Andre Villas-Boas continues to follow in his mentor Jose Mourinho’s footsteps. Porto, Chelsea, sacked by Chelsea and, most recently, suspended for comments bringing the game into disrepute.
Andre Villas-Boas took to Instagram to voice his support for Oscar after Oscar received an eight-game ban for his role in inciting a brawl during Shanghai SIPG’s match against Guangzhou R&F. The Chinese Football Association took issue with such a public statement of discord, even if it was couched as support for Oscar.
The CFA suspended Villas-Boas two games. They suspended players Hulk and Wu Lei for similar offences: wearing t-shirts of protest. They also fined the players and the club a total of just over £20,000.
The Chinese Football Association did not explicitly state Villas-Boas’ offence. However, his Instagram post was his only public remark on the matter. Presumably the all caps “ZERO RED CARDS,” multiple exclamation marks and thumbs-down emoji contributed to the dishonour and disrepute AVB engendered.
While the CFA does not explicitly ban recounting a player’s statistics on social media, his inflammatory use of punctuation and non-verbal communication may have crossed any number of lines.
"Victory is the result every participant pursues but it can never be at the cost of sacrificing football order and disrupting football rules… The CFA will keep strictly punishing all violations of rules and discipline and hope that all clubs, officials and players can maintain order. – SkySports"
This is Andre Villas-Boas’ first suspension just as it is Oscar’s. Villas-Boas would do well to consult with his ex-mentor Jose Mourinho about how to passive-aggressively register discord without picking up a suspension. Mourinho could tutor him in the arts of “I won’t comment because I would get in trouble, but…” or “I respect the decision because there’s nothing else I can do.”
Villas-Boas’ post about Oscar sits between an anniversary photo with his wife and a picture of a drawing his kids did. Clearly, Villas-Boas is a social media monster who was only a matter of time away from a major incident.
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Rumours have that he once considered posting a photo of himself “dabbing.” Supposedly his media representatives and legal counsel talked him out of such a potentially career-ending mistake.