HOW FA BUNGLED ALUKO CASE
They were ‘too busy getting rid of Allardyce’ to respond to her bullying claims
The FA used the excuse that they were busy ‘ getting rid of Sam Allardyce’ to help justify their initial failure to respond to all of eniola Aluko’s claims of bullying and racism,
Sportsmail can reveal.
A copy of barrister Katharine Newton’s first report into Aluko’s claims — never published by the governing body — reveals that only three of Aluko’s eight complaints about former england women’s manager Mark Sampson were addressed in a flawed internal inquiry report by human resources director Rachel Brace and technical director Dan Ashworth, which was completed by October last year.
A video in which Sampson was alleged to have made a racially prejudicial joke had not even been viewed when Brace and Ashworth met Aluko (right) to discuss her complaints in detail, 140 days after she made them. It was eventually seen before the FA reached their conclusions. Lianne Sanderson, one of the witnesses Aluko had suggested the FA speak to, had not been interviewed, either.
Brace told Newton that removing the england men’s manager had been a factor in the decision to limit the Aluko investigation. She said: ‘At that point in time we were getting rid of Sam Allardyce.’
The FA said that the Allardyce comment, included in a first draft of Newton’s report, was removed from the final version at their own request as it was offered only for context. Allardyce was sacked as england manager on September 27 last year — when the governing body were in the process of dealing with Aluko, whom they met 18 days later.
Brace also said that the decision to deal with only three of the initial complaints was ‘deliberate’ because examining all eight would mean the FA would get ‘picked apart and create a bigger problem’. Brace said: ‘By laying all of that out we felt that it would only create an even bigger debate.’
She admitted to Newton that she had reflected on ‘whether this approach was the right approach’ and conceded that failing to watch the video had been an ‘oversight’.
The barrister concluded that the FA’s internal investigation had been ‘ lacking’. She wrote: ‘A response should have been provided to each allegation raised. The video should have been watched. Lianne Sanderson should have been spoken to and if that was not possible, then (Aluko) should have been told it had not yet been possible to speak to her.’
Newton’s report also paints a picture of Aluko’s mounting indignation with the FA, over the course of two meetings to discuss her complaints. This goes a long way to explaining why the Chelsea forward initially refused to co-operate with Newton for her subsequent independent inquiry, commissioned by the FA when they realised their internal investigation was inadequate.
The FA has been willing to publish only a summary of the first report’s findings, none of which reveal their failings. This has not helped Sampson, since Newton’s report reveals that neither black nor white players found him to have created the ‘culture of bullying and harassment’ Aluko described.
Anita Asante, the black defender of Ghanaian descent, described writing to Sampson asking for — and receiving — an explanation for her omission from the 2015 World Cup squad. Though she remained disappointed, Sampson was ‘an open guy’, she said. ‘It’s easy to approach him and have a conversation with him.’ Sanderson ‘does not think (Sampson) is a racist or a bully’, said Newton, who concluded that the manager had been justified in dropping Aluko from the england team. The report also reveals Sampson’s tendency to make jokes at players’ expense, though Newton located no evidence of individuals other than Aluko taking them badly. ‘he said things about my age in a way I don’t find offensive,’ said former england captain Casey Stoney, one of those who was dropped by Sampson. ‘That’s his manner.’
Newton found that several players whom Sampson called ‘a pain in the arse’ — the expression which is central to one of Aluko’s initial eight complaints — were not offended by it.
Asante said Sampson would use that term ‘flippantly, but I never heard it in a way to belittle, more like in jest’. Defender Demi Stokes said: ‘he’s not vulgar or aggressive with it. he may joke about it.’
Newton’s second report, published in October after Aluko had finally agreed to meet her, upheld two of her claims that Sampson had engaged in ‘ ill- judged’ attempts at humour ‘discriminatory on grounds of race’.
he told Aluko to make sure her family did not bring the ebola virus to Wembley for a game against Germany, and asked if player Drew Spence, who is of mixed race, had ever been arrested.
But the unpublished first report also relates how Sampson provided Newton with details of how he and Aluko had ‘laughed’ in a car after a 2015 press conference in
FA ignored five
complaints to avoid creating
“bigger debate”