A post on Facebook which has been shared over 50,000 times claims UEFA officials have noticed that an Italian player in the Euro 2020 final against England received a yellow card in the quarter-final and therefore shouldn’t have been playing.
It states this means Italy, who won the final on penalties, could be disqualified from the competition and England declared winners.
This is all nonsense.
UEFA rules, which applied to Euro 2020, state that players who receive a red card during a single game of the tournament are suspended from the next game.
Players who accumulate two yellow cards over multiple matches are also suspended from the game after the one in which they received their second yellow card.
But single yellow cards are wiped after the quarter-finals meaning no player would have missed the final due to a yellow card received in the semi-final, as was a possibility in previous tournaments.
So the idea that an Italian player would have been banned from the final for picking up a yellow in the quarter-final doesn’t make any sense.
What’s more, no Italian player received two yellow cards up until the final anyway.
Italy didn’t receive any yellow cards during their first two games against Turkey and Switzerland. Subsequently, yellow cards were received by Matteo Pessina against Wales, Giovanni Di Lorenzo and Nicolò Barella against Austria in the second round, Domenico Berardi and Marco Verratti against Belgium in the quarter-final and Leonardo Bonucci and Rafael Tolói against Spain in the semi-final.
So no Italian player received enough yellow cards to be suspended for the final, even without the rule voiding yellow cards after the quarter-finals.
Whether some of the Italian players should have been sent off during the final itself is another question entirely.
