Football

From 24 Oranges:

Nijmegen youth football club Quick 1888 […] has adopted a discriminatory policy by “putting children of foreign descent who apply for membership on a waiting list, while accepting native Dutch youth members.” Apparently, parents of non-native children don’t help out with football, don’t have cars to drive the kids to games or have to work on Saturdays.

That was the first I heard of this story; googling gave me the full story from the Dutch papers. Quick 1888 is an amateur club with a rich past, started as a cricket club and branched out into football, having some success before Dutch football went professional, now happily playing in the amateur leagues. Apparantly they now have about eighty percent members of “non-Dutch origin” (allochtoon as the charming Dutch phrase has it), especially in the junior teams. Apparantly having so many allochtonen is a problem for the club as, so the club says, they are less involved, less likely to volunteer, more difficult to communicate with and supposedly there’s also more trouble with them off and on the playing field. Hence the decision to select new members on origin, to get to a 50-50 percent balance of allochtonen and autochtonen. What’s more, this policy was actually undertaken on advice of the Dutch football union!

It is of course breathtakingly racist to enact such a policy, illegal as hell as well, but a more unofficial policy of selection is not uncommon; as the club itself notes, most other clubs in Nijmegen are pretty white already. You would think that all things being
equal you would get roughly the same numbers of white/non-white players at the various clubs, not one club having most of the non-white players and the other clubs few if any… One innocuous explenation could be that Quick 1888 for one reason or another was the first club that a few allochtone players joined and hence become more attractive to others until most of these players were at Quick 1888, few elsewhere. Or it could be something slightly more sinister. Anybody who’s not a child knows how easy it is for a group to discourage outsiders from joining without ever having to articulate explicit policies for doing so.

That Quick 1888 found it both necessary to form such a policy and did not expect much controversy about it is a sign of the changed political climate in the Netherlands. We’ve long been a nation that’s much less tolerant than we like to think we are, but much of our intolerance was hidden, not talked about, only visible to the people it was aimed against. With the rise of Pim Fortuyn and later Geert Wilders this taboo was broken, to the point where it became normal to talk about e.g. “kut Marokkaantjes” (little Moroccan c*nts) in a debate about street crime. Many autochtoon Dutch people have always been likely to believe the reasons the club gave for this policy anyway, feeding into long existing prejudices about foreigners,; the difference is that these now can be openly articulated, rather than remain unspoken in polite society.

This is not to say that I don’t believe Quick 1888 is lying about the problems it has had in the past few years: lack of voluntarism, communication difficulties with parents not speaking Dutch or more criminality; I’m sure these were very real problems. But thinking these problems can be solved if only more white people became members is deeply wrong. These are symptoms of a failing club, one in which the (white) administration/long term volunteers (coaches, technical staff, field maintainers, canteen staff) have become alienated from the larger (non-white) part of its membership. It won’t be the first time that has happened. What is needed is fewer white people in charge and a more creative approach to solving those problems, not blaming allochtonen.