That will be a season with the chairman in the saddle. “There is enough energy. At the moment there is no reason to leave at all,” he says. “Leaving it also creates insecurity for people.”
Exciting year
The goal is of course the shortest possible stay in the Kitchen Champion Division. But how will the club do that? “We just have to wait and see how things will go,” says Lubbers. “Everything also has financial consequences. Just look at the office staff. They are all going to hand it in. We are all working on it now.”
Also in the selection must be cut. “We already had a lot of expiring contracts this season. So we had players that we really had to sell, but the problem now is that players that you would like to continue with, first wait and see what happens next.”
For a long time there was talk about a new stadium for FC Emmen in order to become a stable premier divisionist. Perhaps that plan is on the back burner in the minds of many supporters, but that does not apply to Lubbers himself. According to him, the arrival of the new stadium is even more urgent than ever. “Then you can further professionalize. You can put more people in it, you have more income, we can accommodate the office staff better and then you can also return to the premier league in a stable manner.”
Financial consequences
Before that happens, FC Emmen will have to wait and see what financial consequences the corona year has. Supporters can still claim compensation for the missed games of last season. Fans will also be able to choose whether or not to take a discount on their new season ticket.
The chairman has confidence in the support of the fans. “That confidence is very high, but it does not alter the fact that it is not 100 percent. It will also depend on everyone how much we want this back and what people are willing to do and not be able to do for it,” he says. Lubbers does not want to make an appeal to the supporters to waive compensation and discounts. “People should be free to do so. You cannot impose that and I absolutely do not want to condemn it if people do choose to do so. But it would be very nice.”
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heavy evening
But first FC Emmen has to prepare for a year in which not Ajax and AZ, but young Ajax and young AZ will come to visit. Although it looked like for a long time that FC Emmen would be relegated, there was still hope for the people of Emmen in the second half of the season. “We were actually resurrected as a phoenix. We came out of the hospital healed and healthy and actually crashed in the parking lot”, he describes the blow that FC Emmen had to deal with.
The feeling at FC Emmen was good, but the comeback came to an abrupt end when NAC proved too strong. A deception for Lubbers. “We had the right feeling that we would get the job done. Then you fly out on penalties. It’s one game and you can’t recover anything in a second game.”
The conversation between Ronald Lubbers and Margriet Benak can be heard here.
Self-critical
Lubbers says that in retrospect he would like to be a bit more critical in terms of sports. “I have few regrets, but there are certainly things I would like to do differently,” he says. “You take a certain expectation pattern with you from the flow we were in last season. Convenience is too big a word, but I might have had to be a bit tighter at times.”
Lubbers also looks back at the times when the coin fell the wrong way for FC Emmen. “If you get five red cards at the beginning of the season, four of which are dropped, then it is not going well either. In the end you would have made it with one more point and there have been many times when that could have happened. if it becomes 0-0 at RKC instead of 1-0, everyone talks about it being great, what has been achieved in Emmen. “
Yet the chairman does not look for excuses in moments of bad luck or luck. “You have mutual trust because choices and things have always gone right. And now things suddenly go wrong. You can’t blame anyone for that, but it does happen,” he says. “Normally you shouldn’t be downgraded with the budget we had, then you just didn’t do it right. Those are the hard facts. There are all kinds of demonstrable reasons why things happened, but it is the way it is.”
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