Ecuador’s football federation has suffered a defeat – apparently definitive – stemming from its decision to field Byron Castillo in several qualifiers for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Switzerland’s Federal Court has rejected an appeal filed by the FEF to try to overturn the punishment that Sportski Court of Arbitration (TAS) ruled on November 8, 2022: three points forfeited to the national team in the 2026 World Cup qualifying tournament.

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CAS ruled a year ago in favor of objections filed by the confederations of Chile and Peru, whose leaders insisted that Castillo’s citizenship was Colombian. Among the various procedural evidence in the case, there was one decisive one. This is an incriminating audio recording in which, according to the CAS judges, “the player (Castillo) expressly admitted in an interview with Colonel Jaime Jara (President of the FEF Commission of Inquiry until January 2019) that he was not born in Ecuador on November 10, 1998 . as Byron David Castillo Segura, as indicated in his Ecuadorian passport, but on June 25, 1995, as Byron Javier Castillo Segura and who came to Ecuador from Tumac, Colombia.”

This is how Byron Castillo admitted he wasn’t born in Ecuador: audio transcription of the interview TAS listened to before he was fined by FEF

Francisco Egas, head of the FEF, questioned the decision of the Swiss Federal Court, which upheld the CAS ruling. In statements on the radio Meshof Quito, expressed several points this Tuesday in rejecting the measure.

​We still think the same, that Byron Castillo is Ecuadorian. The federation acted in a good way, says president Francisco Egas

Egas’ complaints

Apart from saying that “we will evaluate the legal options (without specifying which ones)” and that the CAS is “three Swiss judges sitting at a table, far away, deciding on a subject they do not know”, when in In reality there were four judges, he alluded is on issues that are radically different from several of the arguments put forward by the CAS in its 86-page Arbitral Award, in which it detailed the legal reasons for applying the penalty to the FEF.

‘There is no further remedy: Byron Castillo is Colombian’, says the Chilean lawyer who revealed that the Swiss Federal Court would ratify the sanction against Ecuador

According to Egas, “for us, Byron Castillo is Ecuadorian”, “we still think the same: that the Federation acted in a good way”, “this is word against word and the decision of the Ecuadorian state was not respected”, “when the civil registry “Could not prove the lack in (Castillo’s) documents; only in that case is he invited to the national team.”

However, for the dozen or so reasons listed below, CAS, based on the information contained in the Arbitral Award, does not believe that “the Federation acted well,” as Egas asserts as a defense.

Ten key causes