Vitesse Arnhem have been dealt a dramatic reprieve after an appeals court ruled against the Royal Dutch Football Association’s (KNVB) decision to revoke their professional licence.
Vitesse looked doomed after a civil court in Utrecht judged in favour of the KNVB last month, appearing to confirm the 133-year-old club would be kicked out of the Netherlands’ second division. Many supporters were resigned to at least one season in the cold after no arrangement to continue in amateur football could be reached, but they will now be able to watch their team again after a shock turnaround on Wednesday.
The Arnhem-Leeuwarden court of appeal heard Vitesse’s case on Monday, with some experts suggesting the club had no more than a 1% chance of success. But it has suspended the decision of the KNVB’s licensing committee and appeals committee to withdraw the licence and ordered the governing body “to immediately re-admit Vitesse to professional competitions”.
The ruling sparked wild celebration in the centre of Arnhem and at the club’s training ground. “I’m completely flabbergasted,” Susanne Wichhart, chair of the Vitesse supporters’ association, told the Guardian. “And happy of course. What a rollercoaster.”
It is the latest astonishing twist in a long, complex saga that led to Vitesse losing their licence last month over what the KNVB’s appeals committee called “a multi-year pattern of deception, circumvention, and undermining of the licensing system, as well as a lack of transparency”. Vitesse had been docked 18 points during the 2023-24 season and were relegated to the second tier. Further deductions meant they also finished bottom of that division last season.
Vitesse may be best known to British fans through their previous close association with Chelsea, from whom they took a number of loanees in the 2010s. Mason Mount and Armando Broja are among those to have made the move. The KNVB began its latest investigation into Vitesse after reporting by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in 2023, in which leaked documents appeared to show Roman Abramovich had secretly bankrolled the club for years while owning Chelsea.
A subsequent attempted takeover by the American businessman Coley Parry was blocked by the KNVB. A local consortium named the Sterkhouders agreed a plan to save the club this year but it was viewed by the KNVB as insufficient to save them from being thrown out into the cold.
Now Vitesse will plot their return to a second division that is already four games old. The logistics for their reinsertion remain unclear; in theory they may restart on 12 or 13 September, when the next round of matches takes place, but the task of raising a team looks severe. Many senior players departed amid the uncertainty, although their captain, the former Manchester United defender Alexander Büttner, is among those to have stayed on.
“I have goose bumps all over,” Büttner told the local newspaper De Gelderlander. “People have worked so hard for this. I’ve seen so much pain in recent weeks. I always said I wasn’t leaving Vitesse. I could have gone to 10 other clubs, which were concrete. But I thought: ‘I’d rather quit football than leave now.’”
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In the long term, the club’s restructuring must be approved by the KNVB and an agreement regarding its sustainability reached with the governing body. But for now Vitesse are clear to compete. “This ruling gives us breathing room and perspective,” said Michel Schaay, the chair of Sterkhouders.
