Malky Mackay should face a season-long ban from football for the offensive texts he sent to a former colleague at Cardiff City, according to Lord Triesman, the former Football Association chairman.
Ex-Cardiff manager Mackay has apologised for sending three messages to the club's former head of recruitment Iain Moody, which he admits were "unacceptable" and "inappropriate".
More messages alleged to be of an offensive nature emerged over the weekend - one allegedly racist, about Cardiff's Malaysian owner Vincent Tan, and three of an allegedly sexist and homophobic nature.
The FA have confirmed they are investigating the dossier of messages involving Moody and Mackay sent to them by Cardiff, but they may be unable to sanction either man if the messages are deemed to be private correspondence.
Triesman, FA chairman between 2008 and 2010, believes Mackay should be barred from the game for a season solely on the strength of the three messages he admits sending.
"If it turns out to be three texts then maybe a season [ban], if it's more than that it may be much more," Triesman said. "Assuming that the evidence is stacked up - I can't pre-try it - I think the FA, in the same sense that it can say to players 'here is a period in which you can take no part in playing', could do so with other people in football."
Lord Ouseley, the chairman of anti-discrimination campaign group Kick It Out, believes the case highlights a greater need to address prejudice and bigotry in sport.
He said: "Malky Mackay is probably thinking 'Hey, I'm unlucky, I've got into a situation where all my texts have been forensically examined'. If that happened to every other football manager, senior administrator and other people at top levels of the game then there wouldn't be many people working in football, the game might just collapse. We have to recognise that there is a serious problem about prejudice and bigotry."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article