The 211 members of FIFA will gather this Wednesday for the FIFA 73 Congress in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. An important item on the agenda is the re-election of Gianni Infantino as FIFA President. Victory is already his because there is no opponent.

The Dutch football association KNVB also voted in favor of Infantino. “The KNVB has the attitude to keep talking,” Jeroen Stekelenburg explains. soccer studio. “But Infantino had too many slip-ups in our eyes. This man is a megalomaniac ruler. As the Netherlands, you should not support that.”

At the last World Cup, KNVB, along with six other European countries, clashed with FIFA over the captains wearing the OneLove bracelet. With FIFA imposing a yellow card penalty for wearing the belt, the nations involved eventually felt compelled to refrain from the act.

Barely three months after the much-discussed tournament in Qatar, Infantino had the Netherlands voted once again.

In his spoken column De Muurligger, Hugo Borst also advocated that the KNVB should cast an empty vote in the FIFA elections.

Last week, KNVB Chairman Just Spee met with Infantino in Paris and, according to Spee, after a “firm” conversation, the cold would be worse than the air, the Dutch president said. They posed for a picture together.

“The world is sometimes more complex than we think in our country,” Spee said in Algemeen Dagblad. “The position of Infantino was not easy. He had to take into account what Qatar wanted, with the main sponsors. However, we did not expect things to go like this with OneLove. The previous signals were really different.”

“You can say no out loud,” Spee asked, “but then what?”

Stekelenburg thinks otherwise. A blank vote is mainly for the stage, but sometimes it’s important to tell us what you think. KNVB didn’t like Qatar, and KNVB didn’t like Saudi Arabia. Vote for Infantino? Then I think sometimes it’s worth making a statement and not doing it.

See below for a final reference to the regular section on Frans Baumeister (by Frank Heinen). Also check out the excerpt about Feyenoord and Vincent Janssen’s Thanks for Orange.