England's Football Association (FA) announced an 18-month ban for ex-Crawley Town manager John Yems, with the decision receiving a lot of backlash for being too light. Yems was suspended by his club on April 23, 2022, and soon left the club with the League Two side two days after the FA announced it was investigating allegations of racism against him.
12 days after their announcement on the Yems case, the FA have released a report saying that the 63-year-old 'used offensive, racist and Islamophobic language' and also joked that a Muslim player was a terrorist.
With 16 charges against him, Yems pleaded guilty to one and was found guilty of 11 other charges of racist abuse towards his players. Four other charges were found to be unproven by an FA tribunal. The charge of racial segregation was eventually dropped.
In publishing the written reasons for his ban, the FA disciplinary commission 'accepted that Mr Yems is not a conscious racist.'
"Nevertheless, Mr Yems' 'banter' undoubtedly came across to the victims and others as offensive, racist and Islamophobic," the report added. "Mr Yems simply paid no regard to the distress which his misplaced jocularity was causing."
The tribunal also mentioned that Yems had accepted his ban and was remorseful, adding that, 'his attempts at jocularity had been thoughtless and misguided but not malevolent.'
The report summed up that Yems 'is a man of jocular disposition. His aim is to encourage bonding among players by cracking jokes and joining in the fun with them.'
"He has no appreciation that much of the sort of language which might have been in common usage some 40 or 50 years ago has no place in modern society. There was a considerable weight of evidence to the effect that Mr Yems was in the habit of, in his perception, cracking jokes which were perceived as racist by those who were the butt of the jokes. Probably, Mr Yems gave no thought at all to the effect of his language on those at whom the 'jokes' were aimed. Nor did he give any thought at all to the likely reaction of others to the language he used," the report concluded.
