Real Madrid is synonymous with success on and off the pitch, both in Spain and internationally. The club has built an identity that demands excellence in everything it does—an identity that its fans, in Spain and around the world, take immense pride in. Javier Tebas, in his tremendously irresponsible attack on the club, compared Real Madrid’s management to Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany.
In making this disgraceful comparison, Javier Tebas tried to disguise his intentions by separating Real Madrid supporters’ ideology from what he was insinuating about the club’s management. Madrid fans worldwide wasted no time seeing through this deception and denounced his brazen remarks for what they were.
What Javier Tebas fails to understand is that the values of Real Madrid supporters are not detached from those of the club’s management. The club and its fans share a relentless pursuit of unparalleled success. Real Madrid supporters are among the most demanding in European football, renowned for holding their own club accountable whenever its sporting project fails to deliver the success it is capable of achieving.
The very least Javier Tebas, as president of LaLiga and vice president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), could do is demonstrate impartiality and neutrality regarding the greatest scandal in Spanish football history—the disgraceful Negreira case—while the judicial process takes its course. Instead, he is often found on the brink of publicly defending Barcelona’s position in a controversy that has severely undermined the integrity and credibility of LaLiga as a competition. Tebas is seemingly more irritated by Real Madrid’s refusal to let the Negreira scandal fade into obscurity than by the scandal itself. While the rest of Spanish football appears content to sweep one of the gravest controversies in its history under the rug, Real Madrid continue to exercise their right to call a spade a spade—and Tebas appears to resent them for it.
Today, however, he crossed a dangerous line. He has confused freedom of expression with something fundamentally different. In attempting to justify his appalling remarks, he has sought to draw an equivalence between Florentino Pérez claiming that league titles were stolen during a period when Barcelona paid the vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee for more than a decade, and the sitting president of LaLiga comparing the communication methods of one of his own member clubs to those employed by the Nazi regime.
Tebas, of course, conveniently forgets that barely four months after he became LaLiga president in 2013, the very same Real Madrid management in which he now claims to see a resemblance to Nazi propaganda methods was arranging a friendly match against Deportivo de La Coruña to help raise funds for a historic Spanish football institution facing severe financial difficulties.
Benefited from Real Madrid’s solidarity or not—Spanish football institutions more broadly have chosen to remain silent in the face of such an outrageous attack. The silence is particularly disappointing because this is no longer merely a disagreement between Javier Tebas and Real Madrid. It is a question of the standards of conduct expected from someone entrusted with governing the top flight of Spanish football.
Real Madrid have existed and achieved unparalleled success with pride, integrity, and not while paying the vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee for years under multiple club presidents. Real Madrid were a symbol of excellence long before Javier Tebas became LaLiga president, and, as difficult as he may find it to accept, they will continue to be one long after his tenure comes to an end—a tenure that, under any responsible regulatory body, should have ended last night.