Luis Suarez: Players' Union To Challenge Fifa Ban For Biting

Source: thewillnigeria.com

Luis Suarez’s nine-match ban for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay’s 2014 World Cup group match in Brazil should be annulled, a players’ union says.

The Uruguay players’ union wants the issue raised at Friday’s meeting of the Fifa Congress.

The challenge to the sanction comes in the wake of corruption allegations against football’s governing body.

United States authorities have indicted nine Fifa officials for corruption.

Uruguay players’ union legal adviser Ernesto Liotti said: “With these facts [of alleged corruption], Fifa’s decisions in the last few years have come under a mantle of suspicion.

“We have no proof that this [sanction] was made within the framework of illegal actions but nothing guarantees us that it wasn’t.”

Liotti said one of the arrested officials, the now suspended Venezuelan Football Federation president Rafael Esquivel, was on the Fifa disciplinary committee that handed down the sanction to Suarez.

The 28-year-old former Liverpool striker, who moved to Barcelona last summer for £75m, was banned from all football for four months and for nine competitive international matches.

That means he is due to miss champions Uruguay’s Copa America campaign in Chile, which begins on 11 June.

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