Thanks to the mega transfers, Ajax’s stock price has risen by 10 percent to 13.75 euros. If Ajax has to be judged on the creation of shareholder value, it is already a successful season.
In recent months, the club earned 220 million euros from selling players. Because the technical people were afraid to reinvest this money for fear of bad buys, the difficult choices were shifted to the treasurer of the club, Susan Lenderink. It must decide whether to invest the many millions in shares, bonds, real estate, bitcoins, gas futures contracts and/or private equity for the time being. Because if it is put on a current account with this inflation, the proceeds will go to waste.
In March of this year, Louis van Gaal – the man who in a few months will have to make the Dutch forget all crises – called Manchester United a commercial company instead of a football club. He advised Erik ten Hag not to go there. But he ignored the advice. Finally, Ajax is also a trading company in football players.
Only Manchester United is much more of a multinational. The club now pays 150 million euros for two Ajax stars. And if they don’t work, they buy a few more during the winter break. Perhaps it would have been cheaper to take over Ajax in its entirety and sell the superfluous players on, but grasshoppers with fiscal ingenuity don’t dare to burn their fingers on football just yet.
Football has become a part of the entertainment industry. In this newspaper, the football reports would also be in the section V or on the economic pages. The fact that players move from one club to another for money has been going on for a hundred years, but the fact that entire teams are stripped and put on the market after one season is an excrescence. The twenty multinationals in the English Premier League have pulled out all the stops after two corona seasons and have attracted new players for 2 billion euros. That seems huge, but the Premier League earns 7 billion per season: 3.5 billion in television rights and another such amount in merchandising – the sale of the image rights through shirts and other knick-knacks.
No other country can compete with that. As in ordinary society, the differences between rich and poor have increased further. And that makes the competitions more and more predictable. In the long term, clubs should consider changing a sleeve there to retain television viewers. As in the rest of entertainment, scripts may have to be created where one club loses to another on purpose. Or clubs with a budget ten times lower can start with a 3-0 lead.
Next to the royal family, the English football league is the only pearl of a depleted economy that has fallen further into disarray after Brexit. It must be cherished, because the show must go on.
The Ajax stock price benefits from this. But unfortunately the shareholders at Ajax are usually fans who prefer to see the shareholder value on the field.