Dear Uefa, why have we been fined €5,000 for ‘Uefa mafia’ chants? | Women’s football
Have you ever ever been fined for expressing one thing that’s clearly inside worldwide laws on freedom of expression? Now we have. In a Ladies’s Champions League match in Bergen this 12 months. For a brief interval of our recreation in opposition to St Pölten in January our supporters chanted “Uefa mafia” after not being awarded a free-kick. Huge deal? Apparently in order we had been fined €5,000 (£4,275) by Uefa for it. In girls’s soccer, that’s some huge cash and about 10% of the prize cash for successful the match. It demonstrates that Uefa is difficult freedom of expression and clearly authorized criticism in the direction of themselves, probably the most highly effective soccer leaders in Europe. It additionally exposes the equally necessary situation of disproportionate sanctions that quell the very enthusiasm for soccer that Uefa aspires to ignite. For 114 out of 116 years in existence, Brann had solely males’s soccer. That modified in 2022 once we established Brann Ladies after buying the highest Norwegian girls’s staff Sandviken. The laborious work that went into this merger has paid off, and equality between women and men is now central to our technique. We nonetheless…