Benfica coach Jose Mourinho says Gianluca Prestianni’s career under him will be “over” if he is guilty of racially abusing Real Madrid’s Vinicius Jr.<\/p>\n
Prestianni, 20, was accused by Vinicius during the first leg of their Champions League knockout phase play-off tie in Lisbon on 17 February.<\/p>\n
The Argentine, who denies racially abusing Vinicius, missed the second leg after being given a provisional one-match ban by Uefa pending the result of a full investigation by an ethics and disciplinary inspector.<\/p>\n
He could be punished further once that is complete.<\/p>\n
Mourinho was criticised for saying after the match he believed Vinicius had incited the crowd by dancing at the corner flag after scoring the only goal of the game.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Sunday, Mourinho said he was “completely, utterly opposed to any kind of discrimination or prejudice, or ignorance, or stupidity”.<\/p>\n
“If my player did not respect these principles, which are mine and Benfica’s as well, then that player’s career with a coach named Jose Mourinho and at a club named Benfica will come to an end,” the 63-year-old said.<\/p>\n
“I am not a scholar, but I am not ignorant either. The presumption of innocence is a human right, isn’t it?<\/p>\n
“I stand by my opinion. If the player is indeed guilty, I will never look at him the way I looked at him before, and with me, it’s over.<\/p>\n
“But I have to put many ‘ifs’ in front of it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Benfica coach Jose Mourinho says Gianluca Prestianni’s career under him will be “over” if he is guilty of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-512962","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\/512962","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=512962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}