One of Northern Ireland’s biggest football clubs has cancelled a sponsorship deal with a convicted sex offender after a backlash from fans.<\/p>\n
Linfield Football Club, which plays in the Irish League, issued a statement this morning.<\/p>\n
The club said it had “terminated all sponsorship agreements” with Mooney’s Master Butchers based on Belfast’s Shankill Road.<\/p>\n
Just days ago, the club shared a picture of owner Stephen Mooney holding a Linfield shirt and announcing a partnership arrangement for the 2025\/26 season, including the promotion of its youth academy.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Stephen Mooney was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman at a hotel.<\/p>\n
The Belfast Telegraph reported that he had been fined \u00a3750 and ordered to pay his victim \u00a31,000 in compensation.<\/p>\n
The announcement of the sponsorship deal sparked an angry reaction from fans.<\/p>\n
In its statement, the club apologised and said it would ensure that checks would be carried out in future.<\/p>\n
“The club will be putting measures in place to ensure that all future sponsorship arrangements will be subject to internal vetting procedures.<\/p>\n
“In addition the club will be making a donation to a victims’ related charity and wishes to apologise for any distress caused by this decision,” Linfield FC said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of Northern Ireland’s biggest football clubs has cancelled a sponsorship deal with a convicted sex offender after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-153978","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}