Belgian mayor cancels match against Israeli soccer team

The mayor of the city of Leuven in Belgium, Mohamed Ridouani, on Tuesday ordered the cancellation of a soccer match between a local team and an Israeli one, prompting condemnations by Israel’s embassy, local Jews and others.

Ridouani cited “security concerns” as the reason for the ban on the scheduled match later this month between HaPo’el Beersheba and Union Saint-Gilloise.

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“This was also the reason for previous decisions to ban games, including that of the Red Flames and the Rode Duivels,” Ridouani said on Tuesday at the City Council, following a query on the subject by a council member. “I am continuing a consistent policy. We cannot guarantee the safety” of spectator and players during the match, he added.

A spokesperson for the embassy of Israel in Belgium responded on X by stating that the Israeli team in question”is an example of coexistence in Israeli football. The team includes three Arab-Israeli players: Muhammad Abu Rumi, Mohammed Kna’an and Zahi Ahmed. Politics should never be allowed to interfere with sports.”

Israeli players, the embassy spokesperson wrote, “should be judged by their professional abilities, not by politics or political views. Sport should remain sport, free from political agendas.” The spokesperson offered that Israel’s Ambassador-designate to Belgium, David Saranga, meet with Ridouani. Israel has faith in Belgium authorities’ abilities to maintain public order, and is ready to help if needed, the embassy added.

The Forum of Jewish Organizations (FJO), the main Jewish group in Belgium’s Flemish Region, also protested the ban in a post on X, adding that the decision to scrap the match altogether “leaves a bad feeling” considering that authorities could have sufficed with not allowing an audience.

“Security must be taken seriously. But when an Israeli team is barred out of fear of protest or unrest, the question arises where security ends and exclusion begins,” FJO wrote. “When Israelis are barred because of their nationality or their government’s policies, this takes on a disturbing antisemitic undertone,” a spokesperson for the group wrote.

Israeli sports teams have faced discrimination, exclusion and violence across Europe, and increasingly so after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas’s attacks in Israel triggered a regional conflict and a wave of antisemitic violence throughout the Western World.

In January, a senior British police officer announced his early retirement amid a scandal around his force’s handling of a soccer match in November 2025 between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Birmingham’s Aston Villa F.C.

The resignation of former chief constable Craig Guildford, was over inaccuracies in how the West Midlands Police force explained the ban on Maccabi fans attending the game. Top police officers from that force had claimed that Israelis were the aggressors in a series of riots that broke out in Amsterdam in 2024 during a Maccabi match. In reality, Maccabi fans were attacked by dozens of Arabs and Muslims who acted in a coordinated fashion in what some of them called “a Jew hunt,” according to Dutch police officers.

Under Guildford, West Midlands Police declined to say for three weeks whether Maccabi fans had been banned from the Nov. 6 event because of threats against them, or because the Maccabi fans were deemed a threat themselves.

After three weeks, the force said both answers were true, but it later emerged that West Midlands Police allegedly inverted some of the accounts from Amsterdam, including by falsely claiming that Israelis pushed others into canals.

Britain’s police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), last month formally put former Guildford and four others under investigation over the Maccabi Tel Aviv fan ban.

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