If Sekou Cissé did not choose Feyenoord, but FC Twente in the summer of 2009, the club from Enschede would not have been the champion. That is the opinion of former CEO Aldo van der Laan.
FC Twente wanted to bring Cissé to the Grolsch Veste after a top season with Roda JC. However, Feyenoord pulled the longest, to the disappointment of the club from Enschede. In retrospect, it was luck in an accident: Cissé hardly played for Feyenoord due to a lingering toe injury and Twente decided to buy Bryan Ruiz.
“If he had chosen us, we would not have been a champion. Then he would have been injured with us all season and had ‘au’ on his toe. You have to be lucky,” Van der Laan tells RTV Oost.
Eventually Ruiz came to Twente, but there were also initial doubts about that. “At one point I thought: take a look. But Aldo pushed the transfer through,” said ex-chairman Joop Munsterman. “And his first three balls bounced off his legs, then we thought: oh god what have we now brought home. “
Ruiz scored 24 times in the 2009/2010 season and thus had a large share in the historic league title of FC Twente.
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