Jan Dirk van der Zee, director of amateur football of the KNVB, responded on Tuesday evening to the relaxation announced by the caretaker cabinet. The curfew will expire on April 28, shopping without an appointment will be possible again and terraces may open during the day, but athletes will have to wait longer for new relaxation. Van der Zee writes in a column on the KNVB website that clearly ‘no football player was involved’ in drawing up the cabinet’s opening plan.
According to the opening plan, the sports clubs will be accessible to everyone on 11 May. Currently, young people up to the age of 27 are allowed to exercise outside in groups and teams. Hundreds of thousands of members of football clubs have been at home since October last year, because they are over 26 years old. They are only allowed to come to the club to kick a ball with another player. is exactly what football players want, otherwise they would have gone ping-pong. It is about football for them. Fun. Exercise. Sweating. Whores “, writes Van der Zee. “But if you don’t know that feeling, you won’t miss it. That’s why no one has been in the caretaker cabinet to stand up for it.”
According to the director, there is ‘blindness’ to the fact that sport can be a means to ‘get out of the crisis safely’. He points to ‘numerous’ studies that show that exercising in the open air is safe and also emphasizes that exercise in an organized context is good for health and resilience. Van der Zee therefore believes that sport should not be seen as a sector, as is the case with, for example, the catering industry, shops and schools, but as a ‘public matter’. “We should therefore have been at the forefront of the reopening of the Netherlands. Now, according to the opening plan, we are only allowed to play matches in July, one week before the school holidays.”
The planned KNVB Regiocup, small-scale regional competitions for amateur clubs, is therefore endangered. And that tournament is ‘the only thing football will have in the coming months and which children and adults have been looking forward to for months’, says Van der Zee, who is also concerned about the precedent effect of the pilots with test certificates for football players. “Little is said about it, but it is in the air that we are working towards a test company. With the danger that players – including the pupils – will have to submit a negative test certificate before they are allowed to play against another club. No way. The KNVB amateur football does not participate in that. “
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