Police Trying To Ruin Eredivisie Fun

By: chris | December 13th, 2007

m3-police

Expect Dutch football fans to be pounding Ice-T’s anthem this weekend as the Dutch police look to cancel two of the biggest fixtures of the year, and potentially canceling the entire weekend’s list of fixtures. The popo are unhappy about their wages (among other things), and they’re going to take to a highly visible place to make their demands known, namely Amsterdam ArenA and de Kuip, the former home to Ajax and latter to Feyenoord Rotterdam. And the police weren’t nice enough to schedule this little demonstration when Ajax and Feyenoord would be away for the weekend. Nope, they’re hosting two of the biggest games of the campaign: Ajax-PSV on Sunday and Feyenoord-AZ on Saturday.

On one hand, the police are a bunch of assholes for pulling this little stunt and forcing the fans to lose out - fans who probably have zero control over their collective bargaining agreement. On the other, if you’re looking for your voice to be heard, this is a pretty surefire way of getting it done.

According to goal.com, via De Telegraaf, a Dutch newspaper which is difficult to navigate and contains a lot of vowels:

It is understood that should the police actions go ahead as planned both these high profile matches will be postponed, with all the other round 15 Eredivisie fixtures also in danger, as several major cities’ mayors have suggested due to police force shortage.

I don’t know how buddy-buddy the relationship between the Dutch police and citizens is, but I’m not sure this is a good way of improving things. And if the games are canceled, let’s hope they do so beforehand, not an hour before kickoff or so; because I can’t imagine a mass congregation of police is going to be greeted with handshakes and hugs from football fans who just had their perfectly wonderful weekend full of footy fans. Throw in a few cocktails and you have bad news. Real bad.

Something to watch out for as the weekend approaches.