I’m a European champion. Speaking for Palestine made me a target

By Rufus Wiena 
My phone buzzed. It was my girlfriend. ‘Get out of there,’ she said. Her voice was shaking.
I was in Graz, Austria, at a European footvolley tournament. I had come to compete. I was leaving for my safety.
Hours earlier, a four-time European champion with over 25,000 Instagram followers had posted a story asking his fans what should be done with me. The responses came in fast. One stood out: ‘Post a picture, and we'll take care of him.’ After our match, the same Israeli player thanked his followers for their ‘creative tips’ on things to do with me ‘outside the court.’
I bought a ticket home that night.
I am the Swedish and Nordic footvolley champion of 2025. I am also, apparently, a legitimate target. My crime was standing in solidarity with Palestine. In the ecosystem of European footvolley, that is enough to make you prey.
What happened to me in Graz is nothing compared to what my Greek colleague, Ioannis Tsiouris, has endured since July 2025. Yiannis is a national team player. His threats include: ‘We will murder you like the children in Gaza.’ Rape threats against his family. A message in Hebrew promising to ‘give you a Holocaust.’ A death threat against his unborn child.
Let that settle. A threat to murder a Greek athlete ‘like the children in Gaza,’ delivered with the confidence of someone who sees genocide not as a tragedy but as a template. A promise to ‘give you a Holocaust,’ issued in Hebrew by supporters of a state that claims to exist as a guarantee against exactly that. The cruelty is the point. The irony is lost on them.
I filed police reports. Sweden. Austria. The evidence is documented, timestamped, translated. This month, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's newspaper of record, published a major investigation that went viral. The facts are not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether anyone with authority in this sport gives a damn.
I contacted 31 organizations. Athlete welfare bodies. Anti-discrimination offices. Human rights groups. Sport federations. I received nine responses. Zero investigations. Zero condemnations. Not a single footvolley institution has condemned these threats in over a year.
Instead, the Israel Footvolley Association filed a formal complaint against Yiannis. The victim. The European Footvolley League, the federation that received it, has neither condemned the threats nor confirmed a formal investigation. The message is clear enough: express solidarity with Palestine, receive death threats, and the institutions will protect the people who threatened you.
This is not incompetence. This is a political choice.
To understand why, you must understand what footvolley is to Israel. It is not just a sport. It is a stage. The TAFC tournament series in Eilat brings international athletes to the Red Sea for competitions framed as cultural exchange. IDF ‘Heroes Tournaments’ allegedly feature military personnel competing alongside civilians, turning soldiers into celebrities and military service into lifestyle content. Propaganda tours fly international athletes across Israel, their social media accounts converting a contested state into a sunny destination.
This is sportswashing. The playbook is old. Apartheid South Africa used rugby. Israel uses footvolley. The goal is the same: normalize the abnormal, humanize the inhuman, and make anyone who breaks the spell pay for it.
When Yiannis and I spoke up for Palestine, we did not just express a political opinion. We disrupted the performance. We cracked the mirror. The response was not debate. It was coordinated intimidation, amplified through social media, designed to make an example of us.
The institutions that should protect athletes looked the other way because looking would require acknowledging that something is rotten in the architecture of European sport. It would require asking why European federations accept Israeli participation without conditions while Israeli athletes and their supporters’ issue genocidal threats against European players with impunity. It would require confronting the fact that ‘neutral sport’ is never neutral when one side's athletes allegedly serve in a military accused of genocide and the other side's athletes are threatened for saying so.
I do not write this to complain. I write this because silence is complicity, and I refuse to be complicit in my own silencing.
What comes next is not a question of if but when. The Dagens Nyheter article cracked the wall. More media are picking up the story. The evidence is public. The police reports are filed. The threats are documented. The institutional failure is on the record.
Every organization that ignored this case should understand something: we are not going away. Yiannis is not going away. The evidence is not going away. The question is whether European sport will continue to serve as a laundering mechanism for a state under formal investigation for genocide, or whether it will find the minimal courage to say that threatening to murder an athlete ‘like the children in Gaza’ is wrong.
That should not be a hard question. The fact that it is tells you everything you need to know about the moral state of European sport.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Rufus Wiena is a Swedish athlete, Neuromagician, and public speaker. A 2025 Swedish and Nordic footvolley champion, he co-founded Footvolley Resistance Club after receiving documented threats for publicly standing in solidarity with Palestine