Enjoy watching Rodrigo Bentancur play for Tottenham Hotspur while you can, because it sounds like he’ll be sidelined for a while. According to multiple reports including Sami Mokbel at the Daily Mail, the FA is close to issuing a lengthy match ban on Bentancur for racist comments he made this summer about South Koreans and Son Heung-Min in a social media video. The length of the ban has not yet been released, but unconfirmed sources has suggested it could be as long as seven matches.
Spurs have been bracing for this ruling for a while and we’ve written extensively about it since it happened this summer. As a quick summary, Bentancur was filmed on an Uruguayan television show making disparaging jokes about his teammate, Tottenham club captain Son, and how all South Koreans “look the same.” The FA charged Bentancur with “aggravated breach” of the federations’ rules back in September, and we’ve been waiting for the FA to make their decision for the past two months. Now it sounds like they have.
A seven match ban would be lengthy, but notably less than the maximum sentence of 12 matches that was being tossed around a couple of months ago. In that sense, Tottenham and Bentancur might be getting off a touch easy.
It should be noted that Bentancur tearfully apologized to Son in the midst of all this for what he said, and Sonny gracefully accepted his apology and forgave his teammate. As far as the club is concerned, it’s a done deal and water under the bridge. The FA process is separate from any (unstated) club sanctions to come from this incident.
It’s hard to get too upset about Bentancur picking up a ban for what happened. Actions have consequences, and although he and Son have patched things up it was still a stupid, racist thing to say on camera, and I don’t really have an issue with the FA’s decisionmaking. You can (and many will) quibble with a hypothetical seven match ban for racist comments, especially when compared to other punishments given (or not given) to other players for similar incidents, but I’m honestly still upset at Lolo that he put himself and the club in this position. It was dumb then, it’s dumb now, and it’s not like we didn’t see any of this coming.
Tottenham are in a bad place at the moment, coming off the back of a humiliating home loss to Ipswich Town and with a slew of significant injuries, and losing a key member of their central midfield for seven matches will only make things harder. It will mean more minutes and more pressure on the remaining midfielders such as Yves Bissouma, James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, and potentially even youngsters like Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray. It might even mean Spurs could look to the transfer window this coming January for midfield reinforcements (something they probably should be doing anyway).
