MADRID.- The president of LaLiga, Javier Tebaspointed out this Wednesday that the cancellation of the match scheduled in Miami between the Villarreal and the Barcelona December 20 represents “a missed opportunity”, while the footballers’ association celebrates the decision.
“Today Spanish football has lost an opportunity to advance, project itself to the world and strengthen its future,” Tebas said in a message published on his social networks.
Hours before, the employers announced the cancellation of the match “due to the uncertainty generated in Spain in recent weeks,” as stated in the LaLiga statement.
“The defense of ‘tradition’ is invoked from a closed and provincial vision, while the true traditions of European football are threatened by decisions of the institutions that govern it, which year after year destroy the national leagues, the authentic driving force of the football industry in Europe,” criticized Tebas.
Integrity at stake
This occurs, according to the leader, “in the face of the naivety and passivity of European rulers who do not know how to distinguish the inconsequential from the essential.”
Furthermore, Tebas appealed to the “integrity of the competition from those who have been questioning that same integrity for years, putting pressure on referees, rulers, constructing distorted stories or using political and media pressure as a sporting tool”, in reference to the videos against refereeing that Real Madrid TV broadcasts weekly.
“And others,” he stressed, “perhaps without knowing it and in good faith, have been dragged into debates about information that was already addressed in 2018, where that supposed ‘information’ – which they had then and now too – was just an excuse to end the project.”
The leader thanked Villarreal and Barcelona for their commitment to this initiative that “only sought the growth” of the competition and stressed that the two clubs “were not thinking about them, they were thinking about everyone.”
The employers’ association assured on Tuesday that holding this match would have represented “a decisive step in the global expansion” of the Spanish competition and stressed that it complied with the regulations and “did not affect the integrity of the competition.”
For its part, Barcelona indicated that it accepted and respected the decision, while Villarreal coach Marcelino García expressed the lack of respect for announcing it during their match against Manchester City in the Champions League.
“Unity and firmness of the players”
For its part, the Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE) highlighted the unity and firmness of the players after learning of the cancellation, after the footballers protested by staying still for the first 15 seconds of each match last weekend.
The union assured that this decision “confirms the employers’ continued contradictions regarding a proposed project, promoted and managed by LaLiga that modified the competition model and, as a consequence, directly affected the working conditions of the footballers.”
Regarding the protests, the AFE recalled that “given the lack of transparency, dialogue and coherence of the institution chaired by Javier Tebas, the footballers spoke out unanimously on the field last day to send a powerful message: without footballers there is no football.”
Later, the president of the Higher Sports Council (CSD, a government body), José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, declared that “before taking an initiative of this nature – a decision so relevant that it could have undoubtedly affected the integrity of the competition – a dialogue was necessary, an agreement of the participants, of all the clubs.”
The CSD leader, who had to rule on the appeal presented by Real Madrid against the match, added that the executive will “always” prefer “to bring sporting events to Spain and not take them out.”
