Kostas Lamprou takes back a statement he made in 2012 about Ajax. The goalkeeper played at Feyenoord at the time and called rival Ajax ‘cold’, following his experiences in the youth academy of the team from Amsterdam. Lamprou returned to Ajax in 2017. He stayed there until 2019 and did not notice that coldness anymore. On Sunday he was employed by RKC Waalwijk under the bar against the leader of the Eredivisie (0-1 defeat).
“I experienced the difference between Ajax and Feyenoord very closely. The answer is not that difficult: Feyenoord is a family, Ajax is cold. I did not feel any warmth there”, Lamprou said in 2012. Football International. After he transferred from Willem II to Ajax in 2017, he did not retract that statement. “It was,” he said at the time. “As a little boy, just coming from Greece, I was not well taken care of by certain people.” In the meantime Lamprou has come to realize that Ajax as a club is not ‘cold’, but that individuals were.
“I used to say that Ajax was a very cold club. I had a lot to say when I said that, also because I was at Feyenoord”, Lamprou looks back on Monday afternoon in the online talk show of Football International. “Ajax scouted Lamprou in Greece and brought him to the Netherlands at the age of thirteen. After a year he had to leave again. Via amateur club Amstelveen Heemraad he ended up at Feyenoord, the club for which he made his debut in professional football.
“If you were my age, my mother didn’t speak Dutch, all kinds of things happened, I didn’t speak the language, it was a new world … In my experience it was normal that I saw something distant. But in the two years that I joined Ajax, I have seen another world. I have seen people who are always ready for the players. If you had a problem, you could call them in the middle of the night. Those are the two differences. In the end I must honestly say that I saw it wrong then. It had nothing to do with the club, but with a certain person. In the last two years I have had a really good time. “