Why did Manchester City let Benjamin Mendy play on?By Daniel Taylor 3h ago
The last time we saw Benjamin Mendy on a football pitch he was waving to Manchester City’s supporters after a 1-0 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur. Mendy had not played well but, on a personal level, it was still a success of sorts. A new season was underway and Mendy was a surprise selection in Pep Guardiola’s back four, playing for the Premier League champions.
What the vast majority of people would not have known at the time was that the player wearing City’s No 22 shirt was under police investigation for allegedly raping a woman at his house. The crowd that day would not have realised Mendy had been arrested the previous November. But the people in charge at City knew — and, as we now know, decided against suspending their player.
All of which probably warrants some kind of explanation once the trial is done. And it will be intriguing to hear City’s version of events bearing in mind an employer, in virtually every other walk of life, would ordinarily be expected to suspend a member of staff who is being investigated as an alleged rapist.
Instead, Mendy continued to play for City over a nine-month period in which he made 18 appearances. He scored a couple of goals. He was championed by the club’s website. He collected his Premier League winner’s medal and played in the Community Shield against Leicester City at Wembley last month. “See you guys in the PL,” he told his 1.4 million followers on Twitter.
He was charged last Thursday with four counts of rape, having allegedly committed the latest offence earlier in the week, and a separate offence of sexual assault from January this year. The charges relate to three women. Mendy, who denies all the allegations, was remanded in custody and City announced they were suspending him, pending an investigation. Not that he could have played for them anyway, at that point.
Prior to that, City had decided Mendy should be allowed to continue playing, in part because the Crown Prosecution Service had not issued charges. And nobody really took issue with that decision, or challenged City about it, because the truth is nobody outside the club really knew Mendy was even the subject of a police investigation.
The first most of us knew about it came via a statement from Cheshire police on Thursday to announce he was due in court the following day. Until that point, it had been kept quiet and, as such, City have been spared any real scrutiny from the media, the club’s supporters or anybody else.
But it is certainly surprising that any organisation of that size (with a women’s football club operating under the same umbrella) thought it was the correct choice, bearing in mind the seriousness of the alleged offence.
A comparison can also be made with Everton’s decision in July to suspend a player who had been arrested, though not charged, because of an ongoing police investigation into child sex offences.
Everton decided the allegations were so serious they had to act, in the same way that you would probably expect your own workplace to do exactly the same. It just turns out that City, for the best part of a year, took a different view when it came to rape allegations involving the player they signed for £52 million from Monaco in 2017. And this is the part that is hard to understand or justify.
In making their decision, City referred to the standardised players’ contracts — agreed between the Professional Footballers’ Association, the Premier League and English Football League — and, specifically, the Disciplinary Procedure and Penalties section. The rules stipulate that clubs can suspend a player for 14 days while an investigation is taking place. But there is also provision for that suspension to be extended, if the player agrees. City, in short, could have suspended Mendy but decided against it.
Maybe it would have been different if the police investigation was public knowledge because, without wanting to sound too cynical, it is tempting to think City might have thought very differently if there was the risk of a public backlash. Everton, for example, had to deal with a case that had attracted a lot of media attention. You can imagine the outcry if the player in question, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had continued to turn out for the club.
Or maybe we should be accustomed by now to football clubs behaving in a different way to other multi-million-pound businesses when serious allegations of criminality are made against their employees.
When Ched Evans was convicted of rape in April 2012 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the trial came at the end of a season in which he scored 35 times for Sheffield United and helped them reach the League One play-offs. A week after his conviction, Evans was named in the PFA’s League One team of the year.
His club were widely criticised for not suspending him and, though they would almost certainly deny this, it was difficult not to suspect they took that stance, in part, because he was such a valuable player. Evans, who always denied the allegation, took the case to the Court of Appeal, which quashed his conviction, and was cleared at a 2016 retrial.
