When Ruud Gullit was sold by PSV to AC Milan for seventeen million guilders in the summer of 1987, it rang eight o’clock news him at home, live on the broadcast, to find out what he thought of it himself. ‘A ridiculous amount’, he said, in the tone of someone who is unpleasantly struck by the price of the pagers on the Albert Cuyp.
On Sunday evening, Gullit sat opposite Alfred Schreuder in one of the 47 talk shows in which the football weekend is screened in the Netherlands. It was about Antony, the Brazilian attacker who left Ajax for Manchester United on Tuesday for ‘just under a hundred million euros’. Schreuder hadn’t been able to line up Antony in the last matches, because Antony no longer felt like playing for Ajax. He preferred to play football at the new club of Erik ten Hag, the trainer who apparently feels so out of touch in Manchester that he would do anything to surround himself with acquaintances. But still: received a hundred million for Antony, that is, to work with the editor-in-chief of Football International to speak, ‘break the bottom out of the pitcher’.
Schreuder, who succeeded Ten Hag as Ajax trainer, said on Sunday evening Rondo (Ziggo Sport): ‘Football is all about money.’ A correct observation, from someone who knows what he is talking about: Schreuder was an assistant at FC Barcelona when that club had to discharge Messi due to an acute lack of money – after which all kinds of other, pricey, half-baked knackers were purchased.
Several experts said last week that they thought Antony was worth ‘less than seventy million’. Is such a boy put in his place at the last minute. Hopefully he hasn’t read it, of those ‘not even seventy million’, because then it’s: good-bye self-confidence, hello fear of failure. Before you know it, you’ll be discounting your own shirt for a raison of one hundred million as a returnee at the fan shop.
Even after a bunch of bows has passed by, a hundred million is still more than a ridiculous amount. One hundred million hardly sounds like real money anymore, it is an amount that children come up with.
With a hundred million you can buy everything, do everything.
Many football fans now follow the trade in players with the same attention and seriousness as the game itself. The favorite club’s annual results are proudly shared and all kinds of local sporting business leaders are judged on whether their work has paid off enough. I myself have also followed the news about Antony closely, I could not get enough of it. That must be the influence of football consumerism, the belief that you can solve all setbacks, that the wind will naturally blow in your favor and that peace and stability can be bought whoever throws enough money at it.
Anything is possible with a hundred million.
In the novel Gathering by Natasha Brown, the narrator determines at a certain point that she has arrived exactly where she wanted to be all her life: in a top position, at a top bank, with a top salary. “I’ve got a $2,000 ergonomic desk chair and a wireless headset, blinking contentedly in its shiny charger. (…) This is all.
I’ve got everything.’
It’s not necessarily a cheerful conclusion. ‘Everything’ often turns out to be less than it seemed from a distance.