Netherlands<\/a> in January 2023 having already held the post for two years, from 2018-2020, had also hinted at retirement from coaching. \u201cMoreover, the past few years have made me realise once again that \u200cthere are more important things than football,\u201d he added. \u201cFootball has been my life, but health is priceless. When someone you love dearly is fighting a tough battle, your perspective changes.<\/p>\n\u201cDespite her own illness, my wife Bartina supported and encouraged me every day to finish my work as head coach. That shows incredible strength. I am more grateful to her for that than I could ever \u200cput into words.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nigel de Jong, technical director of the Dutch football association (KNVB), described the World Cup campaign as disappointing. He would have had a major say \u200bin whether Koeman stayed or not had the coach not quit. \u201cThe objective was the semi-finals, and the ambition was to become world champions,\u201d said the former midfielder. \u201cUnfortunately, we didn\u2019t achieve that. Yes, we are a long way off. That is the conclusion. We have to be honest about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Netherlands players who missed penalties in the shootout against Morocco suffered racist abuse online, the KNVB said in a statement. Justin Kluivert, Quinten \u200bTimber and Crysencio Summerville all failed to score as Morocco edged the Dutch 3-2, and were subjected to discriminatory, racist and hateful comments \u200bon social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe find \u200cthis appalling, and we will file a case with Meld Online \u200cDiscriminatie [Report Online Discrimination],\u201d read a KNVB statement. \u201cOnce a report is filed, their legal staff assess whether the statement constitutes a punishable offence. This can lead to a formal complaint being lodged with the public prosecution service, which may then initiate a \u200ccriminal investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not the first time players have faced racist online abuse \u200bafter missing penalties at a major tournament. Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho suffered abuse following England\u2019s loss to Italy in the final of Euro 2020, leading to two people being sentenced to prison and another receiving a suspended \u200bsentence. In the weeks \u200bfollowing the tournament, British \u200bpolice arrested multiple individuals as part of a \u200bwidespread crackdown \u200con online hate \u200bspeech targeting \u200bthe players.<\/p>\n
\u201cFootball brings together millions of different people, whereas discrimination does the exact opposite,\u201d added the KNVB statement. \u201cIt therefore runs counter to everything football stands for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ronald Koeman has resigned in the wake of the Netherlands\u2019 last-32 defeat by Morocco on Monday. \u201cLast night…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":771249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-771248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}