Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The lessons to learn from the FA’s handling of the Eva Carneiro case

The lessons to learn from the FA’s handling of the Eva Carneiro case

As I’m sure you’ve all read, the Football Association this week decided that Joe Mourinho, the Chelsea boss, had no case to answer to in regard to the alleged discriminatory comments that he made towards the team’s Doctor, Eva Carneiro.


Jose Mourinho was alleged to have made discriminatory remarks and comments towards Eva Carneiro during Chelsea’s first home game of the season. She ran on to the field of play to treat Eden Hazard after he had been injured during the game. Mourinho felt that she was naïve in her attempts and subsequently removed her from all first team duties. Last Month Eva Carneiro left Chelsea football club.

Employee Handbook

Staff Employee Handbook


So what can we learn from an employee and employment aspect here.

  1. When Eva Carneiro ran on to the field, she was doing her job! Let’s be very clear about this, her role as the first team doctor is to ensure the physical well being of the players on the pitch. Her role is not to assess the likelihood that Eden Hazard is making a meal of it and how many players Chelsea have on the pitch – the role of the team doctor at Chelase is clearly different. 
  2. The FA are clearly not interested in finding out exactly what happened here which is made clearer by the fact that at no point during the process has the Football Association asked Eva Carneiro to give evidence. Any normal Tribunal will look for real evidence before a decision is made. Clearly not the case here with the Football Association (which, let’s be honest, is broken beyond all repair)
  3. Chelsea must have a very thin EmployeeHandbook- surely this team of incident, in terms of how it is handled should be detailed somewhere in the organization. A normal business will have a handbook of policies and procedures to cover such eventualities.
  4. Is football so corrupt and focused on money, that it is quite happy to publicly state that they have not offered a fair hearing? Unfortunately I think so!


Now, I don’t believe this is the last we will hear about this. No doubt there will be stories that come out about back hand payments and so on, but one thing is clear.

Any business that has a concise EmployeeHandbook will be able to handle this type of situation significantly better than the Football Association and Chelsea!