Watch list Dutch coaches

Oud-bondscoach Pauw: 'Ben als jonge speelster verkracht door voetbalprominent' - https://nos.nl/l/2434906

This is explosive stuff: pretty much the first female coach in history (with the necessary qualifications) claims to have been raped and assaulted by three other coaches.

Matter of time before those names appear in the media.

 

Here the long 22 minutes read:
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/07/0...-pauw-over-haar-conflict-met-de-knvb-a4135293

KNVB RESPONSE
The KNVB states in a written response "to be very shocked" by Pauw's experiences. According to the union, the investigation shows that it "should have tackled a number of things differently". "Unfortunately, Vera has been confronted in the past with a number of (estimation) errors and harmful comments from (former) KNVB employees."

The KNVB also endorses the conclusion that it "did not react sharply enough" to Pauw's "signs of sexual abuse". That these signs were “sometimes veiled/concealed” “should not be an excuse.”
The KNVB "recognizes the errors identified in the report." They "shouldn't have happened to her".

“It is unacceptable that Vera did not experience the safe working environment to which she was entitled at the time. In our contact with Vera, we have experienced that this situation has unfortunately had a great impact on her and we are sorry for that.”

The union says it wants to discuss the recommendation from the report internally and with Pauw "as soon as possible", but "with extreme care". “So that we can take action. Also with a view to restorative mediation.”

CAREER VERA PAUW
1984
Debut in the Dutch women's national team
'88/'89
First Dutch woman to be signed to a professional football club, in Italy (Modena)
2004
Pauw becomes national coach of the Dutch women's team
2005
Pauw is the first woman to complete the UEFA Pro Football course
2007
Under the auspices of Vera Pauw, among others, the Eredivisie Women is founded
2009
Pauw reaches the semi-finals of the European Championship in Finland with Orange
2010
Pauw leaves disappointed as national coach of Orange and becomes director of women's football at the Russian Football Association
2016
FIFA nominates Pauw for the title of best women's coach of the year
2017
Pauw is appointed as federal knight [the 2nd highest FA distinction; same rank as Cruijff, Michels among others]
2017
Under national coach Sarina Wiegman, the Dutch national team becomes European Champion
2019
Pauw becomes national coach of the Irish women's team and later signs until 2023
2019
Under Sarina Wiegman, the Netherlands reach the final of the World Cup. Losing to the final to the United States of America.

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I had already read articles in the past about bad blood between the coach and FA. The resignation of 2010 was with slammed doors.

 

https://nos.nl/l/2434940

Someone thinks he is one of those three.

 

Ten Hag has to be worried terribly as news has come out that Laporta says Frenkie will stay at Barca.
What a mess at United with the cesspool of shite players in their squad.

 

Fascinating article of a month ago (which I only see now) by Simon Kuper about Dutch elite formation. I'm often critical about this author (he was once dismissed at World Soccer because he "struggled to separate non-fiction from fiction"), but I think this has also strong parallels with how it works in sport and football (I used to think the way football people treat each other is very different to the manners in the business and governing circles, and only saw that; now I also see the similarities in the consensus formation for both, and the weak position of the manager).

Translation below:

Elite formation in the Netherlands
In mediocre circles

Anyone who studies at the top university in France or the United Kingdom automatically joins the elite. They therefore have an exclusive and united character there. How does it work in the Netherlands, where power must always seem ordinary?
[...]
The Dutch elite is thus less selective, less imaginative, less wealthy, and less united than in countries such as the UK and France. All in all, it's less impressive and more 'horizontal'. But perhaps a moderate elite is the price to pay for a reasonably egalitarian country.
[remainder of the article in spoilers]

