Top football has long since lost its innocence – in the Netherlands since it was officially launched in 1954 paid football came. Footballers got contracts, a transfer market arose and club loyalty became a scarce commodity. The level of the game undeniably rose, but the hardness on the field also increased.
Top football has now become an industry in which commercial interests prevail, so much so that Louis van Gaal advised against his colleague Erik ten Hag to go to Manchester United because it was a “commercial club”.
Initially the players were mainly semi-professionals, now they are usually well, sometimes even royally paid professionals. A twilight world has arisen around them of people who try to earn money from them: the football agents.
PowNed recently showed an interesting documentary about this world, at least part of it: the small broker who wants to go big. They mainly scour the youth competitions, looking for that one brilliant talent that can make them incredibly rich. Preferably the new Messi or Ronaldo, but a Frenkie de Jong would also be beautiful.
The chance of this is minimal and the competition between the brokers is fierce, but they still hope. They are already satisfied when they succeed in bringing a promising fifteen-year-old talent to a club. Such a talent can earn 30,000 to 40,000 euros on an annual basis; the broker gets his percentage. Isn’t it some kind of child trafficking? No, said the brokers, we are trying to help the children, we make sure they get what they are entitled to.
I was reminded of a recent interview in The Parool with Piet van der Kuil (now 89), a 43-time international who won a legendary 9-1 victory over Belgium with the Dutch national team in 1959. He was then an excellent right winger in a forward guard with Faas Wilkes, Tonny van der Linden, Kees Rijvers and Coen Moulijn. I have often seen him play, ‘Pietje’ van der Kuil, at VSV, Ajax and PSV.
PSV, then still the Philips club, bought him in 1959 for 130,000 guilders from Ajax. Frans Otten, CEO of Philips, thought that Van der Kuil should do something ‘besides football’. “I had the opportunity to become an instrument maker. I went to school. But hey, I didn’t do my homework. It didn’t work. ‘I’m not very good at learning’, I said to Otten. Did he stand in front of me and I can still hear that voice: ‘Piet, you come to my office every morning to do your homework.’ I sat there.”
I read the anecdote to my wife, who also worked for Philips in the 1960s. ‘Typical Philips,’ she laughed at once, ‘that patronizing with good intentions. My father also worked at Philips and that is why we received a reimbursement from Philips for the school costs when I was in secondary school. But I had to go to Philips every trimester with my school report, where an official checked my grades. If there was a meager mark, you got a comment. They remained neat, but there was something humiliating about it. I always hated going there.”
Sixty years later I try to imagine it: Ajax director Edwin van der Sar who says to Ryan Gravenberch, his greatest young talent: “You come to my office every morning to do your homework.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 6, 2022