Friday, January 28, 2022 at 21:19• Tom Rofekamp • Last update: 21:23

Mike Verweij sees that many folds still have to be ironed out before the arrival of Steven Bergwijn to Ajax. According to Verweij, director of football affairs Marc Overmars is involved in a true ‘poker game’ with Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy about the transfer fee of the 24-year-old attacker. Overmars would also face a lot of opposition within his own club, as the Supervisory Board and financial director Suzan Lenderink do not want to give him a blank check for the transfer.

According to Verweij, it is going hard between Overmars and Levy. “You may have the best two negotiators in Europe sitting opposite each other,” the Ajax watcher says in the podcast Kick-Off by The Telegraph. “They don’t give each other an inch.” After Tottenham already wiped out a bid of 16 million for Bergwijn earlier this month, Ajax is, according to The Athletic now plans to make an increased offer of 22 million euros. Even then there would be a difference of 3 million with Tottenham’s asking price, which is 25 million.

There would be a lot of doubt within Ajax about how far the club should want to go for Bergwijn, partly because it is not certain whether the left attacker will conquer a permanent base place in Amsterdam. Valentijn Driessen, also a guest in the podcast, adds ‘the salary problem’ in addition to the transfer fee. “That boy (Bergwijn, ed.) earns better at Tottenham than the highest-paid Ajax player. You can hardly afford to pay him more than Dusan Tadic. Look at that time with Hakim Ziyech. Tadic had to have that jersey number 10.” Driessen refers to the situation surrounding the arrival of Tadic to Ajax in 2018. The then Ajax player Ziyech had already been assigned the number 10, but renounced this after comments from Tadic.

“Those are things you have to take into account: How does something fall into a dressing room?” Driessen concludes. Verweij adds the resistance that Overmars gets within Ajax itself. “Overmars has two huge blocks on his leg: the Supervisory Board and CFO (financial director, ed.) Lenderink. He is wrestling from this, but he has still not quite succeeded. I think that is very strange. Overmars has a positive transfer result of 350 million euros in the ten years that he has been at Ajax, and is convinced that he will sell Bergwijn for much more than he is buying him for now. carte blanche to give.”