José Mourinho’s Real Madrid finished Sunday’s Madrid derby with 10 men and on the wrong end of a 2-1 scoreline against Atlético Madrid. What followed was a familiar sight: Mourinho arriving at his post-match press conference carrying a sheet of A4 paper printed with screen-grabs of two tackles by Atlético players that he believed should have resulted in red cards. “We can save ourselves the bother of the press conference because the story is right here,” he said, waving the sheet in front of the assembled journalists, before setting out his argument that Spanish match officials continue to treat Real Madrid unfavourably.
The performance was nothing new for Mourinho. More than two decades ago, his complaints about refereeing preceded a pile-on from angry fans whose threats forced the Swedish referee Anders Frisk into early retirement, and his career since has been punctuated by red cards, touchline bans and mournful post-match monologues about officialdom.
On Tuesday the row widened. Javier Tebas, the La Liga president, used social media to respond to an article in the Spanish publication El Debate, in which the columnist Tomás González-Martín suggested that, by failing to pander to the likes of Real Madrid, referees were damaging the very league they rely on for a living — a league González-Martín claimed has no value without Madrid. “Here they go again, the mouthpieces and the regime’s television, building the same old narrative: the permanent conspiracy,” Tebas wrote. “But this article goes further: it claims that referees harm ‘the business that feeds them’. What exactly is it asking for? Refereeing based on revenue, viewership or the badge? What a way to understand equality in the competition.”
Real Madrid did not treat Tebas’s defence of the officials as the end of the matter. In an official statement, the club said: “Our club considers it intolerable that the president of La Liga uses his institutional position to continue discrediting and attacking Real Madrid. Given this inappropriate and persistent behaviour, we believe that the professional football competition in Spain urgently needs a leader capable of managing it and realising its full potential with the fundamental duty of neutrality.”
The exchange, which has played out during an international break, moved the argument away from the two tackles Mourinho had highlighted and towards the governance of the Spanish game. Tebas’s intervention was directed at a newspaper column rather than at the Real Madrid manager’s post-match display, while Real Madrid’s response framed the episode as evidence that the league’s leadership is not neutral in its dealings with the club. A complaint about red cards in a derby had become, within days, a public dispute over who should be running La Liga.