The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has announced that Barcelona striker Luis Suarez will learn the result of his appeal for biting Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini at 2pm BST (9am EST) on Thursday.
CAS said in a statement: “The Court of Arbitration for Sport will announce its decision in the matter Luis Suárez, FC Barcelona and the Uruguayan FA on Thursday 14 August 2014.”
“At the request of the appellants and with the agreement of Fifa, the CAS has conducted an expedited arbitration procedure. As a consequence, the CAS Panel has accepted to render its decision within a short period of time but with grounds to follow later.”
Last week, the Suarez and his legal team – which was made up of two lawyers from Barcelona, one from the Uruguay Football Federation and his personal lawyer – presented their case to have the striker’s four-month ban on all football-related activity reduced.
As it stands today, Suarez would be eligible to play on October 26, which would be against Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu. But the player’s legal team is confident the ban will be cut in half. That would make Suarez eligible to return to training on August 25.
According to Suarez lawyer, Alejandro Balbi, the argument made to the CAS was that the ban should be reduced on the grounds that it infringed on his “fundamental rights.”
Balbi told the Uruguayan newspaper El Observador: “It would be more logical to reduce the sanction by a few months than to reduce the ban concerning international games, because legally it’s easier to contend against the terms of the suspension that forbid him from training and from being at the club, because they violate fundamental rights.”
