Should French Guiana appeal to CAS for Malouda's eligibility?
Since Gold Cup lacks clear eligibility definitions, it uses FIFA rules which only apply to FIFA affiliates, and French Guiana is not one of them.
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TUDN
Video Florent Malouda sigue sin hacer caso, se saltó la sanción y se presentó en el estadio
El atacante francés, que ha sido suspendido por alineación indebida y expulsado por dos partidos oficiales, durante los cuales no podrá ingresar al estadio, ha desafiado la decisión de Concacaf.
The answer is yes, the South-American minnows should appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. In a similar case to this of Florent Malouda being declared ineligible to play the Gold Cup by Concacaf, the CAS quite recently overruled long suspensions to Liga MX players Enrique Trivero and Pablo Aguilar by declaring them undue.
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Let’s recall the Triverio-Aguilar cases. In separate incidents, both Toluca's Argentine forward and Club America's Paraguayan skipper incurred in aggressive behavior against different referees. Based on its own established rules on ‘aggressive behavior’, the Mexican Disciplinary Committee handed the two players with similar eight-to-ten-matches bans.
However, the Mexican referees’ association went on strike pushing for harsher punishments from the domestic Court of Appeals. In turn, the Court of Appeals acquiesced and imposed new, one-year bans to Triverio and Aguilar. As expected, the players flew to Lausanne and, finally, CAS found that the Court of Appeals went beyond its due process and reinstated the original bans.
In order to avoid getting too technical, it is enough to say that the Malouda-affair is similar to Triverio-Aguilar because in the two scenarios the sanctioning body is going beyond its own written rules. As such, the word ‘eligibility’ only appears four times within the 34-page Gold Cup 2017 regulations. Explaining who's eligible to play and who isn't is done through simple allusion to FIFA statutes.
But the FIFA statutes about eligibility do not address the issue of Malouda with French Guiana in Gold Cup either; for French Guiana is not a member of FIFA and Malouda himself is not acquiring a new nationality with the purpose of playing with the representative team of another affiliate football association.
All this legal mess has sprung out of Concacaf’s inconsistency about admitting non-FIFA members in its tournaments while expecting to enforce FIFA rulings. This legal inconsistency by Concacaf is something that CAS can well rule ‘improper’, undue, just like it did with Triverio-Aguilar.
The question thus is not whether French Guiana should appeal to CAS for Malouda’s eligibility. The actual question is whether French Guiana or Malouda will appeal.
