Soccer fishes for talent in cycling

In two weeks, on December 1, Merijn Zeeman will go from being the sports director of Visma of Vingegaard, Van Aert, Jorgensen and company to commanding the direction of AZ Alkmaar, a team in the Dutch first division. It is the latest case of a trend that has been occurring in recent years, a transfer of talent from cycling to football.

Zeeman arrived in 2012 at what was then called Rabobank, a structure that faltered and hit rock bottom in the following years. In his farewell, Visma said that “after 13 years of being responsible for the team’s successful reconstruction, Zeeman now chooses a new step in his career.” And the word reconstruction is accurate. With the entry of the Jumbo firm in 2015 and the signing of Primoz Roglic a year later, what was a drifting team became a reference in the peloton. Zeeman has been the head of the team since 2017 and managed to build the best team in the world, displacing Ineos.

He will join AZ Alkmaar as general manager. It is a team with a good reputation that stands out for its methodology and the development of young talent. This is what those responsible seek when turning to cycling, which in the last decade and a half – driven by the emergence of the Sky team with its innovative and successful approaches – has gone from being a traditional sport to a pioneer in the use of science and technology. technology.

Two seasons ago, Zeeman attended Manchester United’s winter training camp, invited by his coach, Erik Ten Hag. «He asked me to tell him what I saw, to give him feedback. “He’s very open to that.” Ten Hag is no longer at United, but there is also a cycling man in the club’s first office: David Braislford. The man who was the great ideologist of the Sky-Ineos project made the leap to Old Trafford thanks to the purchase of the institution by the British petrochemical multinational.

The cycling team has just held its first winter training camp, which took it to United’s sports city in Carrington. There, Egan Bernal, Geraint Thomas and company have attended talks, carried out activities and, naturally, played football. The other great team on the World Tour, the UAE, lost doctor Iñigo San Millán last year, signed by Athletic.

Football, with its economic resources, has been fishing in other modalities for some time. Cycling suffers from it now that it has made its big leap into modernity, but other more advanced sports have also seen talent flow to football. Without going any further, at AZ Alkmaar, Zeeman will meet Billy Beane. Former professional baseball player, he became popular thanks to the movie ‘Moneyball’, in which Brad Pitt recreated his time as manager of the Oakland Athletics, in which he shook the foundations of his sport with his signing system based on statistics. . Chelsea has taken a similar path, which has just signed Sachin Gupta, responsible for the advanced use of statistics in the Houston Rockets and the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA.

La Real plays next week against Ajax. Its top sports executive until spring was Maurits Hendriks, former Spanish field hockey coach and head of the Netherlands Olympic delegation at the London and Rio Games. Knowledge does not include specialties.