Galaxy release Katai after racist posts by his wife

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Galaxy released midfielder Aleksandar Katai on Friday, two days after the team was made aware of inflammatory social media messages posted on an account belonging to the player’s wife.

Tea Katai’s posts, which have been taken down, appeared to make light of the protests and looting that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in police custody last week in Minneapolis. The team made the decision to release Katai after discussing the issue with him Thursday.

Katai’s salary with the Galaxy has not been made public, but he was signed using targeted allocation money, meaning his salary exceeded $612,500. The Galaxy reached a financial arrangement with Katai and are not responsible for paying the remainder of his contract. He earned a combined $2.7 million in the previous two seasons with the Chicago Fire, according to the players union.

The first of Tea Katai’s posts was a screenshot from a video showing two New York City police officers driving their vehicles through a crowd of demonstrators with a caption, in Serbian, that translates as “kill the s——!” The second shows an apparent looter with boxes of Nike shoes below English-language text reading “Black Nikes Matter.” The Associated Press reported Tea Katai also wrote another post in Serbian that described the protesters as “disgusting cattle.”

The Galaxy said Tea Katai was in Chicago when she made the posts while her husband was in Southern California participating in voluntary individual workouts alongside teammates at Dignity Health Sports Park.