Outside of Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Den Haag, Utrecht, etc. of course.
The jealousy and inferiority complex levels within the Netherlands (and accusations of arrogance for bragging about club records and achievements) are so huge that many of the rival fans can't or won't:
- Ever visit Amsterdam, let alone the ArenA, not even for national team matches or concerts
- Refuse to ever say the word Ajax, instead refering to the city's phone netcode 020, or Ajakkes (word with a meaning akin to "icky").
- Feyenoord hooligans prefered Feyenoord to lose to FC Twente to ensure Ajax did not become champions. Going as far to enter their own clubs training grounds to intimidate their players that they should lose to FC Twente.
- Often can't accept a player who prominently played for Ajax
- Hate players, call them traitors and even threaten them if they went from certain clubs (Feyenoord in particular) to Ajax
- Note: only some hope they lose in Europe, even if it costs the rest of the league CL and EL entry tickets, because they can't stomach being told at work by a colleague what an amazing match it was the day before...
Outside of the Netherlands, I think everyone's in love though.
Anywhere you go, it's like "You from Netherlands? Aaaah Ajax, Croif! Van Baston! Burghkamp! Good!"
You tried that with LvG. Then you dumped him before giving him a chance to completely reformat the youth system and get the main team used to a high discipline, technical possession game. Instead, you had a bunch of veteran players not used to the system LvG had in mind.
IMO, they understood the basic idea of passing and ball possession to some degree, enough to execute it on a basic level. But they did not quite get the goal of the passing, nor had the experience with it to be creative with and exploit the triangles, or the confidence to do this playing forward. Then you get these side to side passes for possession with no initiative or goal, which some of the rebuilding teams of Frank de Boer also had.
Basically, as it wasn't routine for them, it takes concentration and effort to pull off. If there's not enough confidence, they just keep doing the easiest pass, which often is side and backwards, playing it safe. One of the hardest things to achieve is getting players to do this while playing forward.
Thing is, with Ajax, the core philosophy is what matters, not star players. Ajax can't afford to rely on one single player anyway, because that player will be gone the next year given the current financial situation in international football.
Scouting for youthful talents is extremely important, certainly. But Ajax' star players are trained with the offensive footbal philosophy of the club. Sculpting the talents to perfection in both individual quality and disciplined teamplay is where the focus lies, so that each player knows their job in the system and plays there with confidence in any Ajax team and virtually anyone can get into a position to score. Hence why there's been years where there was no one top scorer, but four or five spread between midfield and strikers.
Since everyone is taught and grew up with the same system throughout the youth academy, you can relatively easily replace players with younger players once sold off. As they all play roughly the same due to be trained around positions, they can still find one another quite easily because they know what's expected of them and what to expect fellow players.
When you buy a team together for millions upon millions, you don't buy a system to go with them, with some exceptions aside due to smart player purchasing, you have to train them to work together as a team and fine tune them (while many of these players will be veteran diva's, too big ego for teamwork).
That's where Ajax' advantage lies.