Nearly two decades after abruptly entering the world of professional soccer, Dutch billionaire and real estate investor Lesley Bamberger is building on his longtime defensive strategy.
The payoff to his practice of building slowly is a property portfolio spanning the Netherlands and abroad, along with a new role as chairman of the supervisory board of directors for a professional soccer giant, Amsterdam-based Ajax.
He was in Chicago recently visiting the 112-year-old Daniel Burnham-designed office building he’s invested in that just completed a $13 million project to add new amenities at a time when many older U.S. properties are struggling.
Real estate and soccer collided for him when Bamberger’s firm, Kroonenberg Groep, owned the stadium that was home to a professional soccer club now known as Almere City. After that club nearly went bankrupt, Bamberger was asked to buy it in 2010.
“I never should have done it, but 15 years later, it was a nice time,” Bamberger said. “We brought it to another level.”
In 2023 under Bamberger’s methodical business approach, Almere City reached the Eredivisie, the country’s top professional division. That led to the sale of the club last year to Japan’s Yanmar, which already owned the stadium’s naming rights.
"We really grew the team step by step," he told CoStar News. "It was a young club when we started. There was not a lot of history, so we had to make history. That’s what we did. In 2023, we were promoted to the top division because we won the playoffs. That was really a fantastic step."
He said one technique was to pay "players who were not under contract, or who came out of our youth league. The moment we started, no one wanted to play for Almere City. They wanted to play for an old club. Then, step by step, we got more interest from other players, we got more involved in the whole competition, and people didn’t see us as a small team anymore. Eventually, that’s why the promotion was so interesting, because we said we were going to grow and we did it."
Bringing operations experience
In his new soccer role, Bamberger will help oversee the business operations of Ajax. The club is best known for producing 1970s superstar Johan Cruyff, considered one of the sport’s all-time greats.
He said his firm is one of the largest private investors in real estate in the Netherlands, "but we are always conservative, also on the leverage side. We try to grow step by step to have continuity to whatever we do. Real estate is about location, location, location. Soccer is about players, players, players."
He said real estate and running a sports franchise have a lot in common.
"Either way, the way to do it is to be patient," he said. "It’s easy to spend a lot of money. In sports, you need the big players to make big money in a way. But sometimes you’re in a situation where you have to grow it and not take the risks. If it would be for sure that if you spend a lot of money you will be champion every year, that would be an easy one. But that is not the case. And in real estate, you know if you buy good locations, you can defend yourself much more. Maybe the better locations are more expensive, but it’s better as a long-term investment."
With his recent election by shareholders, Bamberger joins other business and sports leaders, including Cruyff’s son, Jordi — the team’s technical director — in efforts to return Ajax to past glory.
Current Ajax player Steven Berghuis is married to one of Bamberger’s three daughters, none of whom is expected to take over the real estate business.
Family roots
The family’s real estate empire was started by and named for Bamberger’s grandfather, Jacob Kroonenberg. They worked together until Kroonenberg’s death in 1996, when Bamberger took over and began expanding the business.
Today, Kroonenberg Groep owns a property portfolio valued at approximately 3 billion euros in the Netherlands, along with a few assets in North America.
That includes the historic Chicago office building owned in partnership with Florida-based Trump Group — a company led by brothers Jules and Eddie Trump, natives of South Africa, and that is not affiliated with President Donald Trump’s real estate firm. They have owned the 20-story building at 25 E. Washington St. for 46 years.
Amid a gloomy office leasing market, the partners recently completed a $13 million project to create amenities such as an open-air courtyard within the building’s light well on the seventh floor.
The cost of the project is a testament to Bamberger’s detail-oriented and ultra-long-term strategy, said Dan Shannon, managing principal at Aspire Properties, which manages and leases the building.
It entailed removing part of one floor to create the open-air entryway from the seventh floor, painstakingly expanding the clay tile arch floor and specially ordering bricks from Spain. But once again, the slow and steady approach paid off.