Antwerp General Manager Sven Jaecques has said that Marc Overmars and Mark van Bommel won’t stay at the club for more than two years.
The Dutch duo were both brought to the club ahead of the new season with Overmars being made Director of Football and Van Bommel taking over as first-team manager.
Both are huge names in the world of football and have played big parts in luring Toby Alderweireld, Vincent Janssen and Calvin Stengs to the club.
Given their reputations, many were surprised that they both chose to join Antwerp, and Jaecques has now admitted that they’ll only stay for two years at the most before moving on.
“The presence of those two is a big plus for us,” he told RTBF.
“We know they will only stay here for a year or two years, but we had to take the opportunity to take advantage of their experience and networking.”
The club received a huge amount of criticism for hiring Overmars after he was sacked by Ajax for inappropriate behaviour towards female staff and then not acknowledging such behaviour.
Jaecques concedes that they could have handled things better.
“We have communicated very poorly about the Overmars affair, I admit that,” he said.
“But we were overwhelmed: the info was leaking and we had to improvise a whole press conference. We wanted to take the time to explain everything, but we still can’t do that at the moment. That has everything to do with the case that is still ongoing in the Netherlands.
“But we had gathered all our information and we screened it well internally.”
GBeNeFN
