Clint Dempsey gets harsher penalty from U.S. Open Cup discipline panel
Another day, another suspension for Clint Dempsey.
On Thursday, just six days after Major League Soccer suspended Dempsey for three games across all competitions for his lamentable behavior in a June 16 U.S. Open Cup game, U.S. Soccer announced that its U.S. Open Cup Adjudication and Discipline Panel has additionally banned him from that tournament for six games or two years, whichever is greater.
As such, Dempsey will at the very least miss the 2016 and 2017 U.S. Open Cups. And if his Seattle Sounders play fewer than six cumulative games across those two editions of the century-old tournament, he could miss part of the 2018 tournament as well.
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The punishment comes in the wake of Dempsey's rage against the referee and an assistant referee in the 3-1 extra-time loss to the Portland Timbers in the fourth round.
Since Dempsey is part of a professional team, MLS had jurisdiction over his case and suspended him the minimum of three games for referee abuse – when referee assault was probably the more suitable charge. The league fined him an undisclosed amount.
Now, the U.S. Open Cup's own disciplinary panel, which had no specific suspension guidelines – unlike MLS – has imposed a separate ban for its tournament in addition to a second fine. The suspension is the same as the one handed to Cuauhtemoc Blanco of the Chicago Fire, when he head-butted a D.C. United employee after being sent off during a U.S. Open Cup game in 2008.
Aside from the awkwardness of being punished (and fined) twice for the same crime, because of U.S. Soccer's byzantine disciplinary jurisdictions and overlaps, the suspensions are remarkable for their disparity. Whereas one disciplinary body saw fit to essentially give Dempsey a nine-day suspension – the June 20, 24 and 28 Sounders games – another ruled him out for at least 730 days.
When Dempsey incurred his first suspension, the general consensus was that he'd gotten off very lightly – we at FC Yahoo wondered about the double standard for players like Dempsey, who are clearly very important to the bodies charged with adjudicating their misbehaviors. This second suspension may be some kind of correction to that, but it comes in a much less meaningful competition, even if the Sounders take the Open Cup more seriously than most other MLS teams.
The optics, if perhaps not the intent, of this are unfortunate: the organization that badly needs Dempsey – MLS has a vested interest in its U.S. national teamers showing well during this summer's Gold Cup – went easy on him; the one that doesn't brought down the hammer.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
