The Football Association will decide by Monday whether the Wigan Athletic owner Dave Whelan’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people to the Guardian amount to racist or discriminatory language and misconduct.
The FA confirmed in a statement that Whelan had responded to its letter of Friday 21 November, which said he was under investigation and gave him three working days – to 6pm on Wednesday – to respond.
“The FA will now consider Wigan Athletic chairman Dave Whelan’s observations in relation to his recent comments, having received them by today’s 6pm deadline,” the governing body said, adding that it would make no further comment. Wigan declined to give details of Whelan’s response.
The FA has three working days to decide whether to charge Whelan under its rule E3(1) which states that people involved in football shall not act in an improper manner or bring the game into disrepute, which is aggravated if words deemed to be insulting include a reference to ethnic origin, colour, race, religion or other forms of discrimination.
The FA wrote to Whelan expressing concern at 2:15pm last Friday, following his comments after appointing Malky Mackay as Wigan’s manager.
Mackay is under FA investigation for racist and antisemitic texts exchanged while he was manager at Cardiff City with the club’s then head of recruitment, Iain Moody. The FA has said that investigation is continuing and includes examining whether the messages indicate a culture in which acts of discrimination took place at Cardiff.
When appointing Mackay, Whelan said he did not think the manager did “a lot wrong” in the texts. He said it was “nothing” to call a Chinese person a “chink,” as Mackay did of Vincent Tan, the Cardiff owner.
That was strongly rejected by the British Chinese Project and seven Chinese cross-party political and community organisations, who called for “a fitting punishment” by the FA, saying in a statement: “We, the UK Chinese community, refute the claim that there is nothing bad about calling a person of Chinese ethnicity a “chink” – this is at best nonsense, and at worst racist.”
Whelan also said it was not antisemitic or offensive of Mackay to have said of the football agent Phil Smith: “Nothing like a Jew that sees money slipping through his fingers.”
Whelan told the Guardian this only meant Jewish people did not like losing money, like anybody. Asked if he did not think it was offensive, because the claim that Jews love money has been used as a negative stereotype, Whelan said: “Do you think Jewish people chase money a little bit more than we do?”
Asked to clarify if that was his belief, Whelan said “Jewish people do chase money more than everybody else”. He added that he did not think that was offensive at all, because Jewish people are “very shrewd people”. The FA has until 6pm on Monday to decide whether to charge Whelan, who has said he would “resign” if he is found guilty.
