August 2, 2014

Louis van Gaal makes club owners richer already

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 3:22 pm

louis-van-gaal-paul-blankThe football season has yet to start, but new Manchester United head coach Louis van Gaal is already giving the club’s owners plenty to be happy about.

The six children of late American entrepreneur Malcolm Glazer are about to make a load of money by selling 5% of their shares in British football club Manchester United, Yahoo! writes. The share price rose steeply after the announcements of both Louis van Gaal as head coach and Adidas as main sponsor, going from 14 USD to 19.31 USD last Wednesday, raising the value of the club to to approximately 3.2 billion USD.

The Glazer family will make an estimated 155 million USD on the sale and will hold on to the majority of shares. In order to underline their intentions, the shares they are selling have reduced voting rights.

Earlier in his career Van Gaal won major awards with Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern München. In his previous job as coach of the Dutch national team, he managed to reach third place at this summer’s World Cup, the more impressive considering that most his players came from lesser leagues such as the Dutch Eredivisie.

Manchester United’s prospectus warns buyers that the club’s worth largely depends on successes in the European campaign, according to The Independent.

Photo by Paul Blank, some rights reserved.

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June 2, 2010

Anti-German sentiments in World Cup commercials

Filed under: History,Sports by Branko Collin @ 10:16 am

Among the tidal wave of World Cup themed commercials, a disturbing trend emerges. Several Dutch companies have come out with TV ads that prominently feature German bad guys.

Heineken’s ad is perhaps the mildest, featuring a representative of the German football association proudly presenting earplugs to counter the noise of the Pletterpet, an orange cap. It paints Germans as rather dull folk, not quite the traditional stereotype over here.

Supermarket C1000 on the other hand goes the full nine yards, as it has a Cruella de Ville look-alike announce that she has to take one for the German team. Utilities company Nuon lets a ‘typical’ arrogant German fan get his comeuppance when his T-shirt turn orange, the Dutch national colour, while standing among his fellow fans.

Both Germany and the Netherlands participate in the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. Anti-German sentiments were alive in the Netherlands from World War II onwards to well into the 1990s, but kids these days just don’t seem to see the point. Which makes it even odder that these ads are so blatantly anti-German.

Something I heard a lot this year, now that Dutch coach Louis van Gaal and Dutch players Mark van Bommel and Arjan Robben have had such a successful year at Bayern Munich: “I never thought I would say this, but I am actually supporting the German side.”

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