Burnley’s former lead performance analyst — who is a former staff member at Manchester City — has been banned from all football-related activity by the Football Association (FA) for 12 months after breaching betting rules.
Richard Bredice was also fined £4,500 after he admitted he breached FA regulations by placing 456 bets on football matches and any other matter concerning or related to football between November 1, 2014, and December 12, 2022.
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Six months of his suspension take effect immediately, while the remaining six months are deferred until the end of the 2025-26 season.
Burnley say that Bredice is no longer working at the club and stopped his activity once he was reminded of his responsibilities.
The majority of Bredice’s 456 bets were placed during his six-year tenure at City, which lasted until 2019. After leaving the Premier League champions, he joined Vincent Kompany at Anderlecht before later moving to Turf Moor in 2022.
Bredice is alleged to have placed 12 ‘inside information bets,’ primarily focused on potential transfers in and out of City, earning a profit of more than £1,700 on 11 of these.
Bredice denied having access to any inside information. He claimed that he did not possess any knowledge about the transfers in question that was not already publicly available at the time of the alleged inside information bets.
One of the bets made included a stake of £515 that yielded a profit of £375, and was made the morning after a staff party. The FA’s independent regulatory commission said that the timing, combined with the successful outcome of the bet and the unusually high stake by Bredice’s standards, inevitably led them to conclude that the information was discussed at the function and motivated him to place the bet.
Given that some of the bets were against his own team, the FA’s commission ruled that a ban ranging from six months to life was appropriate. They acknowledged that Bredice’s actions undermined the integrity of the game.
The FA accepted the argument made on Bredice’s behalf that, as he is not a player, there is less perception that he could influence the game compared to if the breach had been committed by a player.
(Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
