Liberec has officially changed hands. Kania took over the majority of the shares, Nezmar the director

The deal was announced by the Liberec club on its website, at the same time informing about the dismissal of the company’s current board of directors and supervisory board.

Kani’s wife Petra, Tomáš Netopil, Filip Gigal are now working in the management. Long-time local official Zbyněk Štiller is not missing.

“It is a great honor for us that we can become the majority shareholders of such an important Czech football club,” said Kania, who now owns 75.65 percent of the club’s shares.

“Our unequivocal goal for the coming seasons is to return the club to where it historically belongs, i.e. to the top of the league and to fight every year in the preliminary rounds for participation in the basic groups of European cups.”

He marked Nezmar’s appointment as the first step, others will come gradually. “And they will be transparently communicated with fans, partners and the football public,” added Kania.

Graduated as an economic engineer, Nezmar is a former long-time striker, later the club’s stopper. In total, he played for Slovan for nine years with a three-year break, helping to win two league titles in 2002 and 2012.

After the end of his active career in December 2012, he immediately took up the position of sports director. After five years, he headed to Slavia, where he took coach Jindřich Trpišovský with him, whom he brought to Liberec in the summer of 2015.

Nezmar worked in Slavia for less than three years, together with Trpišovský they created a very successful team. He finished there in August 2020, he had a different opinion about the future direction of the club.

When a corruption scandal broke out two months later involving the then vice-chairman of the association, Roman Berber, or Roman Rogoz, the manager of Slavoj Vyšehrad, Nezmar admitted in advance that he would figure in police wiretapping. He was in contact with the two main defendants in the case, which is headed for a June verdict.

“People often have the feeling that anyone who ever met him must have run a red light, but that’s not the case. Maybe someone will say that I drove on orange. I was moving in the gray zone in which Czech football works,” he admitted to Seznam Zprávy.

In the spring of 2021, he worked as a consultant at the Polish club Podbeskidzie Bielsko-Biala. He allegedly lost his job at the consulting firm Deloitte because of his participation in the wiretapping.

Nezmar has been cooperating with the new Liberec owner Kania for a long time, he helped him in entering the football environment and also in obtaining the Liberec acquisition.

Thirty-one-year-old Kania, executive director of JK Education/Consilium, acquired the club from Ludvík Karel, who joined Slovan in the mid-1990s and helped him out of financial problems. During his era, Liberec won three league titles in 2002, 2006 and 2012. It also reached the European Cup several times, reaching the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup in 2002.