The Sporting Kansas City loanee claims he faced personal and racist abuse from Richmond Kickers fans during their match on Wednesday night.
USL Pro have released an official statement following claims from Orlando City SC’s Kevin Ellis regarding racial abuse:
“USL has initiated an investigation into an alleged incident between Orlando City player Kevin Ellis and a small group of Richmond Kickers fans at Wednesday night’s match at City Stadium in Richmond. League officials are working actively to gather information from various parties.
“USL PRO and its clubs strongly condemn all forms of abuse and will not tolerate any such actions from its players, coaches, fans, or anyone in involved with the league.”
After Wednesday night’s decisive match between the Kickers and the Lions, Ellis took to Twitter to complain of abuse received during the game.
He claimed that fans were not only insulting him directly over his deceased mother, but also shouting racist abuse.
Ellis has since deleted the tweets, however his first was quote-tweeted verbatim by another user:
Horrible “@Kev_Ellis4: Richmond your fans are trash sayin racial comments & talking about my mom who died 2yrs ago is as low as you can get”
— South Stand SC (@SouthStandSC) August 15, 2013
The the other deleted tweets were from conversation between himself and a Richmond Kickers fan by the name of Douglas Williford who claims to have been at the game. Williford admitted that whilst insults about Ellis’ mother did occur, he claims the fans honestly had no idea that she was deceased and that those insults are, unfortunately, commonplace in football. He then goes on to claim that the alleged racist remarks either never took place or were not intended to be interpreted as such.
However, other fans in the ground claim to have heard the remarks that Ellis is referring to.
CaughtOffside will bring you all the news on this story as it develops.