Yang Yang was no sucker. On the contrary, he had always considered himself a smart, practical man.
His investment in Ajax was by no means driven solely by personal affection. He had plenty of other goals as well.
Now that he had invested, he would do everything he could to make it work and get Ajax back on the right track.
Van der Sar, Overmars, Bergkamp, Edgar Davids, and the others were all Ajax legends with deep feelings for the club. They were also its management, so running Ajax well was not merely their professional duty, but a career they wanted to build.
European football was neither a vast world nor a tiny one. With their reputations, as long as they did well at Ajax, they would never have to worry about finding work. Nor was this a profession that depended on youth; it could support them for the rest of their lives.
That was why Yang Yang had always known they were different from the people on the supervisory board.
The facts had also proved that they genuinely wanted to achieve something at Ajax.
"This is our preliminary list of young players we'd like to bring in this summer. Most are around fifteen, which means they could be ready to contribute in two or three years."
Van der Sar handed Yang Yang a recruitment list and a thick stack of player reports.
Ajax was renowned for developing young talent, but that did not mean it had to start with the youngest age groups. Quite the opposite: its greatest strength had always been developing and refining players between fifteen and twenty—the so-called unfinished products—and turning them into established players.
Yang Yang had already been seventeen when he joined Ajax. Suarez had been twenty, and Huntelaar and others had also