FA will appeal sanctions imposed on former Crawley Town manager John Yems as 'longer sanction is appropriate'

Yems admitted to one charge and was found guilty of 11 others with comments on ethnic origin, colour, race, nationality, religion, belief or gender between 2019 and 2022.

An independent regulatory commission found four others to be unproven as the 63-year-old was earlier this month banned from all football-related activity until June 1, 2024.

The FA faced a lot of criticism on social media on last Tuesday (January 17) following the full summary of the charges, sanctions and decisions being released. You can read the full summary here.

The summary contains everything Yems was accused of saying following accusations from five players. The panel said they deemed Yems as an ‘unconscious racist’ despite.

Following the release of the full summary, an FA statement read: “The FA brought 16 charges of discrimination against John Yems. The independent regulatory commission decided on an 18-month ban for the 12 charges which it upheld or was admitted. We had requested a longer ban. Based on the evidence presented to the commission, we fundamentally disagree with the independent panel’s finding that this was not a case of conscious racism. As a result, we are considering our legal options.”

Chief executive Mark Bullingham said: “We’ve been clear that we’re unhappy with the sanction and some of the elements of the judgments, and we’re looking into our legal options now.”

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And today (Monday, January 23), the FA released a further statement which said: “"We are appealing the sanction imposed by the Independent Panel on John Yems. We believe a longer sanction is appropriate. We are unable to comment further until the appeal is complete."

The FA said the independent panel suspended Yems from all football and football-related activity up to and including 1 June 2024, and ordered him to attend an education programme for 12 breaches of FA Rule E3.2.

The former Reds manager was charged with 16 alleged comments in breach of FA Rule E3.2 during the period between 2019 and 2022. It was alleged that each breach amounts to an “aggravated breach” of FA Rule E3.2 as the comments included a reference to ethnic origin and/or colour and/or race and/or nationality and/or religion or belief and/or gender.

It was further alleged that he had discriminated against Crawley Town FC players by reasons of ethnic origin and/or colour and/or race and/or nationality and/or religion or belief in breach of FA Rule E4 during the period between 2019 and 2022. However, this charge was denied by John Yems and later withdrawn by The FA prior to any hearing.

Yems appeared on talkSPORT last week – you can read and hear the interview here – to defend himself. He said: “People are out there are going to say what they are going to say, people are going to think what they are going to think.

“I would say to you, have a look that I wasn’t found to be racist, never used racist language with intent, if anybody needs an apology then I think I do. The amount of abuse I’ve been getting when people haven’t even had the courtesy to ask me.

“I don’t think anybody has looked at the case with any open mindedness. I think if you are going there then there should be a few apologies coming my way.”