This archive report was first published on 13 November 2019.
On November 13, 2019, Manchester City's Bernardo Silva was banned for one match and fined £50,000 by the Football Association (FA) for a tweet about teammate Benjamin Mendy.
The incident occurred when Silva compared Mendy to a character on a packet of Conguitos, a chocolate brand available in Spain and Portugal, on a social media platform with 600,000 followers.
Although Silva deleted the post 46 minutes after publishing it, the FA commission found that many people would have taken offense to the content, which was intended to be a joke between close friends.
However, the commission noted that the post was not a private communication between two friends, but rather a public statement exposed to a large audience.
According to the FA report, the tweet was “insulting by reference to race, colour and ethnic origin in a way that unquestionably brings the game of football into disrepute.”
Despite this, the commission accepted that Silva did not intend the post to be racist, stating that it was “clear that the tweet was intended to be no more than a joke between close friends.”
