The board of AFC Ajax, which owns 73 percent of the club’s shares, will retire no later than September 1. The football club from Amsterdam announced this on Wednesday. In the press release Ajax writes that chairman Frank Eijken stated to the members on Wednesday during a General Members’ Meeting at youth complex De Toekomst that he felt “no support” for the board policy. If the formation wants to go smoothly, Eijken, Wendy Nagel, Sander Mallie and Marc Stuut will give up their positions sooner.
The reason for the breach of trust was the intention of chairman Eijken to agree on Friday with the proposal to financially reward members of the supervisory board. Supervisory directors normally work on a voluntary basis, but their work has become more complex — and therefore more time-consuming. For that reason, ‘the honor’ no longer suffices, is the thought, and annual salaries (from 35,000 to 50,000 euros) are justifiable.
Most of the eight hundred members of Ajax disagree with that statement and find payment for the commissioners — Pier Eringa, Jan van Hals, Cees van Oevelen, Georgette Schlick and Annette Morsman — out of the question. Opponents do not want to break with the Ajax tradition of voluntariness. In any case, they believed that the Ajax culture was under pressure, because of the sitting board members only Marc Stuut has a past as a player at Ajax, although he never broke through with the seniors.
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