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

It was December 1987, I was eighteen, and for the first time in my life I was wearing a suit. I took the train from London to Oxford for my university entrance interview. A 45 minute conversation would set my life path. In retrospect, that day was my first experience with elite formation: how a country selects its elites, a theme that now fascinates me.
On arrival in Oxford I was not very nervous. My father was a professor of anthropology (in Leiden, among other places, so I had attended Dutch schools until I was sixteen) so I had learned academic chatter at the kitchen table. I had the confidence to formulate arguments on subjects I knew nothing about. As an upper-middle-class white male, I was also one of the dominant species at Oxford. I was therefore not impressed by the historians who questioned me in a beautiful room above a medieval courtyard. I vaguely remember that I gave a speech about how Belgium was not a real country. Shortly before Christmas, a letter postmarked Oxford fell through the letterbox at my parents' house: I was admitted.
And the rest of my life followed from that. The letter turned out to be a lifelong ticket to the British establishment. After graduating, I became a graduate trainee with the Financial Times, a post almost exclusively reserved for Oxford and Cambridge alumni at the time. If one of the historians that day had had less tolerance for my Belgium story, if that letter had contained a rejection 35 years ago, I might not be writing this piece now. Then I would not have become a journalist, but I would have taken up another profession that suited me less well.
Most members of the current British establishment have received a similar letter. A study at Oxford or Cambridge was certainly in my generation more or less the admission requirement to become a top civil servant, judge, investment banker or prominent politician. Eleven of the fifteen post-war British Prime Ministers studied at Oxford, three did not go to university, and only Gordon Brown studied elsewhere, in Edinburgh, at the University of the Scottish Elite. In my new book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK I call the UK an “Oxocracy”.
Who can join the elite? The entry requirements are different in every country. In my hometown of Paris, I see the French political, cultural and business elites attend a small number of selective colleges, then cluster in a few central arrondissements where they pass each other the ball for life. I once asked an Irish friend how the Irish elite are made up. He had to think for a moment, but then he had it: 'Pure nepotism. Your uncle in high office takes care of you.”

But how does it work in the Netherlands? Since the rise of populism at the beginning of this century, there has been a growing Dutch aversion to the national elite; the members are arrogant and corrupt. Yet there is surprisingly little recent systematic research. A book like The New Elite of the Netherlands by social geographer Jos van Hezewijk is almost twenty years old. Van Hezewijk, owner of the company Elite Research, also focuses mainly on the financial elite. To understand the distribution of power in the Netherlands, we need to understand the functioning of the national elites.
My preliminary hypothesis: The Netherlands has four different elites, the political, the business, the cultural and the exported Dutch (the expat elite) who clump together in cities like London and New York. These four elites live separately from each other, and are not particularly selectively composed – very different from the more unified, highly selected French and British elites. Yet also the Dutch elites build (often subtle) barricades to keep the masses away.
First some generalizations about the Dutch elites. As Joris Luyendijk shows in his book De Zeven vinkjes, they are dominated by white, highly educated native straight men, who usually had highly educated and/or wealthy parents. More and more women are joining the elite, and the number of highly educated white people – say the raw material for elite formation – is growing. In the population group between 15 and 75 years of age, nineteen percent have a bachelor's degree in university education or higher professional education, and another eleven percent have a master's or doctorate degree. In the current working population – roughly between the ages of 20 and 65 – these percentages will be even higher [he's lazy here, the numbers are easy to find - PvH].

Certainly more than a third of all Dutch people therefore have the basic qualifications to reach one of the four elites. However, that means that almost anyone without higher education is locked out of the elites for life. This causes widespread frustration, which is mainly expressed by Geert Wilders. But some Dutch people who have studied – many women, ethnic and sexual minorities, disabled people, etc. – also experience the same exclusion. If you add these groups to the Wilders group, the vast majority of all Dutch people are excluded from the elites for life.

The minimum entrance ticket to the Dutch elites is therefore a university degree. However, which school or university you attended is relatively unimportant. In the Netherlands there is no letter that you receive when you are eighteen and that opens all doors. Everyone who completes higher education has a chance.

That is how it works in more or less social-democratic countries. Also Germany, Canada, Sweden or Australia hardly have university admissions interviews, nor do universities that are at the top of the world rankings, except in a few specific domains. (The Stockholm School of Economics, for example, is a direct line to the best jobs in Swedish companies.) Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell describes how he applied to the University of Toronto in about ten minutes, "one evening after dinner, in the fall from my senior year… There was no realization that much depended on my choice of university."

