Ex-Football Association chairman David Bernstein has said that the chief constable of the West Midlands Police should have been sacked after Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster allowed him to retire instead of firing the disgraced officer.
Craig Guildford will continue to receive his full pension.
Mr Berstein told the Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “It’s a complete failure in every way and it is dishonest. I mean, incompetence is bad enough. Dishonesty within the police is incredibly dangerous.
“So you wouldn’t take much to persuade me that maybe he should have been sacked…but I do think one needs to look at this possibly in a wider context of his own record and so on and so forth. What’s happened, as part of this, Maccabi Tel Aviv has been demonised.
“You’d have thought they were the Vandals or the Vikings coming over to destroy Birmingham. It’s completely out of proportion, ridiculous.
“There are many other clubs in Europe, particularly Italian clubs, with their ultra supporters, who are much more potentially dangerous than Maccabi could ever be.
“I think there was talk about 2,000 fans coming over at most. That should have been policed easily. But of course, that wasn’t the direction of travel the Birmingham police wanted to go.”
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