Amsterdam football club AFC Ajax recently came under scrutiny after it launched an investigation on its technical director Sven Mislintat. A new defender was allegedly brought to Amsterdam via a German affairs agency, which has shares in Mislintat's private company Matchmetrics GmbH. Thomas Peeters, Associate Professor at Erasmus School of Economics, was asked for his expertise in an article by NOS Voetbal.
That the German affairs agency AKA Global GmbH had shares in Mislintat's private company was unknown to Ajax. Since Ajax is listed on the stock exchange and has to comply with strict rules, the club launched an investigation. It turns out that the German football agency, run by Arthur Beck and Kerim Cerit, saw a €161,000 loan converted into 3 per cent of the shares.
Whether the agency's loan was important for Matchmetrics and therefore for Mislintat? ‘Definitely,’ Peeters says. As far as the Associate Professor concerned, Matchmetrics is a typical start-up. 'In the beginning, you put a lot of time into developing software and gathering data. That requires enormous hours of work with no return'. So Matchmetrics did benefit from the loan from AKA Global GmbH, Peeters argues.
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You can download the full article from Trouw, 21 September 2023, above.
You can read the full article from NOS Voetbal, 19 September 2023, here.