The English Football Association punished Evangelos Marinakis, owner of Nottingham Forest, with a five-match suspension this Tuesday, due to an incident that occurred at the end of September, in the 0-1 defeat to Fulham, led by Marco Silva.
According to the British newspaper Mirror, the Greek (who also owns the majority of the share capital of Rio Ave SAD) was found guilty of spitting in the direction of a referee. An accusation that he himself refuted, claiming that it was... a case of coughing caused by smoking.
In the document sent to the organization, he himself said that he smoked "two to three cigarettes a day", which made him need to "spit and/or cough several times", so it was all just a coincidence, at the moment when the referee walked past him.
The multimillionaire appealed this decision, but without success, as an independent commission considered this justification "completely implausible", given the "disrespectful and repugnant" act.
