Blog: FC Bayern and the Dutch continue verbal fisticuffs
The tremendously caustic row between FC Bayern München and the Dutch Football Association (KNVB) continues to bubble viciously following yesterday’s statement by Bayern’s club doctor, Hans Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, in response to thoroughly unnecessary and childish jibes from former Managing Director of the KNVB, Henk Kesler. Martin Shillito investigates the feud.
It is a popular perception that the Germans and the Dutch despise one another. Germans are not often shy in admitting their rivalry with the Dutch usurps their war-induced one with the English. The relationship between the two countries, on a number of different levels, is a long way from healthy, and the current football-related battle over compensation for Arjen Robben’s injury that he picked up at the World Cup has done nothing to sooth the enmity.
The argument started when Robben returned to his club, Bayern München, after playing in his country’s World Cup final defeat to Spain in Johannesburg. On being assessed by Müller-Wohlfahrt, he was found to have a substantial tear in his left thigh muscle and was told he would be out of action for at least eight weeks.
Being arguably Bayern’s best player, this angered the club, and with the club’s hierarchy never ones to be shrinking violets, they accused the Dutch national team’s physios of not treating him properly, and threatened legal action to receive compensation to pay his wages for the time he was injured. Robben still has not played a game for Bayern this season.
A war of words has raged since the summer, but the nature of the words reached a new level on the puerile scale last week when Kesler decided to goad Bayern and Müller-Wohlfahrt in particular, after the KNVB received FIFA’s Medical Centre of Excellence Award on Thursday, the first time such an award has been given. Kesler is reported to have said: “We immediately sent a copy of the certificate to Munich.”
At the same time he could also not resist having a dig at Bayern’s club doctor, claiming Müller-Wohlfahrt only uses treatment products that he has developed himself in order to increase his revenue. Kesler carried on to say that when he met him at his clinic, he spoke poor English and insisted the best way to cure muscle injuries was through rest because that is what a famous book, that he himself had written, recommends. “Bert van Oostveen [current Managing Director of the KNVB] had problems taking him seriously after that“, Kesler claims.
These malevolently childish jibes provoked Müller-Wohlfahrt into a riposte yesterday as the club released a statement to the press on his behalf in which the club called Kesler ‘smug’, and the doctor himself labelled Kesler’s declarations as ‘embarrassing and mediocre, indeed laughable’. He also said: “I regret that the discussion is no longer being held on a medical level, but that it has descended onto a pathetic, personal level.” The worrying thing is this joust may only just be getting started. It may end up irrevocably grim, and already the fact that it is about football has been suppressed.
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