Tottenham seeks Premier League ban on ESPN reporter over anti-Spurs chants

Tottenham Hotspur have lodged a formal complaint with the Premier League asking that ESPN Brasil reporter João Castelo-Branco be prevented from covering the club, after footage showed him joining Arsenal supporters in São Paulo in a chant about Tottenham. The club has requested his exclusion from matches, press conferences and potential interviews — a sanction aimed at one named journalist, touching no other reporter and not ESPN itself, which holds Premier League broadcast rights across the Caribbean and South America.

The video appeared on Castelo-Branco's personal Instagram and on the account of an ESPN podcast. By his own account to The Times, ESPN learned of Tottenham's displeasure when the Premier League notified the broadcaster that the club had seen and disliked the post; ESPN agreed to delete it, and the videos have since disappeared from both accounts. "Given my role as a correspondent in the UK, I feel I made a mistake," Castelo-Branco said, apologising to the club for the video and adding that he should have thought more about the chant and "the reach it could have", and that he would reconsider "the boundaries of my persona" on the podcast.

Nothing in the complaint concerns his reporting. The conduct at issue is a chant he joined on his own time, on another continent, among fans of a rival club — filmed and posted by himself, and judged by the club it mocked.

Football coverage runs on access that the organisations being covered grant on their own terms. Tottenham complained about no story, requested nothing of the broadcaster that pays the league for its rights, and framed a sanction calibrated to a single correspondent: the club keeps the cameras it needs, and the reporter stands to lose the access his job is built on.

Castelo-Branco has apologised and the videos are gone. The Premier League has yet to rule on whether a club may bar a reporter for what he sang on another continent.