The Legia Warsaw football club has been fined €15,000 by UEFA and will not be allowed to sell tickets for its next away match. The decision was taken by UEFA on October 13, a week after a match in Alkmaar, between Legia Warsaw and the AZ Alkmaar football club, during which two Polish players were arrested and the owner of Legia Warsaw was beaten by Dutch police. The two players, Radovan Pankov and Josue Pesqueira, were held for several hours.
UEFA sanctions are due to Polish supporters’ behavior during the match and are not linked to the treatment of Polish fans and club members by the police outside the stadium. The incidents that took place after the match are subject to a separate investigation.
Legia Warsaw has published footage showing Dariusz Mioduski, owner of Legia Warsaw and vice-president of its board, being beaten by aggressive members of security and policemen while exiting the stadium.
“For many years I have gone to matches from Kazakhstan to Portugal and I have seen a few situations, for example, when our team coach was attacked by rival fans, but I have never seen the team, staff members, and management attacked by security and police. It is unprecedented on a global scale,” Mioduski said.
Following a scuffle between aggressive security guards and Pankov and Pesqueira, and after the two Legia players made it on to the team’s bus, Dutch policemen asked them to get out and they were taken into custody.
Fans and journalists present at the scene reported that the Poles were treated in a discriminatory manner before and after the match in Alkmaar.
Rinke Rooyens, a Dutch television producer living in Poland who was a member of Legia Warsaw’s delegation in Alkmaar called the behavior of the security guards and police outrageous.
Rooyens said the police were behaving provocatively towards the Poles even before the match. He told the Onet.pl website that when he joined the club’s delegation at the hotel before the match, they “found out the Alkmaar authorities did not want the presence of Legia fans in the city, because they had an important celebration.”
According to witnesses, the police tried to take Polish fans out of the city after the match, even if they had done nothing wrong. Before the match, fans were sent to the Hague to pick up their tickets.
“The Dutch treated the match as a high-risk encounter. From the beginning, one could sense their nervous approach. If they had approached it in a normal way and talked to the fans, it would have been different.” – Rooyens said to Onet.pl.
Very aggressive behavior on the part of the police was also observed in other points of the city, including at the railway station where Dutch police are said to have charged groups of people, including women, when they were hearing them speaking Polish. Several were also arrested for no apparent reason.
Rooyens witnessed the Legia Warsaw owner’s beating by the police, and this is what he has to say about it: “I saw how the president of Legia, who was dressed in a club jacket, was treated. This is a highly respected person throughout Europe. After all, a week earlier he had hosted in Warsaw the presidents of major clubs from Atletico Madrid to Paris Saint-Germain. When there were presidents of clubs from another part of Europe in the Netherlands, there was never such a reaction. Similar situations never occurred. You can also see in the videos that he was not behaving aggressively.”
Following the incidents, Polish MEP Patryk Jaki said he would ask for a debate in the European Parliament about the rule of law in the Netherlands.
During the Law and Justice governments in Poland, the Netherlands has been at the forefront of EU member states lecturing Poland about respect for the rule of law and asking for sanctions against that country.