18th October 2005

Ref suspended after race claims

A referee has been suspended over claims he made a racist comment during a football tournament.

Thomas Carter took charge of a match involving a Greek-Turkish team during a five-a-side contest in the PowerLeague centre in Portobello, near Edinburgh.

But afterwards one of the footballers claimed that he had called the Scottish-based Myrthe team "dirty greasy Greek bastards". PowerLeague has now suspended Mr Carter - an SFA-qualified referee - and is
investigating the claims.

It comes after the centre hosted a series of matches as part of the UK-wide Nike Pro 5-A-Side Challenge on Sunday.

PowerLeague staff have already taken a statement from the player who made the complaint and will also interview witnesses and the referee.

A spokesman for PowerLeague said: "We have suspended the referee and we are carrying out an investigation."

He continued: "We have over 80,000 customers a week at our centres and we are very strict in terms of racism, it's not something we will tolerate.

"The referee concerned is an SFA-qualified referee who we had booked for the game and it is extremely unusual for something like this to be alleged against a referee."

The spokesman for the Paisley-based company added that it hoped to have completed its inquiries by the end of the week.

However, the SFA said it was not aware of the claims against Mr Carter. Donald McVicar, the head of referee development, said: "I am not aware of any such incident, there has been no such incident reported to us."