Homophobic chants in football stadiums can also lead to match strikes from next season, the KNVB has stated announced Monday. If football players or referees are targeted en masse, repeatedly and/or for a long time, perpetrators will first receive a warning from the stadium speaker. The referee will (temporarily) stop the match if the warning has no effect.
The new measure means that the KNVB has concluded that the focus on awareness and prevention alone has not been of sufficient use. According to the football association, at the end of last month, all football clubs expressed professional football during the general meeting that they wanted to put an end to homophobic chants.
“Football is for everyone and from everyone,” says KNVB director of professional football Marianne van Leeuwen. “There are no chants in which the word homo is used as a swear word. Together we have drawn that line.” Perpetrators can receive a stadium ban of up to 18 months.
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Paid football clubs have, as laid down in the Directive on Combating Verbal Violence, for years the possibility to act against homophobic chants. “During the match, they are also primarily responsible for stopping the match,” the KNVB writes in that directive.
Yet in reality it rarely if ever happens that home clubs stop a match because of homophobic chants. In April, PSV player Xavi Simons was the target of this during the cup match in Spakenburg. Spakenburg fans repeatedly chanted that Simons was gay, but the club — an amateur club, that is — failed to intervene.