The president of the Italian football federation (FIGC), Carlo Tavecchio, has been banned for six months by European football governing body Uefa for making racist remarks.<\/p>\n
The 71-year-old caused controversy during his election campaign in July by referring to “eating bananas” when discussing foreign players.<\/p>\n
He later apologised for his remarks.<\/p>\n
The ban means Tavecchio cannot hold any Uefa position and will be barred from the next Uefa congress in March 2015.<\/p>\n
He will be unable to carry to carry out his duties as a member of Uefa’s youth and amateur football committee, and has also been told by the governing body to “organise a special event in Italy aimed at increasing awareness against racism”.<\/p>\n
However, Tavecchio will continue as head of the FIGC after the federation’s internal prosecutor dropped his inquiry over the comment last month.<\/p>\n
The remark, made when discussing the recruitment of foreign players, referred to a fictitious signing named Opti Poba.<\/p>\n
Tavecchio\u00a0was elected as president in August,\u00a0beating former AC Milan player Demetrio Albertini<\/p>\n
His appointment\u00a0was described as “a dark day for football”\u00a0by former Nigeria and Juventus player Sunday Oliseh.<\/p>\n
Tavecchio was previously president of Italy’s amateur leagues association (LDN) from 1999 to 2014.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC Sport<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The president of the Italian football federation (FIGC), Carlo Tavecchio, has been banned for six months by European football governing body Uefa for making racist remarks. The 71-year-old caused controversy during his election campaign in July by referring to “eating bananas” when discussing foreign players. He later apologised for his remarks. The ban means Tavecchio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":54506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29,3],"class_list":["post-54505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dr-mahamudu-bawumia","tag-ghana-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}