Houston Player Gets $500 fine for Anti-Ref Tweet

By: Laurie | July 21st, 2009

The upside of the twitter revolution? Lots and lots of people can have immediate access to your off-the-cuff thoughts.

The downside? Lots and lots of people can have immediate access to your off-the-cuff thoughts.

And that can cost you. Ask Brian Ching, Houston Dynamo forward who sent the above tweet after a controversial Seattle goal in their match against the Dynamo. It reads:

Ref in Seattle just cheated the dynamo. What a joke. Not even close. Ref is a cheat.

Ching wasn’t actually at the game; he was on the other side of the country, playing with the US National Team, so he was relying on video to see what happened. (At about the 1:00 mark. And for the record, these are Houston announcers, and there are video angles that are a little more in Seattle’s favor.) In the play, Seattle’s Fredy Montero gets a nice left-footed shot past Pat Onstad, but defender Mike Chabala seems to make a brilliant save off the line — only to see the Assistant Referee rule it a goal.

Seattle went on to win the game, 2-1.

Even though Ching later apologized (via Twitter), MLS officials were not amused. They fined him $500.

This raises some interesting questions about public vs. private speech. Was he speaking as a private person, or as a representative of the league?

Ching has 1800 followers on Twitter. Not huge, but not tiny, either. I suppose he might have that many actual friends, but presumably a lot of these people follow him because of his role in US Soccer. So what are his (and other players’) responsibilities when they’re writing their own thoughts about the game they represent?

As an MLS fan, I’ll be the first to admit that the refereeing can be abysmal and inconsistent. And as a Seattle fan, I’ll even admit that this goal was rather suspect. If Chingy had said, “Ref made a horrible call,” I’d be fine with it, because that’s definitely arguable.

But in my opinion, when you call a referee a “cheat,” implying that he intentionally threw the game to the other team, that crosses a line.

So say, “Horrible call.” Say, “Bad refereeing.” Even say, “We got screwed.” But when it comes to claiming intentional dishonesty?

Watch your tweets.