‘KNVB should not rally behind megalomaniacal powerhouse Infantino’

The 211 members of the World Football Federation will gather next Wednesday for the 73rd FIFA Congress in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. A key item on the agenda is the re-election of Gianni Infantino as FIFA president. The victory is already in for him, as there is no opposing candidate.

The Dutch soccer federation KNVB is also voting for Infantino. “The KNVB’s position is to stay in talks,” Jeroen Stekelenburg explained in Studio Football. “But Infantino has had too many slip-ups in our eyes. This man is a megalomaniac ruler. You should not support that as the Netherlands.”

At the last World Cup, the KNVB along with six other European countries clashed with FIFA over the wearing of the OneLove band by the captains. Since FIFA put the penalty of a yellow card on wearing the band, the countries in question eventually felt forced to abandon the action.

And barely three months after the much-discussed tournament in Qatar, Infantino thus gets the vote of the Netherlands again after all.

In his spoken column The Wall Layer, Hugo Borst also argues that the KNVB should cast a blank vote in the FIFA election.

Last week KNVB president Just Spee met with Infantino in Paris and after what Spee said was a “robust” conversation, the Dutch president said the worst of the chill would be out of the air. They posed together for a photo.

“The world is sometimes more complex than we think in our little country,” Spee told the Algemeen Dagblad. “Infantino’s position was not easy. He had to take into account what Qatar wanted, with the big sponsors. That does not alter the fact that we did not expect things to go the way they did with OneLove. The signals beforehand were really different.”

“You can yell no loudly, but then what?” wondered Spee.

Stekelenburg thinks differently. “A blank vote is basically for the stage, but sometimes it is important to let people know what you think. The KNVB didn’t like Qatar, the KNVB doesn’t like Saudi Arabia. Vote for Infantino? Then I think sometimes it is worth something to make a statement and not do that.

Watch the regular End Signal column on Frans Bouwmeester (by Frank Heinen) below. Check further excerpts about Feyenoord and thanking Vincent Janssen for Orange.