More than three hundred pages of sexually explicit WhatsApp messages to an office employee over a period of three and a half years. “Very explicit material.” Those text messages and photos served as main evidence in a disciplinary case against Marc Overmars, former director of football affairs at Ajax.
The disciplinary committee of the Sports Jurisdiction Institute (ISR) suspended him on Thursday for two years, of which one year was conditional. This concerns positions within the KNVB or organizations affiliated with it – read: Dutch football clubs.
The ruling could have consequences for his current position as technical director of the Belgian club Royal Antwerp FC. This is the case when the KNVB reports the case to the world football association FIFA, which can then take over the punishment internationally. A spokesperson for the KNVB said on Thursday that the association cannot yet provide a definitive answer on this. “We will study the ruling and see what the consequences are.”
In February last year, Overmars resigned from Ajax due to “sending cross-border messages to several female colleagues over an extended period of time,” the club stated. NRC in the months before, investigated the sexual misconduct of the director of football affairs. The newspaper spoke to eleven (former) employees, who wanted to remain anonymous for various reasons. This showed, among other things, that Overmars sent sexually explicit text messages and dick pics to subordinates.
Overmars has “not adhered to the rule that he refrains from sexual intimacies through any means of communication,” writes the disciplinary committee in the statement.
Big impact
The case is built around one specific report. Overmars’ messages to the woman – who reported within Ajax on January 26, 2022, six days after the controversial broadcast of BOOS about The Voice of Holland – were viewed by a club employee and an external expert, who spoke to her twice in detail.
They have had a “major impact” on her, the ruling says. Given her relationship of dependency on Overmars, the woman felt “powerless” to take other steps that could have stopped his undesirable behavior. She wants to remain anonymous.
In his defense, Overmars said that it was not clear to him that the contact was experienced as unwanted. He had the impression that there was “reciprocity and voluntariness”.
The disciplinary committee puts that reading aside: Overmars, given his position, “might have been expected that he would have been aware of the role model he had and that he would have refrained from such behavior, even when he believed it was happening.” on the basis of reciprocity and voluntariness”.
It is striking that the reporter did not cooperate in the ISR investigation. For that reason, this is mainly based on what she stated to Ajax and what an employee of the club saw in the form of images and messages – because the ISR did not have that either.
When Overmars was confronted with the report in early February 2022, he told an Ajax employee that he had sent “non-business messages, sexual innuendos and/or sexually suggestive messages to 10 to 15 women.” This is evident from a statement included in the ruling, based on what the Ajax employee in question told the ISR researchers.
He denies to the ISR that the now 50-year-old Overmars had told the ISR that “there were several women with whom he had had similar contact” as with the employee who reported it. ISR does not know who the women are. According to the prosecutor, “more research is needed first.”
Fishing expedition
The sentence is considerably lower than the prosecutor demanded. He wanted a suspension of five years, of which two years were conditional. When determining the penalty, the disciplinary committee took into account that the issue “has received a lot of publicity” and that Overmars has “been damaged” as a result, but also takes the long duration of the transgressive behavior into account in its judgment.
Overmars’ defense that the ISR procedure took “unreasonably long” and that there was a “fishing expedition” was pushed aside.
One of the women NRC spoke to last year for the investigation into Overmars’ sexually inappropriate behavior sees the statement as a form of recognition. She views Overmars’ behavior as an abuse in a closed world. “The fact that I want to remain anonymous to this day proves how great the fear still is,” she says.
A spokesperson for Overmars tells NRC that the technical director of Royal Antwerp has no need to respond to the ruling.