Sjoerd Mossou calls the KNVB’s OneLove campaign ‘a rare clusterfuck’. This coming weekend, the captains of the Eredivisie will play with a OneLove captain’s armband against racism and discrimination. However, Orkun Kökçü refused and wears a custom captain’s armband with the text ‘respect for everyone’ on Sunday during the Classic against Ajax.
“Imagine. You come up with a campaign that is as peaceful, neutral, politically correct and all-encompassing general as you can come up with,” Mossou writes in his column for the General Journal. “You try to file away every conceivable frayed edge, because oh woe if you step on someone’s toes. Very carefully you design a heart with some random colors, very deliberately without a rainbow, because before you know it you will be pushed into a left corner – or even worse: maybe FIFA will get angry.”
Mossou describes the OneLove campaign as a giant compromise, “an overcooked piece of cauliflower wrapped in a statement of tolerance.” The columnist saw how the campaign exploded right in the face of the KNVB. According to Mossou, this is partly due to Kökçü, who refused to wear the band ‘out of religious conviction’. “The captain of Feyenoord suspected a secret rainbow in it – and of course that could not be the intention. He was really against racism and discrimination, according to Kökçü, respect for everyone and so on, but propagating lhbti acceptance? No sorry, that was really a bridge too far ‘for personal reasons’.”
Kökçü’s refusal caused quite a bit of controversy. “Part of the Feyenoord supporters suddenly saw Kökçü as a fighter of free speech – a rebel who stood up against the so-called ‘woke movement’. A rather comical reversal of things, because Kökçü’s refusal had nothing to do with ‘woke’ or ‘non-woke’, of course, but with his own personal, medieval beliefs,” says Mossou.
The columnist believes that there is little left to salvage from the campaign. “The controversy completely overshadowed the message, and the lack of communication and decisiveness led to a rare clusterfuck. But in the context of more tolerance, a small helping hand still feels appropriate. Because fair is fair (and peace on earth): ‘OneLove’ may have failed, but it was well-intentioned. Also worth something. Especially in these dark times.”