John Terry doesn't believe he was given a fair trial by the FA when they found him guilty of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand.
Former England and Chelsea captain Terry was accused of calling Ferdinand a "f***ing black c***" during a Premier League meeting between Chelsea and QPR in 2011. At a criminal trial at Westminster Magistrates Court he was found not guilty of a racially-aggravated public order offence as the prosecution was unable to prove he had used the words as an insult.
But an FA independent regulatory commission found him guilty in its own separate hearing. The defender didn't appeal the verdict at the time, and accepted the four-match ban and £220k fine handed to him by the FA. He duly retired from international football.
Terry has revealed neither Anton Ferdinand nor the player's older brother, ex-England international Rio, are on speaking terms with him. And now the 43-year-old has taken aim at the FA's actions around the hearing, even claiming evidence used during his court case was refused.
"I could have overcome it, given a fair trial again, and given the evidence which we had in the court of law, which was refused by the FA," Terry told William Hill's 'Up Front With Simon Jordan' podcast. When asked directly by interviewer Jordan whether he thought he had a fair trial, he said "no I didn't".
"I go into Wembley on the first day and my lawyers and myself demand evidence to be in, that was in the court of law, and it was refused - literally and blatantly," Terry continued. "So we then have an hour's meeting outside of that.
"Board members are refused entry to come and give evidence backing me and telling their side of the story. So right from the outset it wasn't going to be a fair trial, clearly. They'd made up their mind right from the outset, in my mind. Did I feel like it was fair going into it? Did I want to put myself through four days of absolute hell again? No I didn't."
Terry said he attempted to make contact with Anton and Rio Ferdinand immediately after the game but "basically got shut down, instantly".
"I knew Anton, we were mates," he continued. "I wasn't socially but we knew each other and we always got on well. Obviously got on well with Rio.
"We could have done something that was probably more powerful than what came about in the end, and that's probably my disappointment, because it's in the game - clearly, in the stadiums and all of that - that we need to get out, for sure. We could have done something really powerful as a group of players - not only us but everybody else, I think, at the time.
"Since then I've tried to speak to Rio, who doesn't want to talk to me at all, I've seen him on the beach in Dubai and [he's] refused to speak to me, and there's not much more I can do. I think it could have been addressed and could have been dealt with a lot better."
In 2012, Ferdinand broke his silence over the incident, tweeting "On a serious note people need 2 read the facts before they send stupid tweets 2 me with liar and grass in it footage don't lie." He would later speak in more detail about his experiences of racism in the 2020 BBC film ' Football, Racism and Me'.
“I was sitting in the room with two FA delegates,” said Ferdinand, who was 26 at the time of the incident. “And they were probing me. Probing me. They started to make me feel like I was in the wrong. That I’d done something wrong. All I know is that I didn’t feel like the victim in that room.
“I’ve tried to get my interview with the FA. But it turns out, back then, they didn’t record interviews with alleged victims.”
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