By David Gold
August 20 – Rio Ferdinand has been fined £45,000 ($70,000/€57,000) by the English Football Association (FA) for comments on the social networking site Twitter.
Ferdinand (pictured above) seemed to endorse a fellow user describing Chelsea defender Ashley Cole as “choc ice” (original Twitter exchange pictured below).
The term is slang for implying someone “black on the outside, white inside”, and was used because Cole defended teammate John Terry during his trial for allegedly racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, Rio’s brother.
Terry was cleared of wrong-doing by the court after claiming he had used racist language in a sarcastic context, rather than offensively, during Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat to Queens Park Rangers last year.
The former England captain, whose court trial led to a chain of events which prompted the resignation of national team coach Fabio Capello, is still to face an FA charge over the incident.
The FA is under pressure to punish the Chelsea player, given the extreme sanction meted out to Luis Suárez last season.
Suárez was given an eight-game ban for using racist language during an altercation with Manchester United’s Patrice Evra.
Like Terry, Suárez admitted using racist language but denied that it was meant in an offensive way, and so it would raise major questions were the Chelsea man to escape a similar sanction.
Ferdinand’s manager at Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, has voiced his concern at players using Twitter.
“They (the FA) want to close the door on this kind of thing,” he said.
“What surprises me is that other players have been tweeting for ages and have never been challenged by the FA.
“I don’t know why anybody can be bothered with Twitter.
“But it is there and as a club we have given instructions to the players that they cannot talk about Manchester United.
“Rio is mature but he still has to remember that one word can make a difference – and you cannot take it back.”
The immediacy of Twitter has landed a number of players in trouble in recent times, but it is effectively the same as publishing written material using any other media platform.
Users can expose themselves to legal action through their use of the site if they are not careful.
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