Tottenham to appeal one particular aspect of Rodrigo Bentancur's ban and it could affect Liverpool

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Tottenham Hotspur are set to make an appeal to Rodrigo Bentancur's seven-game ban following his comments regarding Son Heung-min in an interview released in Uruguay.

On Monday Bentancur was handed a seven-match suspension by an independent regulatory commission, along with a £100,000 fine and ordered to attend a mandatory face-to-face education programme, for his comments, containing a racial slur, to a Uruguayan reporter regarding Spurs captain Son.

Tottenham had a set amount of time to decide whether to appeal the decision or not, and football.london understands that while the north London club will not be appealing the verdict itself, they plan to appeal the length of the ban.

Currently Bentancur will miss six Premier League games and the Carabao Cup quarter-final with Manchester United, before being able to return to action on Boxing Day. He will be able to play in Tottenham's Europa League matches as it is a domestic ban.

The player was interviewed at home by Uruguayan journalist Rafa Cotelo in April and the part of the interview in question featured a request from the reporter to see one of the football shirts that Bentancur had at his home. Here is the translation of the exchange that was used in the case documents.

Cotelo: "Your shirt… well, what about the Korean’s shirt?

Bentancur: "Sonny?

Cotelo: "Or a champion."

Bentancur with a laugh: "Or one of Sonny’s cousins as they all look more or less the same."

Bentancur denied the FA charge against him and claimed that his response to the journalist had been a sarcastic one and was meant to gently chide him for calling Son 'the Korean'. The commission believed that the Uruguayan's two public apologies, private apology to Son, his captain's own Instagram post speaking about Bentancur knowing he'd made a mistake and the club's comment on the situation suggested that the midfielder knew he had said something wrong.

The commission decided that when it came to the six to 12-game recommended sanction for such a rule breach, "in terms of culpability and consequences, this breach falls towards the lower end of the guideline range but not the lowest point. Cases can easily be envisaged which are less serious than this, but nevertheless subject to the minimum suspension of six matches".

It is the length of the ban and the nature of it being an aggravated breach that Tottenham will seek to appeal, although with the minimum threshold being six games, it is unlikely that they could get more than one match taken off of it. If that was to be done successfully then Bentancur could be able to face Liverpool on December 22 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

There have been question marks over an FA rule, published in 2020, that allows commissions to apply a ban below the automatic minimum six matches if an offence is "in writing only or via any communication device" along with a specific mitigating factor. Bentancur's spoken interview appeared on YouTube and was shared widely on social media but its original form meant he could not receive a sanction below the six-game threshold.

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