Northampton Town has signed 22-year-old goalkeeper Adam Smith, who was previously sacked by his former club Leicester City after video footage of him involved in an orgy in Thailand with two of his teammates surfaced online.
The footage depicted Smith and two other Leicester players involved in an orgy with a group of Taiwanese women, with one of the young men recording recording himself using abhorrent racist and sexist slurs which led to the trio’s eventual sacking from Leicester. However, Northampton has agreed to give Adam Smith a “second chance.”
Smith, who can be seen in the background of the above photo smiling while his friend is having his anus licked, said: “I know the club do a lot for anti-racism and I’m willing to get involved in that. The way the papers said it, it was like all three of us. It was one comment, which wasn’t made by me.
“If I put the performances in on the pitch, hopefully the fans can put that behind them and get behind me and the rest of the lads.”
So here’s the thing: no, Adam Smith wasn’t the individual who made the derogatory comments during the video footage, but yes, he was filmed laughing and generally being complicit in what was taking place. While it’s all well and good him being awarded a second chance, if he were a retail assistant in Topman who’d been caught out doing this kind of shit, his supervisor wouldn’t move him on to another branch in the company. He’d be done, and his days of selling t-shirts to students would be over.
He’s 22, which is still young but not so young that he wouldn’t have had the mental capacity to process that what he was engaged in, whether or not he was the one who was verbally abusing the women featured in the video, was totally wrong. It’s pretty incredible that Northampton Town has snapped him up with such rapidity, regardless of how many insincere apologies he made after the fact.
