Epilogue of a sad soap opera which will have lasted more than two weeks. Neither the Brazilian striker of Paris-Saint-Germain, Neymar, nor the Spanish central defender of Olympique de Marseille, Alvaro Gonzalez, will be sanctioned by the disciplinary committee of the Professional Football League, announced the latter on Wednesday. September 30.
The two players were accused of having made discriminatory comments during the stormy meeting between their teams on September 13. “The commission notes that it does not have sufficient convincing evidence allowing it to establish the materiality of the facts of statements of a discriminatory nature”, explained the League in a statement.
During a conference call, the chairman of the commission, Sébastien Deneux, also insisted on the ” doubts “ born from the reliability of labial expertise techniques, asserting that the conclusions were “Too random and did not constitute a sufficiently tangible element” to sanction players.
“The decisions are always commented on, and this one will be too. But there are no fears, it is more serious to have given ourselves all the means to shed light on this. “
Two waves of sanctions for a single match
These decisions put an end to several weeks of media jousting between the two clubs, both stepped up to defend their player since the Ligue 1 “clasico” of September 13, ended between fights, bad gestures and exclusions.
Neymar accused Alvaro of calling him “Monkey”. OM responded by letting it be known that they had images of the Brazilian striker uttering a racist insult to Japan’s Hiroki Sakai. A Spanish channel had also assured that the Parisian player had uttered homophobic insults against Alvaro.
The decision of the disciplinary committee closes a file which gave rise to two waves of sanctions. The first concerned the Marseillais Jordan Amavi (3 suspension games) and Dario Benedetto (1 game), and the Parisians Layvin Kurzawa (6 games), Leandro Paredes (2 games closed plus a suspended one) as well as Neymar, already (2 matches closes plus a suspended sentence). The second pinned Angel Di Maria (4 games) for a spit in the direction of Alvaro Gonzalez.
