Europe’s football playing-fields are now even less level than before

Date: 13/03/1997

IT CANNOT be mere coincidence that things have only started to go awry at Ajax in the last year.

Two years ago, the Amsterdam club's captain Danny Blind was raising the European Champions' Cup above his head after victory over Milan in Vienna.

Now Ajax languishes in an inglorious sixth position in the Dutch league - a position most teams would be quite content with, but one which is causing considerable unease among a group of passionate fans accustomed to success at the highest level.

Ajax general manager Maarten Oldenhof puts much of the blame firmly at the door of the 1995 Bosman ruling, which banned transfer fees for out-of-contract players moving to another member state.

“For us, the Bosman ruling was a disaster. It was very short-sighted. In the long run, it will no longer be economically worthwhile to develop our own talents, so why should we bother?” he asks.

It is universally accepted that Ajax has been hardest hit by the outcome of the case taken to the European Court of Justice by little-known Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman.

The multiple Dutch champions are renowned for their youth development policy. They scan the country for talented youngsters, sign them up and provide them with schooling as well as football training before unleashing them on an unsuspecting world.

Patrick Kluivert is perhaps the most recent example, a tremendously gifted striker who was a regular in the Dutch national side before his 20th birthday.

Kluivert - along with former club mates Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids, Winston Bogarde and Michael Reiziger - will be resident in Italy from the start of next season, lured there not only by the sun, but also by the promise of more-than-healthy salaries with which Ajax simply cannot compete.

When the young striker Kluivert came on the market, as many as four of the newly wealthy English clubs were sniffing around. Rumours suggest he was finally enticed to Milan by the promise of a weekly pay cheque of around 65,000 ecu.

Oldenhof claims the Ajax youth policy costs the club some 2.5 million ecu every year.

“We can groom these boys, but since Bosman we have to let them go after two or three years. I am putting millions [of guilders] a year into my youth development programme, so we want the lads to play for our first team so we get some profit out of it. But they are going to countries where they hardly have their own youth teams. Why bother with the youth programme when it is cheaper just to pick some guys up from other Dutch teams?” he says.

For the moment, Ajax is not planning to abandon its traditional recruitment methods, but the club will be forced to go on to the market and buy new players.

In the longer term, Oldenhof believes it may be less willing to take the risk of a sizeable investment in players who are not guaranteed to make the grade at the highest level.

“I fear we will end up with teams that just buy players for the trade rather than to see them play. If I look at the players who have left our club, most of them do not even play with the clubs they were sold to,” claims Oldenhof with evident frustration.

The substitutes' bench at Italy's San Siro stadium would turn most football managers with a smaller budget than Milan or Internationale weak at the knees.

While Edgar Davids is temporarily out of action with a serious leg injury, Oldenhof believes it will not be long before the Italian clubs cash in their investments, selling on their overseas stars for a tidy profit.

Ironically, part of the problem is the lack of the much-vaunted 'level playing-field' in European football.

Oldenhof points out that Dutch clubs can be refused an operating licence unless they can prove that their income and expenditure are at least in balance.

“In Italy and Spain, that is not the case, so if a club is losing 25 million a year, who cares? It is very hard for us to compete with that type of club. I have to balance my books and they do not have to bother if they have a rich 'sugar-daddy' paying the bill at the end of the season,” he complains.

“We should have an international licensing system to ensure that every club at least breaks even and is run like a normal company so that we can really compete with each other.”

Oldenhof's views are given credence by a recent report from US management consultants McKinsey, which showed that no club in Italy's Serie A has a record of three consecutive years in profit.

In spite of its fanatical following, Ajax is realistic enough to realise that there are always going to be differences in the earning potential of clubs from the smaller EU member states such as the Netherlands and those from larger 'football-mad' countries such as Italy.

But Oldenhof draws a distinction between the cash-rich English premier league on the one hand and Italy and Spain on the other.

“The cash gap between us and England is really big at the moment, but most English teams are run like a business, so that is fair competition. They have a lot of money because of an excellent television deal, but that is their money which they have really earned. I have more problems with Spanish clubs which are heavily in debt but sign up players as if money were no object.”

The inevitable changes Bosman has brought to the game will require more of the ingenuity which has allowed Ajax to stay in the top flight of world football for almost 100 years.

One thing the club will not be doing in the short to medium term is following the example of major rival PSV Eindhoven, which has announced its intention to float on the stock market.

“On the stock market you have to make profits and it is in the shareholders' interests to sell as many players as possible to earn a bit of money,” explains Oldenhof.

But money talks as never before in European football. With the collapse of negotiations on a mooted television deal which would have brought untold riches to the Dutch league, the senior clubs have now turned to Dutch bank IMG and football specialists Deloitte & Touche “to try to imitate the British superleague model” in time for the start of next season.

The top clubs are looking for more independence within the national football set-up, so that revenue from television rights is no longer shared evenly between the 36 teams in the two Dutch divisions.

“We are really going to work on the league's image and on the merchandising side of things,” explains Oldenhof.

Clearly, Ajax has made a start on the latter. A favourite dessert on dinner tables in Amsterdam is the new line in red and white vla, custard which has been coloured in honour of the city's most famous sporting sons.

Having only become seriously involved in merchandising three years ago, Ajax has seen its profits double every year and has now taken over full responsibility from external consultants. “If you compare our efforts with Manchester United or Bayern Munich, it is peanuts. But compared to some Italian and Spanish clubs we do quite all right. Our name is very famous throughout the world, so we have to earn some money with it,” says Oldenhof.

Speaking in the week when his 'boys' did battle with Athletico Madrid in the Champions' League, Oldenhof rejects the idea that European integration will go so far as to see national football championships superseded by a European superleague.

“You might see a situation where national competitions happen at the weekends and we play international competitions on Wednesdays, but I do not see a

Euro-league in the near future. That will only happen as a supplement to football at a national level.”