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Swansea City’s Player Liaison Officer, Huw Lake, has been suspended by the Football Association (FA) from all football and football-related activity for 12 months for betting related misconduct.
Lake has also been fined £1,500 ($1,900) for the charge, which he has subsequently admitted to, with the FA alleging that he had placed 2,476 bets on football matches between 3 April 2018 and 24 September 2023.
Though, within some of the case documents, it highlights that 754 of the bets included games in competitions in which Swansea participated during the relevant seasons; 212 of these involved Swansea themselves, but Lake claims “he never used specific knowledge from his position at Swansea when placing bets.”
Originally, an independent Regulatory Commission imposed the 12-month ban and the fine, though the ban was going to see Lake serve the first three months immediately and the remainder of it would be suspended until the end of the 2024/25 season, as well as the fine.
However, the FA appealed against this, stating that the penalty was “so unduly lenient as to be unreasonable.”
As such, an independent Appeal Board came to a similar decision and substituted a 12-month suspension to be served in its entirety from 25 March 2024.
This follows on from the FA charging West Ham United midfielder Lucas Paqueta with four breaches of the governing bodies betting rules last week, and comes as two more players have been caught up in the A-League betting scandal from earlier this month.
