Red Card Sanctions

What do other leagues do in respect of red card sanctions?

In the Oxfordshire Walking Football League, we play rounds of fixtures once a month and a player receiving a red card is (a) banned for the rest of the games that day and (b) also banned from the next 2 rounds of games. 

However, standard County FA rules for 'regular' football normally dictate a 2 'match' ban.  We consider a 2 'match' ban equates to our 2 rounds, as if we had to strictly comply with the word 'matches' a player could then potentially turn up at the very next round of games, sit out the first two games and then play in the remain matches that day - hardly a great deterent!

Discuss......

Parents
  • We had something very similar after our first match day where someone was given a red card and their ban was from "all Sunday football" until "3 matches were played". We queried this with the county FA and they said that there was no way around the sanction, but for us that would have given the person a whole match day ban, but still not felt to be a good enough sanction. However, as he was banned from all football, it meant that he also couldn't play for another walking football team in a different league so there were other consequences in our case. 

Reply
  • We had something very similar after our first match day where someone was given a red card and their ban was from "all Sunday football" until "3 matches were played". We queried this with the county FA and they said that there was no way around the sanction, but for us that would have given the person a whole match day ban, but still not felt to be a good enough sanction. However, as he was banned from all football, it meant that he also couldn't play for another walking football team in a different league so there were other consequences in our case. 

Children
  • Thanks Hannah - looks like this could be a real grey area and certainly not suited to the way most walking football competitions/leagues are run.  Hopefully, we might get some steer/direction from the FA...and at best confirm that we can adopt an approach that the FA's standard one match ban eqautes to walking football's one round of matches on a single day, so long as we make it crystal clear in our individual league competition rules at th outset...

  • On the Somerset FA run Walking Football Tournaments we use the small sided soccer module which means sanctions on the day and do not get reported through Wholegame, which sounds as though this happened in Hannah's example. All sanctions are match based exactly as per FA Sanctions, this does mean that depending on how many fixtures the team has during the day a player maybe eligible to play later in the day. It does also mean that the sanction may carry over into the next tournament run by Somerset FA, but does not stop the player playing in other tournaments. There is a caveat in that if the sending off warrants an extraordinary report then this will be entered on Wholegame by the Referee and an appropriate sanction from the County FA / The FA awarded. 

  • That sounds remarkably lenient - a player can be red carded in first match and then able to play again on same day in perhaps the fourth match of what could be a 6 or 7 match event....