Stefan de Vrij has filed a compensation claim of 22 million euros against real estate agency Sports Entertainment Group for ‘unlawful acts’, reports The Telegraph Thursday night. The defender is demanding a refund of a commission that SEG received on his transfer from Lazio to Internazionale in 2018, plus a retroactive salary increase. SEG denies the allegations of the the Dutch international and finds the claim unfounded.
The newspaper has confidential documents in its possession, which show that De Vrij summoned his former agent’s office last summer. The case will be heard in Amsterdam in February. Owner Kees Vos of SEG calls De Vrij’s claim ‘laughable’ and states that it ‘doesn’t make sense’. “He allowed himself to be whispered to by third parties that we should not earn anything from it and has come to believe that,” says Vos in a response to The Telegraph. The summons claims that SEG has enriched itself at the expense of De Vrij.
In May last year wrote Follow the Money although De Vrij was not fully informed by SEG when he switched. An investigation by the journalistic platform showed that De Vrij believed that the brokerage firm represented him in the negotiations, but that in reality the firm only acted on behalf of Inter. The disagreement led to De Vrij breaking with SEG and now being assisted by Mino Raiola in a business sense.
De Vrij has been coached by SEG since he was sixteen. A written agreement was never drawn up, because mutual trust was high. De Vrij became good friends with his agent Doniphan Slager, who still works for SEG. They went on vacations together, saw each other at weddings and at a funeral. At the beginning of 2018, the end of De Vrij’s contract with Lazio was approaching. Interested clubs, including Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Zenit Saint Petersburg and Inter, lined up. Although De Vrij did not want to leave on a free transfer, no agreement was reached on a new contract. Sporting director Igli Tare then blamed ‘the agents’ for the failed negotiations.
De Vrij thought that SEG was acting for him, but SEG stated last year that the defender himself negotiated with Lazio and ‘several other clubs’, without reaching an agreement. After a departure from Lazio became inevitable, his agents slowly directed De Vrij towards Inter. The contract was arranged by top agent Jeroen Hoogewerf of SEG. De Vrij soon felt at home in Milan, but became suspicious of his agents: he had not received any signing money, something that certainly often occurs in transfer-free agreements. Inter’s annual report (page 13) for the 2017/18 season nevertheless shows that the club lost 7.5 million euros on his arrival. According to confidential documents that Follow the Money that money disappeared into SEG’s pockets over three installments.
Those documents also state that SEG only represented Inter’s interests. According to FIFA regulations for intermediaries, agents in a deal are not allowed to have dual interests and SEG owner Vos is aware of this, he told last year. Follow the Money. “We didn’t act for Stefan, but for Inter, and he knew that.” According to Follow the Money However, De Vrij only found out after the deal was closed. The documents show that SEG will receive 200,000 euros for every six months that De Vrij plays football at Inter. SEG would also receive a commission of 2 million euros if De Vrij serves out his full contract. If the the Dutch international transfers in the future, the brokerage office will receive 7.5 percent of the transfer fee. In the annual report of Inter (page 21) about the 2018/19 season, payments to the brokers of De Vrij are indeed mentioned.
However, SEG would only earn money if De Vrij would actually sign a contract and earn a maximum of EUR 50 million gross during the duration of his five-year contract; the salary that SEG stipulated for De Vrij was significantly lower. That would have been 37.5 million euros. The youth exponent of Feyenoord would not know anything about that agreement between SEG and Inter. He was told by the office that SEG received a 12 percent commission on the deal and that the signing fee was included in his salary, it was announced last year. “Inter was probably the right choice for De Vrij,” a prominent SEG agent said anonymously Follow the Money. “But if Inter hadn’t paid SEG so much money, he wouldn’t have gone there and SEG would have found him another club. But they paid SEG enough, so De Vrij went there. Even if he didn’t want to.”
Hoogewerf left Follow the Money see an Italian document that states that SEG was acting on behalf of Inter, while according to the same document, De Vrij was not represented by anyone. That document has been signed by De Vrij himself. “There is a lot of smoke in the transaction, but we do not recognize ourselves in the image that we deliberately kept it away from him,” emphasized the man who arranged De Vrij’s contract. De Vrij himself did not want to react; a former employee of SEG called it ‘unfair’ what happened to the defender and spoke of a lack of transparency. “At the same time, the footballers agreed to this, because SEG was acting on their behalf. I don’t want to defend SEG, but what it did was not wrong. The players allowed themselves to be represented by SEG, which only cost the players commission. The cooperation is completely based on trust. But when it came down to it, that turned out not to be the case.”
De Vrij states in the summons that he only became aware of the role that SEG played a year and a half after his transfer. For that reason, he demands the signing fee plus the commission back, and he wants SEG to reimburse the difference between his current wage of 37.5 million euros and the maximum salary of 50 million. His lawyer Dick van Voskuilen accuses SEG of wrongful acts and violating the prohibition on serving two persons in the summons. According to Van Voskuilen, SEG has not complied with the KNVB and FIFA rules for agents. De Vrij would also run the risk of receiving additional assessments and fines from the Italian tax authorities due to the dubious course of events.
According to the lawyer, De Vrij could assume that SEG negotiated with Inter on his behalf in 2018 and not the other way around. According to SEG, the allegations are unfounded. There was no contract between SEG and the footballer regarding the transfer to Inter, he himself confirmed in his contract that SEG was acting exclusively for Inter, and was informed several times about the commission raised by SEG. “As a result of his transfer, De Vrij has become one of the five highest paid players of Internazionale. He has not suffered any damage in any way due to the actions of SEG or the commission that Internazionale has paid to SEG,” said a spokesperson for the agency.