General manager Alex Kroes, who was suspended by Ajax on Tuesday, already antagonized the club’s Supervisory Board before he took office on March 15. That reports Algemeen Dagblad-journalist Sjoerd Mossou, at least. According to the journalist, the Supervisory Board asked Kroes in vain whether he would like to express his support for the KPMG report on Sven Mislintat.
Although Kroes ultimately stumbled over the purchase of a large package of Ajax shares, just before it was announced in August 2023 that he would become the club’s new general manager, the protagonist’s suspicion that he will have to leave due to a ‘ dark political game’, according to Mossou ‘could well be true’: “The new director certainly did not only have friends internally,” writes the journalist.
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“Just before his first day at work, the Ajax Supervisory Board asked whether Kroes would support the now completed KPMG report on the dismissed technical director Sven Mislintat, if only to the outside world,” Mossou reports. “Kroes refused, thought it was a rubbish report and told the supervisory body that they had to defend the conclusions themselves,” the article continues.
The Supervisory Board did not thank the prospective director for this: “It did not exactly make him more popular with his supervisors,” Mossou writes. The statements Kroes made about Mislintat before his appointment (including calling the German ‘a charlatan’) also hit the wrong note. “With his harsh criticism of Mislintat, Kroes had implicitly already made a scathing assessment of the Supervisory Board.” In addition, Mossou endorses the suspicions that were already frequently expressed on Tuesday (including by former professional Willie Overtoom), that many people within Ajax feared for their position now that Kroes had taken office: “Many employees on the work floor also had to fear for their jobs, because Kroes was determined to make a clean sweep within the Amsterdam club.”
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