Former Crawley manager John Yems has ban for racism extended to three years

The former Crawley manager John Yems has had his ban from football extended to three years for 12 breaches of anti-discrimination rules. The Football Association said it was “the longest ever ban issued to a participant in English football for discrimination”.

Yems was initially banned by an independent regulatory commission for 17 months until 1 June 2024 but the FA appealed, arguing the sanction was insufficient, and an independent appeal board has imposed a ban from all football and football-related activity up to and including 5 January 2026.

“We fundamentally disagreed with the commission’s finding that this was not a case of conscious racism,” the FA said. Yems had admitted to one charge in the intial hearing and been found guilty of 11 of the remaining 15 charges.

Instances of Yems’s behaviour, which occurred over a three-year period between 2019 and 2022 and were found proven by the commission, included calling a player of Asian heritage a “curry muncher”, a Muslim player a “terrorist”, black players “Zulu warriors” and mispronouncing the name Arnold Schwarzenegger so as to sound like a racial slur.

The panel, in explaining their sanctions, said that Yems’s case was “extremely serious” and that his behaviour would have demanded “an extremely lengthy, even permanent, suspension” in other circumstances. But a smaller punishment was deemed appropriate as they had “accepted that Mr Yems is not a conscious racist”.

The FA said on Wednesday: “We are pleased that the independent appeal board ruled that specific findings from the independent regulatory commission were unreasonable, as there were numerous examples of inherent and obvious racist language.

“This is a deeply distressing case for the victims involved, and we