Hey remember that time when Tottenham Hotspur scored a goal against Brighton and the Spurs coaching staff looked over at Brighton’s bench and was like YER MOM and Brighton manager Roberto De Zerbi was like OH NO YOU DIDN’T and there was shoving and stuff and both De Zerbi and interim manager Cristian Stellini were both red carded even though Stellini was like ten feet away and had nothing to do with it and was all WTF-but-staring-in-Italian and both teams ended up getting £100k fines from the FA for Failure to Keep Ur Shit Together or something?
That was awes… wait, no, that was extremely silly and dumb. But I have some good news — Spurs don’t have to pay the full amount of their stupid FA fine from the stupid FA, because at some point they appealed the charge and had the fine reversed. Kind of.
The Evening Standard reported today that Spurs made an appeal, which is news to me because I don’t think that appeal was ever reported, and the independent Appeals Board reduced the fine from £100k to £40k. But that’s not all! The Appeals Board also basically said it was all De Zerbi’s fault for being aggro and encroaching out of his technical area towards the Spurs area of the pitch.
“…the behaviour of Brighton and Hove Albion FC was more disorderly than that of Tottenham Hotspur FC in that [Brighton manager] Mr De Zerbi did leave his technical area on the side of the Tottenham technical area and did appear to encroach on Mr Stellini and engage in seemingly provocative behaviour.
“If Mr De Zerbi had not left his technical area on that side then the mass confrontation may not have arisen.”
The whole thing was super dumb, obviously, except that it did give most of the fanbase a little clarity that hey maaaaaaybe they DON’T want to hire another talented but hot-headed Italian as their next head coach, k thx.
Also since De Zerbi had started out the match yelling at Stellini for saying nice things about him in a press conference that had been aggregated and wrongfully interpreted by an Italian language media outlet (while Stellini just stood there taking it like an elongated Charlie Brown), I think it’s kinda dumb that Spurs have to pay a fine at all, even if it’s 40% of the original cost.
But whatever. It’s still a good outcome. Who says Tottenham doesn’t ever win anything?
