Guest Post: Jeremy Taylor is community manager at Our Social Times – a UK based social media agency, blog and events company.

Last week UEFA announced that the Serbian Football Association would be fined £66,000 after members of the England under-21 team were subject to racist abuse and violence in a recent match.

Predictably, the announcement sparked uproar on Twitter. There had been widespread calls for UEFA to ban Serbia from future competitions, so the fine seemed a very lenient punishment to a lot of fans.

Using our social media monitoring tool to search for mentions that associate UEFA with racism, we can see a huge spike following last week’s announcement. The overwhelmingly majority of these are tweets criticising UEFA or mocking their unwillingness to seriously tackle racism.

There is another very noticeable and perhaps more surprising trend. A look at the topic cloud (below) shows “Nicklas Bendtner” featuring very prominently. Given that he doesn’t play for England or Serbia and had no involvement in the match whatsoever, it might seem strange for him to have more mentions than Serbia, Danny Rose or even the Ferdinand’s.

Drilling into these mentions, we can see that they all refer to the £80,000 fine that Bendtner received for showing his Paddy Power branded boxer shorts when celebrating a goal in Euro 2012. The fact that Bendtner was fined significantly more for unauthorised advertising than Serbia were for racism and violence is shocking – which explains why it was tweeted and retweeted by hundreds of sarcastic social media users.

So. Bendtner’s pants are still more offensive to UEFA than racism. Good to know.

— LadyArse (@LadyArse) December 13, 2012

Although this is probably not a subject Paddy Power would want to associate themselves with, there is no sign of any animosity towards them. Instead, by fining Bendtner such a large sum UEFA have scored an own goal and given Paddy Power more publicity than they could have dreamed of when they first gave Bendtner his green undies.