{"id":512726,"date":"2026-03-01T23:14:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T23:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/512726\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T23:14:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T23:14:07","slug":"infantino-suggests-players-covering-mouths-when-addressing-opponents-could-be-sent-off-soccer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/512726\/","title":{"rendered":"Infantino suggests players covering mouths when addressing opponents could be sent off | Soccer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino<\/a>, has suggested players who cover their mouths while addressing opponents could be sent off as part of the governing body\u2019s battle against racism.<\/p>\n

The practice, which has long been deployed to prevent cameras picking up conversations between teammates and opposition, has been put in focus after Vin\u00edcius J\u00fanior\u2019s allegations of discriminatory abuse<\/a> by Gianluca Prestianni. The Benfica player denies doing so but was suspended<\/a> for his side\u2019s Champions League playoff second leg against Vin\u00edcius\u2019s Real Madrid pending the outcome of a formal investigation.<\/p>\n

After the game, Vin\u00edcius posted in Portuguese on Instagram: \u201cRacists are, above all, cowards. They need to put their shirts in their mouths to demonstrate how weak they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issue was discussed at Saturday\u2019s meeting of the International Football Association Board (Ifab), with Infantino clear that a more interventionist approach is now necessary to punish those who hide their mouths to avoid detection. He said on Sky News: \u201cIf a player covers his mouth and says something, and this has a racist consequence, then he has to be sent off, obviously.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere must be a presumption that he has said something he shouldn\u2019t have said, otherwise he wouldn\u2019t have had to cover his mouth. I simply do not understand \u2013 if you don\u2019t have something to hide, you don\u2019t hide your mouth when you say something. That\u2019s it, as simple as that.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd these are actions that we can take and we have to take in order to be serious about our fight against racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Measures could be agreed and implemented in time for use at this summer\u2019s World Cup, with the Fifa<\/a> Congress in Vancouver next month the next important staging post.<\/p>\n

Infantino, meanwhile, wants to encourage guilty parties to take public responsibility. \u201cMaybe we should also think about not just punishing, but also somehow allowing, changing our culture, allowing players or whoever does something to apologise,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can do things that you don\u2019t want to do in a moment of anger [and] apologise and then the sanction has to be different, to move one step further and maybe we should think about something like that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, has suggested players who cover their mouths while addressing opponents could be sent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-512726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}