Chelsea left back and England international Ashley Cole tweeted<\/a> this afternoon from his @TheRealAC3<\/a> – “Hahahahaa, well done\u00a0#<\/s>fa<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0I lied did I,\u00a0#<\/s>BUNCHOFTWATS<\/strong><\/a>” following a FA judgement and publishing of findings from the recent John Terry case<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cole tweeted out the offensive tweet at Friday lunchtime to his 382,000 Twitter followers and within it’s first hour attracted over 17,000 retweets – including many messages of disgust from former players and journalists.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/strong> Cole has since deleted the tweet but even though it was deleted just after 1 hour, it hasn’t stopped the story reaching major media.<\/em><\/p>\n

Less than 3 months ago we reported a leaked document from The FA outlining the new Social Media guideline<\/a>s and rules that would be enforced regarding bad\u00a0behavior\u00a0on Social Media.<\/p>\n

The official document (which presumably Ashley Cole never read), states:<\/p>\n

“Any comments which are improper, bring the game into disrepute or are threatening, abusive, indecent or insulting may lead to disciplinary action”<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And just in case Cole thinks an apology on Twitter or deleting his tweet will help his chances at avoiding punishment, the rule list states:<\/p>\n

“Deleting or\u00a0apologizing\u00a0publicly for an improper\u00a0posting\u00a0 whilst advisable, will not prevent disciplinary action being taken”<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whilst most football players have been better behaved in the past 12 months, this is still a real problem and our advice that clubs should properly educate players about the consequences of bad social media<\/a> – rather than just giving them rules – is still very relevant. Perhaps Ashley Cole will take a note out of Joey Barton’s book – who famously used Promoted Tweets as a way of\u00a0apologizing<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0to the wider audience for his tweets in a desperate attempt to claw back some PR credibility?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chelsea left back and England international Ashley Cole tweeted this afternoon from his @TheRealAC3 – “Hahahahaa, well done\u00a0#fa\u00a0I lied did I,\u00a0#BUNCHOFTWATS” following a FA judgement and publishing of findings from the recent John Terry...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6176122579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[68,69,61,27,56,60],"tags":[96,85,38,30,28],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n