Commercial football schools are no longer allowed to use municipal sports fields in Amsterdam from next season. The municipality announced this in a letter on Monday. Among other things, there will be two supervisors who will have to check whether the football schools have concluded a rental agreement before they train on the 145 municipal fields.
Within the Amsterdam amateur sports world there has been discussion for some time about the approximately eighty local football schools, where children receive extra training for a fee. An attractive offer for (parents of) children who would love to reach professional football. The schools earn good money (about 13 euros per training), but often do not pay for the fields they use. At an amateur association, training costs less than two euros. In the meantime, those accessible amateur clubs are often having a hard time; little money comes in and offering high quality training is difficult.
The situation that has arisen is crooked, says alderman Sofyan Mbarki, especially because the amateur clubs “also suffer from improper use because this causes conflicts about the use of the field, for example”. Mbarki also points to the fact that many of the schools do not request a Declaration of Behavior from their employees, which can create unsafe situations for football students.
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