“It’s very sad news” - Richard Plugge on the departure of Merijn Zeeman from Visma | Lease a Bike

Over the last few seasons, Team Visma | Lease a Bike have been building an incredibly talented squad and after winning all three Grand Tours last season it was clear to see that they were by far the best team in the world.

Someone who played a key role in building their current squad is Merijn Zeeman, who has worked as a sports director for over a decade having joined the team in 2013. However, after building Visma | Lease a Bike into a Grand Tour winning superteam, he is now set to leave to take a new role as the CEO of the Dutch football club AZ Alkmaar.

On the departure of Zeeman from the team, the CEO of Visma | Lease a Bike Richard Plugge said in an interview with GCN at Paris-Roubaix that “it’s very sad news. On a personal level we are friends, we’re working now for 12 years together, we built this team together and he is very instrumental and very important for the team”.

However, Plugge is firm on the fact that the team will not crumble once Zeeman leaves the team, as he said “we always said that nobody is bigger than the team, no individual is bigger than the collective, so we need to make sure that the collective is able to fill in gaps if individuals are leaving. So that's a bit of what we did in the past two years already”.

Plugge also knew that this would eventually happen though, as he went on to say “he told the story himself, how he looks at things, and after 12 years it’s sometimes time to do something else. He wanted to go to football one day. It was his dream to be working in football one day, and at a certain moment it’s time to go”.