Dele to serve one match ban for racist Snapchat video, will miss Premier League restart

It took a while for the FA to hear Dele Alli’s case, but they didn’t take long to decide his fate. One day after Dele appealed to the FA after being charged when a racist private Snapchat video leaked to the press, the FA ruled that Dele will serve a one-match ban, will pay a £50k fine, and will enroll in a racism education course.

This means that Dele will miss Tottenham Hotspur’s match against Manchester United on June 19, Spurs’ first match after the coronavirus-related shutdown of football.

It is worth noting, as Dan Kilpatrick also pointed out on Twitter, that this punishment is commensurate with that received by Bernard Silva after after he tweeted a racially insensitive tweet about his teammate Benjamin Mendy earlier in the season.

It’s a major bummer for Dele and for Spurs, naturally, as it’s never good to be without one of your best players ever, and especially in what could be a pivotal match in Tottenham’s quest to return to the Champions League. However, this is also an expected outcome. The FA takes a dim view of jokes in poor taste, and while I’ve maintained since the beginning that this doesn’t mean that Dele is a bad person, he DID make a racist video. That should be a universally acknowledged fact, even if the video was never meant for public consumption.

It’s tempting to speculate on who would come in for Dele against United next Friday, but there’s so much we don’t know about player fitness, Mourinho’s tactics, and the restart that there are plenty of options. All we do know is that Dele won’t take the pitch until at minimum the home derby against West Ham on Tues. June 23.