Birmingham City Women announced on Thursday that Marcus Bignot had been sacked after being banned from the sidelines for seven games for expressing homophobic slurs on former England Women’s assistant manager Rehanne Skinner.
The club revealed they had “terminated his agreement” after he was given one of the longest suspensions in Women’s Super League history for telling openly gay Tottenham Hotspur manager Skinner“Maybe if you had a little p—k in you and in your life, maybe you’d be better off for it and at work.”
Bigot, who previously worked with England’s Under-19 men’s team, was also instructed to attend a mandatory face-to-face education program.
The former Queens Park Rangers defender was charged by the Football Association in March for making the comment after Skinner told him in a row: “F—off Marcus, you’re a p—k and you always been wasting time during Birmingham’s WSL defeat to Spurs the previous month.
Bignot denied doing so or knowing that Skinner was gay, despite being married to a player from his time in Birmingham and despite claims that he had previously asked about her partner at an event a few years earlier.
An independent regulatory committee found him guilty of both making the comment and being fully aware of Skinner’s sexual orientation.
The Regulatory Committee’s written reasons for its ruling read: “The Regulatory Committee does not concern itself with whether Mr. Bignot is homophobic, nor does it make any statement. He turned out to have made a comment that was clearly homophobic and totally unacceptable. It is especially important that homophobic comments, such as Mr. Bignot’s, are severely punished.”
The committee learned that Bignot had been suspended and subsequently lost his position at Birmingham as a result of the case, which also prematurely ended his place in the FA’s elite coaching program which had seen him work with the England Under-19 men’s team .
Birmingham confirmed his departure on Thursday, saying: “We strongly condemn any form of homophobic abuse and reiterate our commitment to address and eliminate discrimination of any kind.”
Skinner was previously head coach of England’s Under-19 and Under-21 women’s teams before briefly becoming assistant manager of the senior team under Phil Neville.
She retired in November 2020 to take the Spurs job.