That seems to me to be a smarter selection method than the British one. Take a look at the life paths of two internationally renowned British political analysts who are both now in their fifties: Edward Luce and Fiona Hill.
Ed is my colleague at the Financial Times and author of landmark books like In Spite of the Gods (on India) and The Retreat of Western Liberalism. He and I were contemporaries at Oxford, but never exchanged a word. I do remember a cricket match between my college and his where one of their batsmen was hit in the head and taken to hospital. Years later, when I met Ed in his then hometown of Manila, he showed me the scar on his temple. He was that batsman.
It was a sure bet that Oxford would allow Ed. He's smart, had attended boarding school, and, the son of a Conservative minister in the Thatcher government, had a lifetime of experience in the kind of political discussion you have to stage for the admission interview for the Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree. Thanks to his letter of admission from Oxford, we now know his books.
Very different is the story of Fiona Hill, the daughter of a northern miner. For her admission interview, she traveled to Oxford in a suit sewn by her mother. The other girls she met there could barely understand her accent. Her interview was a humiliating experience, and she was rejected. Like 99 percent of the population, Hill was thus banned for life from most British positions of power by the age of eighteen. Even then, she'd delivered an extraordinary performance: hardly any other woman in her social class had even made it to the Oxford interview.
Fortunately, she was later picked up by another country: after graduating from the University of St Andrews, she ended up at Harvard, where she became a Russia expert. She landed a major role in Donald Trump's White House, and gave impressive testimony against him in the Senate during his second impeachment trial. Her talents were lost to the UK. And think of the many Fiona Hills we don't know, who never published books, because they didn't enter Oxford and got a second chance nowhere else.
In a country like the Netherlands, age eighteen is a much less decisive moment. Here too, ambitious people are constantly looking for social differentiations, but status symbols that can elevate them above the competition are scarcer. Where you study in such a country is relatively unimportant, because it is only after university that you start climbing the stairwell to power. For example, the judges in the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Constitutional Court, come from a wide range of German and American universities. A map of the ancestry of the members of the British Supreme Court would look a lot simpler.
The Dutch elite is neither socially nor cognitively very exclusive. That is, of course, typically Dutch: society here is relatively 'horizontal', large differences are not accepted, so the elite should not act proud or think that they are brilliant. Power should always seem ordinary in the Netherlands – something that Mark Rutte knows how to portray perfectly.
The lack of a demanding educational selection system gives the Dutch elite an smell of mediocrity, also because the talent pool is inevitably smaller than in the UK and France. There is less competition to finish on top in a country of 17 million people than one of 65 million.

To be continued.

 

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The four Dutch elites live relatively separately from each other. The political-administrative elite is confined to The Hague. Many members have studied public administration, law or political science. Young politicians-to-be often become active in the youth section of a party at school or at university (Rutte's first large network was the JOVD). Many are already on the municipal council of their home municipality before their thirties. Ideally, you will quickly become an employee of a Member of Parliament.

Because the Dutch political-administrative elite is not selected for study or parental home, it is more open than in many other countries, Bas Heijne once said. But, he added, that creates conformity. How do you prove that you belong to this elite? Not because of your resume or accent, but because of your views. “So you have to say the things that the people around you are saying.”

Incidentally, someone from one of the other elites transfers to the Hague elite: Hans Wijers and, more recently, Wopke Hoekstra made it from business elite to cabinet. The writer Jan Terlouw (cultural elite) led D66 for years. Robbert Dijkgraaf, prominent physicist at Princeton University (expat elite) is Minister of Education. But in general, the bubble in The Hague stands on its own: most members stay there for their entire career.

Things work differently in Paris or London, where the political-administrative elite reside in the same city and often in the same neighborhoods as the cultural and financial elite. In France and the UK, partly because of this, the political elite is less of a separate caste. Many leading British and French politicians also have a foothold in the cultural and/or business elites. These people often have undergone a very selective education, and therefore believe that they are also culturally leading. Boris Johnson (Oxford, of course) writes books like many French politicians (although Emmanuel Macron's novel has never been published). Such people do not want to be conformists, but see themselves as creative thinkers. You can say anything about Brexit, but it is an original, imaginative idea, just like Macron's vision of an autonomously operating Europe. Such visions rarely arise from the elite of The Hague, where Rutte likes to quote the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt: 'If you have visions, you should visit the eye doctor.'

