Chaos complete at Ajax, both in management and on the field crisis

“You actually can’t blame the players for this,” says financial journalist Erik Rezelman. “It’s not right at all levels of the company. Starting with the most important man: there has been no general manager for months. They hired Alex Kroes from AZ and then they later found out that he can only start next year because of the non-competition clause from AZ. They didn’t know that, that’s really amateurish.”

There has been no general manager at Ajax for months. This means that there is no one who can control the cooperation between technical director Sven Mislintat and trainer Maurice Steijn. While that does not always turn out to be a happy marriage.

Business relationship

For example, Mislintat was openly criticized by Steijn after another mediocre match. It also emerged yesterday that the technical director bought a player through a business associate who owns shares in a private company of Mislintat. Ajax is currently conducting an investigation and says it is not aware of a shareholding.

In the absence of a general manager, Supervisory Board member Jan van Halst temporarily takes on the role of director. According to Rezelman, this is incomprehensible: “You hardly see a listed company where someone from the Supervisory Board becomes a temporary director. Then he has to return to his old position and monitor himself. That is not possible,” he says.

Jan Driessen, former Communications Director of former main sponsor Aegon, is also surprised. “A temporary management position by a member of the Supervisory Board is not formally possible at Ajax and is therefore undesirable. It clouds the relationship between the Supervisory Board and the Board of Directors and therefore does not deserve the beauty prize. The Supervisory Board would have saved itself a lot of misery and criticism if they had taken the royal route and quickly installed an external (interim),” says Driessen.

No trust

Rezelman shows that Ajax’s stock price is currently at its lowest point in five years. “The company has halved. This means that confidence is gone. You only see that in companies that are poorly organized and where there is little expectation for the future,” says Rezelman. “The fans do not notice the stock market decline at the moment. Ajax remains immensely popular. There are still 30,000 people waiting for a season ticket and almost every match is sold out.”

With crucial matches against Marseille and Feyenoord just around the corner, the question remains: will things turn out well for Ajax? Rezelman is hopeful. “Things always turn out fine with Ajax,” says Rezelman. “Without money, Ajax is always run better. Then they no longer buy mediocre players from the second division of France, but they give young, talented boys from youth a chance. And if you look at history, successes at Ajax are always celebrated with youth players.”