DN has previously told about the young ice hockey player Olle, who has an NPF diagnosis (neuropsychiatric functional impairment), and who has been suspended by his association.
The club has ended up in conflict with the boy’s father, who for a long time made a long series of reports against board members, coaches and players, where he criticized, among other things, how the son was treated.
Now the club board is considering to exclude Olle from the association. In a 140-page document, which Olle’s guardians have been asked to comment on, they list events and arguments for the exclusion. One reason is that Olle must have behaved inappropriately towards teammates.
Johan Peterson Aldergren, chairman of the organization Safesport Sweden, which assists Olle and his parents in the case, believes that none of what the club accuses Olle of is grounds for exclusion. He points out that when the club announced on December 27 last year that Olle was suspended from the business, no information was provided that he would have misbehaved.
– And since he has been suspended from his team for over three months, he cannot have been guilty of anything during that time. No, it is obvious to us that this is an afterthought, says Peterson Aldergren.
DN has read the letter that Olle’s parents sent to the club and where they give their view on the threat of exclusion. Here the parents write that the son opposes the criticism directed at him. The father does not consider himself to have acted improperly in his contacts with the association and adds that these contacts cannot in any case justify Olle being subjected to reprisals.
According to the family, other clubs in the area do not want to accept Olle because rumors have spread that Olle and the father are causing problems. Olle is sad about not being able to do what he loves most, playing ice hockey.
But does the family really want to return to the club after everything that happened?
– Yes, you can really ask yourself how it will be done. Now we aim to solve the formal issue first. Then I think it should be up to the club and the Swedish Ice Hockey Association to find a solution, says Peterson Aldergren.
The club refutes the accusation of after-the-fact construction. A board member tells DN that there have been incidents around Olle for a long time.
– But if someone sits in a dressing room and calls a teammate something, we don’t make a court case out of it. We deal with it in the day-to-day operations, says the board member and explains that it is the consequences of what happened around Olle that made his father make all the reports and that the club now wants an end to the story.
The association has found itself in a difficult position. According to the board member, parents and players in two youth teams involved are threatening to leave the club if Olle and his father are allowed to return.
How do you proceed now?
– We are looking with lawyers at the answer we received from the parents and then we will see. We can state that it contains factual errors, says the board member.
The sports ombudsman at the National Sports Confederation has been involved in the case, but has not been able to reach a solution.
The question is whether the association can exclude a child on these grounds.
Sports lawyer Stefan Alvén, former Allsvenskan soccer player and with several leadership roles in soccer behind him, says that it is far from unusual for parental conflicts in associations, but he has never heard of disagreements becoming so deep that a child is threatened with exclusion.
The child’s best interests must always be prioritized and its rights protected by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but Alvén believes that at the same time there must be limits to what an association with non-profit leaders must do and put up with. According to Alvén, the fact that a parent group threatens to leave the association could be an argument for exclusion.
– If there are factual reasons for what the parents (and the association) state, then it damages the association’s interests and operations – and that is one of the subjective grounds that are usually given as reasons for exclusion, says Alvén.
He believes that even if the father in Olle’s case is not a member of the association, he has a responsibility as a guardian, and that this could also be used as an argument by the club.
Alvén says that despite his long time in sports law, he has never heard of a similar case.
– That is why it would be good if it is tried by the highest instance, that is the National Sports Board, so that we can know where the line is, says Alvén.
Olle is actually called something else.
Read more:
13-year-old Olle is threatened with exclusion from the ice hockey club
The RF lawyer: “An exceptional case”
Jens Littorin: The lock-ups in the “Olle case” raise questions about how conflicts in sports should be resolved
