The EFL Board, acting as the Management Committee of the Carabao Cup, has today fined Grimsby Town Football Club £20,000 - of which £10,000 will be suspended until the end of Season 2025/26 - for having breached the Rules of the competition. The breach relates to the Club fielding an ineligible player against Manchester United in a Round Two tie on 27 August 2025. Grimsby Town progressed to Round Three following a 12-11 penalty shoot-out win at Blundell Park. The circumstances leading to this transgression are that Grimsby Town submitted the registration of Clarke Oduor at 12:01 pm on the day before the fixture i.e. shortly after the 12:00 pm deadline required in accordance with the 2025/26 competition rules. The Club self-reported the breach upon discovery the day after the fixture had been completed. Following a comprehensive review of all the evidence and considering prior decisions taken in respect of offences in the League Cup, the Board determined that the issuing of a fine followed precedent. The Board further noted the Club’s non-compliance was not deliberate with no intention to deceive or mislead. The Club has since implemented several actions to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. The Club will be liable for the suspended sum of £10,000, if they were to again field an ineligible player in any League Competition between now and the end of Season 2025/26. https://www.efl.com/news/2025/septe...-town-fined-after-fielding-ineligible-player/ didn’t we get chucked out of the FA cup for a similar thing with Aiden Marsh?
Possibly so but are they ineligible or not. Don’t understand why they have even been fined if they are saying that ok to field the player but missed the registration by a cut off point.
No he wasn't cup tied. He was registered as a player with York City in the first game which BFC drew in the FA cup. He was recalled for the replay ,which he was not allowed ,as the previous game he wasn't officially with BFC. Definitely not cup tied ,a misstake by BFC .
No, it was just a whim of the rules that he wasn’t re-registered with us at the date of the original tie but was for the replay so shouldn’t have played. In effect on both occasions the sides fielded a player who wasn’t registered on time to play. £10k fine compared to being thrown out is a much bigger difference in punishment than the difference in the level of offence. I thought at the time we’d had our pants down and should have appealed the sanction - it probably could and should have been a fine not expulsion.
1 mins late a fine, half of which is suspended seems fair enough. I'm surprised they haven't been kicked out though, maybe Odour missing the penalty helped their case!?
More like the furore that kicking them out and re-instating Man Utd would have caused, all the noise about favouring the big clubs etc etc, wasn’t a good news story like Horsham being reinstated was at the time. Grimsby would have got universal sympathy and United ridicule - there was none of that for us and Horsham. There are huge parallels in offence but massive chasms in the level of sanction. It stinks. And I’ve absolutely nothing against Grimsby, nor do I feel they should have been expelled from the league cup.
Ex-red Clarke Oduor at the centre of all this. Comparison with our FA Cup fiasco is somewhat meaningless, given that the two situations are from different cup competitions run by different organisations (FA vs EFL). Apparently the EFL have followed precedence from prior League Cup decisions on this one. Given that it's a self-reported, 1 minute late registration, it looks like an unusual, and surprising, case of common sense from the EFL.
I don't agree with this at all. Clarke Oduour would have been an eligible player if their fax machine was 1 minute quicker. It was impossible for Marsh to be eligible to play for us. Grimsby's was a small technical breach, ours was pretty egregious.
Grimsby should be kicked out & Man United progress to the next round There seems to be an odour of favouritism here
I had a bad feeling about this when they said during the game he'd only signed the day before - I almost posted about it but decided not to tempt fate.
The most annoying thing about the Horsham debacle, at the time, was that Sutton away would have put me back up to 92. But now I’m hoping for Bromley away.
I know these are the rules before the cup competitions start, but I can't help but think it harks back to a time when the cups were held in similar regard as winning the league. It's not like Grimsby would have signed Odour to give them a discernible advantage over Man Utd, in the same way that we didn't field Marsh with the intention of sparing our blushes vs Horsham. Gone are the days when clubs might have poached players before deadline day to try and give them an added chance of winning the FA Cup; can you imagine if we got to the Final and Man City sent us Haarland on a one-match loan so we could beat Liverpool at Wembley. It's not gonna happen. To take this further, why is it that players who sign for clubs mid-season can play in the play-offs, which are essentially cup ties with a final and a trophy to present to the winners? It's all rather quaint really.
No, they shouldn't. Fa cup and league Cup different. Liverpool did the same and they only got fined in 2020. Absurd to kick them out for what happened.
I think we could have appealed it but likelihood was wed lose the appeal. Could be wrong. Probably am.
