Winston Bogarde no longer has any contact at all with Ajax, as he indicates in an interview with ESPN. At the moment, he is mainly focusing on the Winston Bogarde Academy, an academy for defenders aged 10 to 18.
Bogarde left Ajax at the end of the 2021/22 season after two years as an assistant coach. He had also worked in the youth set-up for many years. However, his contract still had another year to run. According to Bogarde, the club never told him why he had to leave.
Previously, he had already said a return to Ajax was probably never going to happen. Nothing has changed there. "There is no contact at all, but there does not need to be. Ajax are busy with their own thing and I am busy with my own thing. I am fine with it like this," he says to ESPN.
For a former Ajax player, it still hurts to watch the club's decline in recent years. Bogarde therefore draws a hard conclusion about the sporting level.
"It has gone from the Champions League to the Conference League, so I think it is clear that the level has dropped heavily, heavily. The standard has gone down and you see that on the pitch every week as well," Bogarde observes.
Meanwhile, Bogarde is doing everything he can at his own Academy to keep growing in the coming years. "I am going to set the standard and guard it, but I also want to train as many coaches as possible in my methodology."
"We have to pass it on to the youth, because in the end the youth are the future," he concludes.