PSV Fire eSports Fifa Pro After Just 2 Days – Beware Your Digital Skeletons in the Closet

E-Sports is big business, but then you didn’t need me to tell you that. What you may know have known is that Football Clubs throughout Europe were also taking it seriously. Some were taking it so seriously that they were actually hiring their own personal eSports team for Fifa Football. Well Dutch club PSV recently hired one eSports player and sacked him within 2 days due to a rather unfortunate past online.

PSV Hire eSports Fifa Pro to find out he has an unfortunately history with the club

PSV hired the appropriately named Tony Kok to their eSports Fifa team reports PCGamesN. Tony was a professional eSports player and when he was offered the opportunity to play (figuratively speaking) for PSV professionally, he jumped at the chance. There was just, however, 1 major problem. Tony Kok had said in a post that all PSV fans were ‘farmers’.

Farmers? What’s so offensive about that you might ask. Well apparently in Holland a ‘farmer’ is a derogatory term for a homosexual. As a long-term fan of rival Ajax, Tony Kok posted this several years ago. His loyalty to Ajax did not appear to stretch too far, however, as he seemingly jumped at the chance to sign for this supposed rival team.

Apparently he had either forgotten or attempted to bury this post as the revelation of obviously a matter of great embarrassment, particularly given the fanfare his signing received. Here is the official video from PSV announcing his signing. They haven’t done one announcing his sacking yet.

Now, I should say, I do not speak Dutch, so apologies if there is anything particularly inflamitory in these comments. It is my understanding that his homophobic remarks are amounst the following tweets.

What a Kok!

Giving this guy as much leeway as possible, most in his position would have said yes and probably lied about this history. The money in eSports is crazy and such a high profile position would certainly carry some prestige. We’ve even seen instances of wireless mouse usage at competitions for profession gamers being big news. As a football fan, we’ve all said stupid things and while I do not endorse homophobic remarks (and Tony Kok is obviously very ignorant), I’ve heard worse things at games. You could perhaps tolerantly put them down to the stupidity of youth.

That being said, to make such remarks about a club you are going to professionally sign for is just suicidal. If you are a professional gamer or YouTube personality you have to almost be squeaky clean. Look at the vitriol thrown at YouTube personally JonTron just for admitting he believes in the alt-right. Admittedly, when Tony Kok made those comments (4 years ago) he probably didn’t expect that he would one day play eSports for PSV. 4 year ago though, who would have thought that would ever happen? Professional gaming was still in its obscure infancy even then.

The moral of the story is this. Beware the cyber skeletons in your online closet. If you choose to make the internet your home, don’t  choose to vacate your bowels on it.