And British and French politicians overlap more than their Dutch equivalents with the business elite. Thierry Breton led several French companies, taught briefly at Harvard Business School, and served as French Economy Minister before becoming European Commissioner for the Internal Market in 2019. You will not easily find such a gifted centipede in The Hague.
The elite of The Hague thus has a fairly narrow experience, little intellectual imagination, and a small talent pool. These disadvantages also have their advantages. Too much imagination can be dangerous (see Brexit) and the risk of political corruption is greater when the door to lucrative jobs in the corporate elite is wide open. Johnson had a close relationship with the London-Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev, even appointing him Lord; Lebedev appointed ex-Treasury Secretary George Osborne as editor-in-chief of his newspaper, the London Evening Standard.
In The Hague, the risk of internal party corruption is greater than of personal corruption and enrichment. The software entrepreneur Steven Schuurman donated D66 a million euros and the Party for the Animals 350,000 euros. The investor Hans van der Wind, also head of fundraising for the CDA, gave the party more than a million euros.

The Dutch business elite resides in a few traditional reserves: Wassenaar, Bloemendaal, Aerdenhout, the Amsterdam canal belt and 't Gooi (but certainly not in growth centers such as Zoetermeer or Almere).
To understand this elite, I enlisted the help of what anthropologists call a "native informer": a group member who can explain the rituals. Jan Maarten Slagter, CEO of the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD) in Amsterdam, explained to me in an email how the Dutch gather the spiritual 'starting capital' to join the elite in general, but especially the business elite:
'My experience is that 'being one of us' is as important in the Netherlands as in England, but that the rules are much less clear for the outsider', he says. Because there is no public school system, the military is actually irrelevant, universities are all equally good and the nobility is much smaller and less visible, you have to have a subtler distinction. ‘The networks are crucial in this regard. Informal: the families your parents go skiing with. Formal: student body, McKinsey alumni. And often less visible: the right children's camps, the countless men's drinks clubs.' These are the places where you 'learn mores': what do you talk about in the minutes before the meeting/zoom call starts, what do you wear in your spare time?

According to Slagter, an 'old' family - studied for several generations, visible social positions, relevant networks, nobility or patriciate - gives '100 points'. You can lose part of it by not studying, not getting a good job, living in a terraced house, marrying a partner from a 'lower social strata'. “But part of it is made of granite: your familiar name, access to certain networks, knowledge of the 'right words'. And you can earn additional points through your own social achievements, cultural credibility (on the Rijksmuseum supervisory board) and the right “neat” ways of spending money: a holiday home in the Achterhoek, children at an expensive foreign university, art.'

Slagter's tip if you don't come from such a family: you can collect points in all of the aforementioned areas. That starts with gaining access to the right networks. Gymnasium, the right sports clubs, studying, including membership of the corps help with this. That is also where the right partner is found. Then a career that starts with a well-known 'training' company: McKinsey, Unilever, the big law or accountancy firms. Also good: an investment bank in London. Cultural credibility is important: Concertgebouw, Rijksmuseum, opera. Know your classics. In any case, go to the Matthäus-Passion (Leiden or Naarden). Sports: field hockey, tennis, golf (sailing, cricket, rowing, rugby are also good). Acceptable: you can watch football. Formula 1 and racing better not.

Slagter's points concept helps us to understand the entire Dutch elite. Not every elite member is created equal. Wopke Hoekstra, for example, has eighty elite points, Wilders maybe sixty, and the producer of a cultural radio program five, although Wilders will call her 'elitist' on social media.

Slagter describes a very exclusive business elite, although it has been somewhat democratized since the 1970s. The role of the patriciate and the nobility has been diminished to negligible, proved Meindert Fennema and Eelke Heemskerk in 2008 in their study New networks: The elite and the downfall of Netherlands Inc. This also weakens the traditional incubator function of student associations, such as Minerva in Leiden, the so-called 'gentleman factory'. Fraternities and sororities still help if you want to become a partner in a law firm or in accountancy, but especially new business sub-elites (such as tech, real estate) do not find this interesting.

In the 1990s, many foreigners were given top positions in Dutch companies, but this trend stalled again after the financial crisis. For example, the chairman of ABN Amro was the Briton Mark Fisher from November 2007 to February 2009, but is now just another Dutchman, Robert Swaak.

