Rodri and Morata given one-game ban for ‘Gibraltar is Spanish’ chants

Spain players Rodri and Morata have been given one-match bans by UEFA for chanting “Gibraltar is Spanish” during their celebrations of winning the 2024 European Football Championship, the organisation said on Wednesday.

In a statement, UEFA’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Committee explained that it had decided to punish the two players “for breaching the basic rules of good conduct”, resulting in both missing the next game of the UEFA National Teams Tournament.

That means Manchester City’s Rodri and Paulo Fonseca’s Milan’s Morata are certain to be casualties when Spain travel to Serbia on September 5, at the start of their Nations League title defence.

During the celebrations of their European Championship victory on 15 July in Madrid, Morata and Rodri sang “Gibraltar is Spanish” at events along with the crowd that welcomed them to the capital, where they celebrated their fourth title after a 2–1 win against England in the final in Berlin.

The Gibraltar Football Association (GFA) then lodged a formal complaint with UEFA and called the Spanish team’s celebrations “highly provocative”, “offensive” and “unacceptable”, adding that “there is no place for such behaviour in football’s nature”.

The Gibraltar government expressed “disappointment” at the celebrations and called the chants “outdated comments about Gibraltar” and the gesture an “unnecessary mixture of sporting success with discriminatory political statements”.

UEFA recognised Gibraltar, a British overseas territory on the southern coast of Spain, as a full member in May 2013 following a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (TAS) against the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) and the Spanish government.