29 jan

Vitesse, the football team from Arnhem – the city of One bridge too far – had an annual loss of €24,5 million over the past year, it was revealed today. Quite an accomplishment. The annual turnover was €11 mln. It reminded me of good old times. In the years 1997-2000 i followed Vitesse quite intensively, as a reporter for the regional newspaper De Gelderlander. There was something thoroughly fishy about the finances in those days, although these numbers are dwarfed by today’s results. At the time the state-owned electricity company Nuon financed the deficits. Now there is some ex- Soviet billionaire who fills the holes.
There is nostalgia, though. My fascination at the time was not Vitesse, but the stadium-theatre Gelredome that was being built – built with a lot of public money and also money that no one really understood where it came from. It was Nuon it turned out.
My best moment in journalism was one evening when I was returning home from work, late in the evening. I saw a lot of activity going on at the stadium nearby. It was in the finishing stages at the time. There was a serious problem with the sliding football pitch the stadium had. Think of a box with matches. The pitch with grass would slide in when there were football matches, and be outside, where the grass could grow nicely, on other days, after which the stadium, with also a slideable roof, could be used as a theatre or concert hall. Brilliant stuff if it would work, but a few weeks before the official opening of the stadium the sliding pitch was stuck. A technical problem, they said.
I went over to have a look, from outside the fences around the stadium. While I was looking at the scene (nothing really clearly visible) a car turned up behind me. It was Eugene, the editor of the city desk. He had also passed the stadium and also sensed something was peculiar.
‘What’s going on’, he asked. ‘Don’t have a clue’, I answered. ‘Let’s go and have a look’, he said. ‘Right’, I answered, thinking he was making a joke, but then realizing he was starting to climb over the fence. Dogs, I thought…. Awful men with guns…. But I realized this was not the moment to show my boss i was a pansy, so I climbed over the fence behind him. I remember ruining one of my shoes on the pointy spikes of the fence.
We walked over to the pitch, still stuck. We talked to some guys who were walking around and got a good idea of the problem. The surface over which the pitch had to slide had not been cleaned well enough. The dirt had caused a kind of vacuum. Now they were trying to pull the pitch out of that vacuum. A tricky business. The pitch could get loose, ….. or crack.
We were excited with our knowledge. It was past 1.30 AM by now. Too late to file a story, these were the days before social media. But we would be able to fill an exciting few pages in the coming days with the knowledge we acquired.
The next morning, when we arrived at the newspaper, early and excited, there was a press release from Gelredome. The pitch was moving again. A half hour after we had left there had been a loud explosion like sound. Everybody around imagined the pitch had cracked, but it was stil in one part. Problem solved. Our story disappeared into nothingness.
This was 1998. The situation at Vitesse/Gelredome exploded two years later when Karel Aalbers, the seemingly almighty chairman of the football club, and director of the stadium, was sent home. Nuon, where the independent directors started to grasp a little bit of the money squandering at the Arnhem football club and stadium, told him he had to leave. It was on the 14th of february, Valentine’s day. I wrote a quite good book, if I may say so myself, about this whole episode.
When I read the story about the losses at Vitesse today, I asked an old friend if he was really sure Karel Aalbers was not involved again with the team.This kind of ‘visionary’ spending could only be done when Aalbers was involved, I thought. This friend claimed he was certain Karel wasn’t involved.
Which I do find a pity somehow. I can not think of someone who would be able to spend the hole in someone else’s hand as dedicated, somehow even wisely, as Aalbers. Anyhow, it doesn’t take a risky forecast to claim that Vitesse is heading into a lot of trouble again. I see a nice book being written in the near future. Someone else will have to do it.