The Dutch cultural elite is located in Amsterdam and other large cities. This elite consists of the bosses of important museums, universities and TV channels, as well as influential journalists, writers, musicians, artists and academics. The cultural elite is leading the discussion about the Netherlands: what kind of country should it be, which alleged abuses are unacceptable, which reforms should be given priority.

Because cultural capital is a prerequisite for access to this elite, most members come from families who knew the right books and art. Family capital also helps, because the training process for the cultural elite is often long, and earnings are usually low, especially in the first professional years. In cultural sectors that do not revolve around language – such as visual art and music – the Dutch cultural elite is laced with foreigners from all around the world.

The number of highly educated white people is still limited in a small country, so it is inevitable that members of the cultural elite also have acquaintances in the business and political-administrative elites. Some went to school together. But the differences in positions, incomes and outlooks on life are so great that members of the different elites don't interact much with each other, and sometimes look down on each other. There is not one dominant city or place.

The fourth elite, the expat elite, is a by-product of the small scale and international focus of the Netherlands. Very ambitious Dutch people often go elsewhere to play for bigger prizes. The glass ceiling is particularly oppressive for highly educated women in the country with the lowest percentage of full-time working women in Europe. But also outside the Netherlands, these women often encounter this ceiling.

Dutch people with international careers rarely specialize in Dutch themes (too small) and often function entirely in English. Some can't even explain their professional expertise in Dutch. Examples of Dutch expatriate elite members are the late artist Karel Appel, the political scientist Ivo Daalder (former US ambassador to NATO), and the economist Willem Buiter (former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England). The export of gifted people reinforces the mediocrity of the native Dutch elites. And the export trend is intensifying as more and more children of the elites attend English-language universities. The brain drain can become crippling.

The Dutch elite is thus less selective, less imaginative, less wealthy, and less united than in countries such as the UK and France. All in all, it's less impressive and more 'horizontal'. But perhaps a moderate elite is the price to pay for a reasonably egalitarian country.

I think there is some interesting overlap with the "old boys network" discussion in football.

He received some critique for the 'brain drain' thing (citing facts and research) - but it does apply to football for sure.

Kuper himself also observed that while in 1990 the average Dutch citizen was only 8 and 10 percent richer as the France and UK, that is now approaching a 30 percent gap. See also the hours worked and the wealth.

 

>> Also the description of a (relatively) disunited and fractured elite is quite comparable to the situation in football - and the frequent quarrels/disagreements between football people.

 

May I ask a link to that post? Just curious.

Either way, I think most of those observations also have a bearing to the football situation.

I'd say until the mid-1960s the higher strata were still overrepresented among coaches and administrators (until the 1920s/1930s also among footballers, certainly).

This declined afterwards, especially when the golden generation came to prominence - but that is also true for general society (nobility - although always small by international standards - was relevant and overrepresented until the 1960s - also in something as the Foreign Affairs department for example).

 

Can you give a link to that article, as I asked above?

It is not only about financial capital, but also the networks and cultural capital one is born in. As we also see in the football scene.

Someone of nobility born without wealth has still an advantage because of his name, his network and mental capacities he has been grown up with. This is not an exception.

I'd interpret the Indonesian interracial relationships a bit different but let's not have a discussion about that.

Rather think about why we don't see the surnames of the business, cultural and political elites popping up in the football world and vice versa. Especially in the decades between the early 1960s to the 2000s this happened only sporadically (before the 1960s, football itself was quite elitist, like I said above). This limits the talent pool and creates a close-knitted world.

 

Thanks.

 

Just getting to this now. Here's an English-language article on this situation:
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...e-was-raped-and-assaulted-during-playing-days

 

Ten Hag loses his official first match going down 2-1 to Brighton.
Man United are very poor and Ten Hag has a massive job on his hands.
Inherited a terribly overrated overpaid team.
Should have been allowed to gut squad.
Ronaldo a big problem too.

 

I know its only 1 game, but United actually looked worse today then they did last year. No rhythm, no passion, and poor defending

 

Very poor team. Ten Hag set up for failure here as the Board has not given him control.
Ronaldo situation is bad for him too.
No club wants to deal with his attitude, but truth is he’s clearly their best attacking player by miles even though he’s 37.
Frenkie wants nothing to do with this either it appears.
Theatre of Nightmares.