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Sports club banned on Facebook for sexy name

Jessica Jones
Jessica Jones - [email protected]
Sports club banned on Facebook for sexy name
The group's name was too sexy for Facebook. Photo: Atletismo Çexitano/Facebook

An athletics club in southern Spain has been banned from using their name on Facebook…because it sounds too sexy.

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The Sexitano Athletics Club (El Club Atletismo Sexitano) from Almuñécar in Granada, southern Spain ran into trouble when trying to make a Facebook page for its sports group.

Facebook claimed the group’s name could not be used because of its "sexual connotations".

But Facebook’s moderators obviously do not know their Spanish history.

The town was originally a Phoenician colony called Sexi and the town's inhabitants became known as sexitanos, a name that has endured to this day. 

The club’s treasurer, Manuel Alonso, explained that the club has been having problems registering its name "for some time" but had recently tried again to no avail.

"We didn’t mind putting a space between the letters in the word 'sexitano' or using an 'h' but neither were possible," he said.


The group was forced to change the first letter of its name. Screen shot: Facebook

The group decided to change the first letter of the word, changing sexitano to çexitano - and was finally accepted by Facebook.

Many people have asked about the name change and according to Alonso, it must be down to the fact that "Facebook’s policies prohibit the word 'sexi' from being used and that Silicon Valley doesn’t know anything about Almuñécar and its Phoenician origins." 

"We have to defend our history, our identity but of course, if I could speak to Mark Zuckerberg I would tell him that the town was the Phoenicians’ first point of contact along the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula," he told Spanish news agency Efe.

"I would tell him that the place name Seks, or Ex, encompasses an archeological complex comprising of the town’s three necropolises. And that this place name became Sexi, the name by which the town was known during Phoenician and Roman times, and where the current word 'sexitano' comes from". 

The town’s inhabitants are referred to as sexitanos as well as the lesser used Almuñequero.

It is not the first trouble the sexual-sounding moniker has caused for the town; the group Antiguo Sexi (Ancient Sexi) saw its name changed in the United Kingdom where "they didn’t believe the name or where it originated from", according to Alonso. 

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