Perhaps you might also recall that Lee Hughes was never suspended by West Bromwich Albion after causing the car crash in 2003 that had killed a 56-year-old motorist and then fleeing the scene. Hughes played another 17 games that season, scoring six times, to help his club win promotion before heading off for his trial and, ultimately, a six-year prison sentence.
In Mendy’s case, it would be wrong to think City did not consider all the options open to them. The club, as a whole, are extremely conscious of their PR image and the decision was taken at a high level within the club. The bottom line, however, is that decision was very different to what might reasonably have been expected outside the football bubble.
It is also part of a pattern that probably tells us a lot about how football, as an industry, tends to blur its priorities sometimes.
Leeds United, for example, decided against suspending Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer after they were arrested in connection with the street attack, in 2000, that left an Asian student beaten with such a level of violence that the people who found him thought he was dead.
“I had no right to deprive two employees of their ability to perform their duties,” Peter Ridsdale, then the Leeds chairman, explains in his autobiography.
Ridsdale received hundreds of letters to criticise that stance and recalls meeting the victim’s solicitor, Imran Khan, as well as representatives of the anti-racism group Kick It Out and the National Civil Rights Movement. Neville Lawrence, the father of murdered teenager Stephen, was also there.
“The normal thing for a blue-chip company such as yours would be to suspend your employees on full pay,” Ridsdale was told. “Mr Ridsdale, these are very serious matters — you must suspend them.”
Bowyer was acquitted at the subsequent trial, though later made an out-of-court settlement to the victim. Woodgate was convicted of affray but found not guilty of the more serious charge of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
It is a difficult, complex subject because Ridsdale will not be alone in presenting a case that “the British justice system is built on sturdy foundations that insist a person is innocent until proven guilty before a judge, jury or magistrate”.
Sometimes, though, is there not an undeniable case that the allegations are so serious the clubs surely have to take some kind of action? Allegations of rape, for example.
This is clearly something that football, as a whole, tends to struggle with. Sunderland, for example, suspended Adam Johnson in 2015 when he was arrested on suspicion of sexual activity with a girl of 15, then lifted that suspension two weeks later.
Amazingly, Johnson was still allowed to carry on playing for Sunderland even after the club’s chief executive, Margaret Byrne, was shown transcripts of the police interviews in which Johnson admitted kissing the girl on the lips, grooming her for more and knowing she was below the age of legal consent.
Johnson was sentenced to six years in prison and the details emerged in court of Byrne being given full access to the 834 WhatsApp messages, many of a sexual nature, that he exchanged with the girl. Byrne admitted “a serious error of judgment” and resigned, facing accusations Sunderland were more concerned about Premier League points than any sense of moral duty. But she also took a payoff in the region of £750,000, in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement.
Don’t forget either — as mind-boggling as it is — that when Bradford City signed Gavin Grant in 2010 they knew he had a trial coming up for a gangland execution on the Stonebridge estate, where he grew up in north-west London. Grant played with an electronic tag under his sock before a murder trial ended with him being sentenced to a minimum 25 years behind bars. Bradford’s official website, welcoming the new signing, explained that Grant had missed the last year because of “personal reasons”. Wycombe Wanderers, his previous club, helped Grant try to get bail when he was charged. Three years earlier, Millwall had continued to select Grant while he was on bail after being charged in connection to another gangland killing (Grant was found not guilty).
And Manchester City? Maybe they will retreat, as they often do, behind the default setting that the media is too quick to criticise them. Or maybe they will understand this is an important subject that needs to be addressed. Not yet, perhaps, when there are legal restrictions about what can and cannot be said to ensure a fair trial. But when that trial is over, and the verdict is in, it doesn’t feel like too much to ask why, in football, it is apparently OK for the champions of England to include a player who is being investigated by police on suspicion of sex attacks.
Daniel Taylor is a senior writer for The Athletic and has been named Football Journalist of the Year for the last four years. He was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer and spent nearly 20 years working for the two titles. Daniel has written five books on the sport. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic.
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