What next for Ajax? Is this the end of the road for Dutch giants' young side?

Ajax were knocked out on away goals as Lucas Moura scored a 96th-minute winner for Tottenham in Amsterdam

"It was like the ground disappeared from under our feet. So close. We were so close."

Ajax captain Matthijs de Ligt's despair as the Dutch giants agonisingly squandered the chance to reach a first Champions League final for 23 years was telling.

This young side were on the brink of achieving something remarkable until Tottenham staged what had seemed an impossible comeback.

Thoughts at the Johan Cruyff Arena quickly turned to whether this marked the beginning of the end for a team whose scintillating football had seen off teams such as Real Madrid and Juventus in this season's competition.

Midfielder Frenkie de Jong, who said Ajax's run was like a "fairytale with an unhappy ending", will join Barcelona in the summer, and 19-year-old De Ligt could go too.

"This team is breaking up," Marcel van der Kraan, sports editor of Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, told BBC Radio 5 Live's Football Daily podcast.

"Frenkie de Jong is heading for Barcelona. Matthijs de Ligt will most likely follow him unless a big Premier League club puts the money on the table. Hakim Ziyech is looking for an exit.

"If there was a big success they might rally round together and say 'come on boys, keep this great team together as much as we can' - they can do it losing one or two but not with five or six, which is probably going to happen now."

Will the Ajax production line continue?

Ruben Jongkind is Ajax's former head of talent development and was responsible for writing and implementing Plan Cruyff, which led to a rebuilding of the club known as the 'Velvet Revolution' after Johan Cruyff returned to the board in 2011.

The plan had four components: Ajax should play attractive, attacking football; at least half the first team should be homegrown players, incoming signings must improve the team; and a performance culture must be created.

Everything from catering in the youth academy to the club's medical department was reformed, taking the best of other sports such as American football, athletics, judo and triathlon as inspiration, while a methodology department designed to create plans for individual players helped develop current first-teamers such as De Ligt and midfielder Donny van de Beek.

Jongkind said the club's vision was to "give dreams and chances to young people and inspire the world with attractive football".

"The mission was to develop Champions League winners," Jongkind told BBC Sport.

"We said we would get back to the top eight of Europe and people said we didn't have the money. Johan said: 'I have never seen a bag of money score a goal.'"

Jongkind fears Ajax have since moved away from those principles and doubts the club can continue to produce players of the pedigree they have now.

"It will be hard," he added. "Next year some players will stay and they have a lot of money now so can buy some reinforcements, but you need a solid, high-level youth academy that keeps producing high-level players.

"I don't think they can do it any more. The environment has changed incredibly - it has reverted back to a more traditional academy like all the others in the world - you have to do something completely different in order to make a difference.

"The culture and the spirit is different. It's not the Cruyff spirit."

Is history repeating itself?

In 1995, an Ajax side boasting future global stars such as Edwin van der Sar, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, De Boer brothers Frank and Ronald, Marc Overmars and goalscoring substitute Patrick Kluivert won the European Cup for the first time in 22 years.

Twelve months later they were beaten in the final on penalties by Juventus before exiting to the Italians in the semi-final a year later. The youngsters soon dispersed, leaving Amsterdam for Europe's wealthiest clubs.

Jongkind says the break-up of that team - and subsequent 22-year wait to reach another Champions League semi-final - was again a result of Ajax turning their back on Cruyff's principles.

"You first have to go to '92 when they won the Uefa Cup. The players coming then were all scouted at the end of the '80s," he said.

"Johan Cruyff - who was head coach and technical director - and Tonny Bruins Slot did all the scouting and they changed the academy based on more creativity.

"Louis van Gaal was a really good coach to mould a group of young players and work with the material, but after the success of the '90s they started to put their money into the stadium and infrastructure, and implemented Van Gaal's philosophy for the whole academy."

Jongkind says Ajax can still not compete financially with Europe's super-rich clubs and need to maintain an identity of "bringing up great youth players".

"People will say 'now for Ajax everything is going great' and I say 'no, Ajax is not going great because they are doing the wrong things in the academy again'," he added.

"It will go down and down - if you look at the under-14/15/16 now there is only one team that will be champions, maybe two, and we say becoming champion is not important but it is a thermometer - now they are on average fifth or sixth in the competition.

"You also saw it in Barcelona. When Barcelona were so good and dominant - seven, eight years ago - I was walking with Cruyff on the training ground at La Masia and he told me: 'Everybody is looking at the first team and I am looking at the academy. Things are not right and they have to change.'"

Have we seen the last of the underdogs?

Monaco's talented young side of 2016-17 reached the Champions League semi-finals, after which players such as Kylian Mbappe, Benjamin Mendy, Bernardo Silva and Tiemoue Bakayoko moved - with varying success - to bigger clubs.

Monaco have failed to progress from the group stage since.

Jose Mourinho's Porto won the competition in 2003-04 only to witness many of their key players follow the manager out, and have not gone beyond the quarter-finals in 15 years since that success.

Then there was the case of 5,000-1 shock Premier League winners Leicester City reaching the last eight of Europe's elite competition in 2016-17.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire says such underdog stories could be about to become even less likely.

Uefa is reportedly considering a revamp of the Champions League from 2024 that would see four groups of eight teams and a system in which the top clubs automatically qualify for the next edition - effectively guaranteeing Europe's elite a place each season.

Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin said on Wednesday that "no decisions have been made" and the governing body only has "ideas and opinions".

Maguire, a football finance lecturer at the University of Liverpool, told BBC Sport: "That additional money will be such a financial advantage in terms of recruiting players it is very difficult to see any form of democratic split of money and talent.

"We all accept there is dominance of a few clubs but the romantic always looks forward to another Leicester City - there is no way clubs would be able to recruit players of a significant calibre to compete.

"The big clubs are doing extremely well and to them the likes of another Leicester occurring is a risk."