After more than three hours of meetings, Michael van Praag gets up from his chair with a little difficulty. The chairman of Ajax has just formally ended the annual meeting of shareholders of the football club, but wants to give those present a final message. To give his words weight, he takes a seat behind a lectern. “Ernst, will you join us?”
Ernst Boekhorst also strides towards the corner of the room with long strides. He has been chairman of the so-called administrative council, a seven-member body that represents the amateur association Ajax represents. With a 73 percent stake, that association is by far the largest shareholder in the listed company company Ajax. This gives the governing council the power to indirectly block plans.
“We agreed together to stand here,” Van Praag begins. Because they want to publicly put an end to a year full of arguments and conflicts, the result of two seasons in which Ajax’s sporting performance was severely disappointing. In such cases, Ajax sometimes reacts “very extremely,” Van Praag knows, with his years of experience at the club.
“But we have to move forward,” he continues. “So let’s use Christmas this year to reflect on where things went wrong in our mutual cooperation. Let’s try to no longer talk about each other, but with each other. And above all: no longer airing dirty laundry.”
Boekhorst agrees. He refers to the match between Ajax and Feyenoord, which had to be stopped last September due to fan misconduct, with a 0-3 deficit, while Ajax was well on its way to a last place in the rankings. Since then, the Amsterdam club has “come a long way,” says Boekhorst. “We had some bad weather along the way, and we are not proud of that. But we are proud of where we are now.”
Contempt
How different the atmosphere was seven months ago, when the disagreement between commissioners and the association broke out in public. This happened at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting where a vote would be taken on the dismissal of recently appointed director Alex Kroes, due to alleged insider trading. A vote that never happened, because the commissioners reversed their decision before the meeting under great pressure from the amateur association.
The seed of the clash was not Kroes, but the situation that had arisen due to the appointment of Sven Mislintat. The German director of football affairs took office in the summer of 2023 and immediately made purchases worth more than 100 million euros. Because they were very disappointing on the field, and Ajax was having a dramatic season, Mislintat had to leave in September of that year.
Shortly after his dismissal, suspicions arose of a conflict of interest for the German, something for which no evidence was found in external research. But the board decided not to wait for that investigation and, through an offensive in the media, pushed for the departure of three commissioners because, according to the body, they had failed as supervisors.
This working method prompted one of the other supervisory directors, Leo van Wijk, to choose confrontation during the special shareholders’ meeting. “That’s her [de drie commissarissen] Being vomited out by the media, that the largest morning newspaper in the Netherlands writes that they have been chased away with tar and feathers, is the result of this action by the board of directors. I have great contempt for that.”
270 candidates
Seven months later, in a meeting room in the Johan Cruijff Arena, the supervisory board and the board of directors are doing their utmost to radiate as much unity as possible. Chairman Ernst Boekhorst hardly intervenes in the meeting with difficult questions, and apart from some veiled accusations about the leaking of internal information, chairman Michael van Praag also leaves the previous clashes untouched. Commissioner Van Wijk does not make himself heard during the entire meeting.
The agenda includes the appointment of three new commissioners, Hermine Voûte, Dirk Anbeek and Sirik Goeman. They are the first three members of the almost completely new council that will supervise the management of Ajax in the future and work together with the board of directors. The only commissioner who remains is former Ajax captain and coach Danny Blind, responsible for football technical supervision. In addition to Blind, the new council should include another commissioner with a football background, according to Van Praag.
The search for new supervisors took a long time, he acknowledges. But that is because Ajax has surveyed or spoken to more than 270 candidates for the available positions in recent months. Only on Friday was the club able to share the name of the intended new chairman: after the commissioners refused a candidate proposed by the association last month, Ajax has now ended up with Carolien Gehrels, former councilor and deputy mayor of Amsterdam
The formal appointment of Gehrels will only be decided later, at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting yet to be convened. Ajax did report that Gehrels can count on the support of the works council and the board of directors. Her three colleagues were already appointed on Monday: Voûte, Anbeek and Goeman received the support of 99.99 percent of the shareholders.
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