where it came from. I just knew it was his.
It stayed with me. When I went looking for the context, I found out it came from the 1974 World Cup — right now, in the middle of the 2026 World Cup, which is slightly ironic, because football isn't really my thing. I'm more of a padel and F1 person.
But that's beside the point. It wasn't the World Cup that led me to this quote. It was the other way around: the quote led me to a story I thought was too good not to tell.
Munich, 7 July 1974.
The Olympiastadion is packed. English referee Jack Taylor has had to delay kick-off by ten minutes: the stadium staff had removed the corner flags for the closing ceremony and forgotten to put them back.
The Netherlands kick off.
And for the first minute, Germany doesn't touch the ball. Not once. Fifteen, sixteen passes, orange to orange, while the Germans chase a ball they can't get near. Then Cruyff picks it up around the halfway line, drives forward, leaves Berti Vogts behind and enters the box.
He's brought down.
Penalty.
Goal.
Germany still hasn't touched the ball.
That gesture — carrying on playing in exactly the same way even after scoring, just to prove a point about how football should be played — had a name: total football. Any player could take any position. No fixed roles, no waiting for instructions. An idea by Rinus Michels, perfected by a twenty-something named Johan Cruyff who carried it onto the pitch the way you carry a conviction.
Germany fought back. Breitner equalised from the spot in the 25th minute. Müller scored a second just before half-time. 2–1 to the hosts. The Netherlands lost the 1974 World Cup final playing, probably, the best football anyone had ever seen.
The remarkable thing is that fifty years on, most people remember how the Netherlands played more than who lifted the trophy.
That idea is still alive today — in the Barcelona Dream Team Cruyff would later manage, in tiki-taka, in Guardiola, who as a teenager was so slightly built that nobody wanted to take a chance on him until Cruyff said: "if we lose, we lose. We need to create players." He promoted him anyway.
Cruyff summed it up years later with a line that's been repeated so often it's almost become a cliché — but one he genuinely believed:
"It's better to go down with your own vision than with someone else's."
It's not about football. It's about having an idea of your own and holding onto it even when the scoreboard says otherwise.
That line kept turning over in my mind for days. Because without quite realising it, I'd been making decisions for exactly that reason.
Without ever putting it into words
I haven't written this newsletter for weeks.
I could have written anything to keep the rhythm going — something correct, publishable, something that ticked the box. I chose not to.
I'd rather wait for something of my own than put out something borrowed.
And thinking about it, this idea of going down with your own vision is something I've been living out at the studio for a while. I just hadn't put it into words.
In this industry, the standard approach is still to split photography and video into two separate rates, then add extras that show up at the end of the project when nobody saw them coming. I decided to do it differently.
One flat rate for the studio rental. Everything included.
That's had a cost. There have been projects that didn't go ahead because someone found a cheaper studio, or because they wanted to negotiate terms I wasn't willing to change.
It hurt at the time. Over time I understood that we probably weren't looking for the same thing.
I'm not saying this from a place of superiority. I'm saying it because those losses are part of what it means to have your own idea and stand by it.
A while back I put together Content Day. A format that didn't exist until I decided it needed to. There are more ideas turning around right now — still shapeless, still not sure if they'll work. But I'd rather let them take form than force them out just because it was time to announce something.
I don't know if all of these ideas will work out. The only thing I know is that I'd rather find out by building them than by copying someone else's.
The script keeps moving forward. This time, it just took a little longer to write itself.
Warmly,
Marc
the one who also writes l'Atelier d'Idées by openbcn studios