Foul play?

Simon Jordan has weighed in on the discussion over Felix Zwayer, the referee for England’s semifinal against the Netherlands tomorrow night.

Back in 2005, Zwayer received a six-month football ban for match-fixing following an investigation into a £250 bribe.

And the controversy arises given that Jude Bellingham was fined back in 2021 after he negatively referred to Zwayer’s controversial history after a Borussia Dortmund match. 

But talkSPORT’s Jordan has defended the decision to appoint Zwayer for the match, arguing that if all the proper channels were taken when allocating him the game, there can be no cause for complaint now.

“Do we know at what point a referee is told that he’ll get a certain game, the semi-final or the final?” he said. “Because I don’t think it’s something that happens instantaneously. Isn’t it already pre-planned and pre-ordained? So wouldn’t it find the light of day that he was awarded the semi-final by a quirk of circumstance and fate? It happens to be England, which includes Jude Bellingham.”

He added: “Now they’ll say if you’ve cheated once, you’ll cheat again. If you’ve been corrupt once, you’ll be corrupt again. And we’ve now got a situation where they could have potentially said a referee that was appointed to the game, which is now proven to be England, has been taken out of that game through no fault of his own, no lack of merit. 

“He was awarded the game on the basis of merit and because of the controversy that happened with him 20 years ago, and because of a player’s, by the way, inappropriate observation. It’s not right for Jude Bellingham at 18 years of age to be saying what he said about a referee. Jude was barely born when he transgressed the way he did.

“We do live in a rehabilitative society. Referees do make mistakes. In this instance, it was a corrupt mistake and he’s been consequenced for it. And clearly, the authorities that have allowed him to referee domestic football and international football have been very visibly scrutinizing, I would imagine, his performances.

“So what do they do? They award him a semi-final and because it’s England and because a player said something about something that he knows nothing about that happened 20 years before or years before he was born, he gets taken out of the game.”