Voting Station

Marco Van Basten

Please vote to return to collections.

Soccer Player

The Resume

    (October 31, 1964- )
    Born in Utrecht, Netherlands
    Birth name was Marcel Van Basten
    Striker for Ajax (1981-87) and AC Milan (1987-95)
    Played internationally for the Netherlands (1983-92)
    Managed the Netherlands national team (2004-09), Ajax (2008-09), Heerenveen (2012-14), and Az Alkmaar (2014)
    FIFA World Player of the Year (1992)

Why he might be annoying:

    Repeated ankle injuries forced him to stop playing at age 28.
    He spent another two years with AC Milan on the sidelines before officially retiring.
    He said, 'Losing as a manager was so painful I couldn't live with it.'
    He cut his managerial career short after he suffered stress-induced heart palpitations.
    While working as an analyst for Dutch sports, he said 'Sieg Heil' during a live broadcast (November 23, 2019).
    In a particularly egregious bit of bad timing, he invoked the Nazi salute on the same weekend that Dutch teams were observing a minute of silence before matches to protest discrimination.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was nicknamed 'the Swan of Utrecht' for his elegant style of play.
    He was the third player, after Johann Cruijff and Michael Platini, to win the Ballon d'Or for outstanding European player three times (1988-89, 1992).
    Despite his truncated career, he still made the top ten of several 'players of the 20th century' surveys, including those of FIFA (#6), France Football (#8), and World Soccer (#9).
    He later explained that the 'Sieg Heil' had been an 'ill-placed joke' about a colleague's attempt to speak German made when he thought he was off-mic: 'It wasn't my intention to shock people.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying