Shortly after his departure from Ajax, Marc Overmars asked whether a return to the club was possible Het Parool based on Menno de Galan’s book: Ajax in Crisis. However, Overmars soon no longer met one of the conditions for a possible return.
Overmars was forced to leave Ajax because of sending sexually explicit and transgressive messages to female colleagues. A few weeks after his departure from the Johan Cruijff ArenA, Overmars asked then-SB chairman Leen Meijaard whether a return to Ajax was a possibility. Meijaard indicated that he could not rule that out. He did impose several conditions. Number one was that he was going to go under the radar for a while.
The second condition was that Overmars would enter therapy. If he had successfully completed that, he would have to go through the dust again. Overmars hoped that the women working at Ajax would accept that. In the end it didn’t happen. Overmars went to therapy, but only lasted two sessions. Then he quit ‘because that wasn’t for him’.
Barely two months later, Overmars joined Royal Antwerp, where he started working as technical director. De Galan knows that this transfer at Ajax is seen as ‘a slap in the face of the management and ‘a kick to the women’.
Start of the chaos at Ajax
After the departure of Overmars, Ajax quickly went downhill on an administrative level. For example, Edwin van der Sar suddenly had to operate independently, which was difficult for the then general manager. In Overmars’ absence, Van der Sar consulted almost everything with Meijaard. In addition to his role as supervisory commissioner of Ajax, he was also fully active in the club’s management.
De Galan also considers it plausible that Van der Sar initially blocked the arrival of Alex Kroes. Kroes is the new general manager of Ajax, but will probably only be allowed to start work in Amsterdam on March 15 due to the non-competition clause in his contract with AZ. Two summers ago, Van der Sar stopped the appointment because he wanted to get involved in the technical part himself. Ajax’s transfer summer was ultimately very disappointing.
On May 30 this year, Van der Sar announced that he would quit Ajax because he was ‘finished’. A direct successor could not yet be appointed. Jan van Halst eventually acted as interim general manager, but he too could not prevent last summer from being even more disastrous for Ajax than the year before. Sven Mislintat was appointed and dismissed within a few months, while on a sporting level it could not have been more dramatic with an eighteenth place in the Eredivisie. Ajax has now climbed to twelfth place.