The technician was sentenced to one year of suspended prison. He won’t be able to coach in the Czech Republic until 2030, but he could do so in another country. The victims: “A mockery”
Women are not safe even inside a changing room. Or at least the 14 players of FC Slovacko, a club in the Czech top division, were unwittingly filmed for four years by their coach while they were changing and showering. The technician Petr Vlachovsky, who was also found in possession of child pornography, was sentenced last May, without a public hearing, to a one-year suspended prison sentence and received a five-year nationwide ban. “An extremely lenient sentence”, according to the players involved and Fifpro, the global union of footballers. Vlachovsky could in fact return to coach in the Czech Republic as early as 2030. Immediately, in the rest of the world. And it is precisely a global disqualification that Fifpro would like to obtain.
the facts
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Vlachovsky – previously in charge of the Czech Republic’s Under-19 women’s national team – has for years used a miniature camera hidden in a backpack to film Slovacko players. The youngest was 17 years old. “Some of my teammates started to worry that someone was watching them, even through the window. They had difficulty sleeping, some girls were vomiting”, said Kristyna Janku, Slovacko player at the time of Vlachovsky’s arrest to the Czech newspaper Seznam Zprav. A nightmare that left deep trauma in the players: “Everywhere I went an alarm went off in my head and I kept checking if there was a camera somewhere – Alena Peckova always tells the Polish media – I also started having problems with my body. I felt disgusted”.
a mockery
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The players are angry, disappointed by the sentence imposed: “We all think it’s a joke – explained Janku – but the investigator had warned me in advance that we shouldn’t expect anything special”. But the girls, at least, were not left alone: Cafh, the Czech footballers’ union and Fifpro supported them right from the start. The former are clamoring for the Czech Federation – the criminal trial and the administrative proceedings of the Football Association are separate and can take place in parallel – to ban Vlachovsky and all sexual offenders from returning to a football pitch for life. The latter are helping female footballers explore possible legal avenues to obtain a global ban. This is why the Cafh and the athletes have chosen to make the case public: although this leads to an increase in media pressure on the victims, publicly reporting the matter also represents the first step towards working against abuse in sport and preventing it from happening again.
zero tolerance
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The president of Cafh, member of the board of directors of Fifpro Europe, Marketa Vochoska Haindlova said that the union is “in regular contact with the players to ensure that their needs are adequately met”. The union provided them with legal representation and the ability to take advantage of “the mental health and counseling program for athletes, provided by experienced professionals.” The line is that of “zero tolerance”, the objective is “to use this case to promote an amendment that provides for a lifetime ban for all sexual offenders. It is the only way”, explained Haindlova. Fifpro is also pushing for a strengthening of safety and protection measures for female athletes as well as for easier sharing of information between countries in the presence of convicted coaches.
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