Keys to the cancellation of Villarreal – Barcelona from La Liga in Miami: pressure from Madrid and a threat of a strike by the footballers | Soccer | Sports

On October 8, in his presentation at the World Football Summit in Miami, the president of LaLiga, Javier Tebas, announced that on December 20, Villarreal – Barcelona on matchday 17 would be played in the city of the state of Florida. La Cerámica stadium, will be played at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami,” he proclaimed. Shortly after, the employers’ social networks supported their president’s message. On the night of Tuesday the 21st, just two weeks after the official announcement of what was going to be the first match in the history of the League outside of Spain, Relevent, promoter of the match with which LaLiga has signed a joint venture which guarantees a minimum of 2,000 million euros in 15 years, canceled the event due to “the uncertainty generated.”

Relevent, which had already canceled ticket sales hours before, was exposed to a battery of lawsuits if it sold tickets for a match that did not have all the necessary permits. This was the fourth failed attempt by LaLiga to export an official match away from Spanish territory since 2018. A Barcelona -Girona, a Villarreal – Atlético and a Barcelona – Atlético already suffered the same fate.

The small formal issue that Tebas alluded to to ensure that this time he would have started in Miami was not so small. The approval of the Central American and Caribbean Confederation (Concacaf), which demanded that its referees be chosen, was missing from the American federation and the consent of the soccer players’ union (AFE), which for months had been demanding detailed information about the match to ensure that the working conditions of its members would be met. From the union they assure that they were willing to go on strike as a last and great measure of pressure. In the background, there was also the real possibility that the Higher Sports Council (CSD) would oppose the double complaint presented by Real Madrid and in which the club chaired by Florentino Pérez claimed that the competition was being adulterated.

Sources from the Madrid entity explain that the second complaint, sent this last Tuesday, was a measure of pressure on the CSD, given the intuition that the government body chaired by José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes would not stop the initiative. This morning, Uribes himself gave his opinion about what happened: “The episode we have experienced with what happened in Miami, the Barça and Villarreal match, shows that this is not how things are done. 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, of the players and of the hobbies,” indicated the president of the CSD. “For the future, if there is any idea in this sense, we must start from the need for dialogue and agreement. And immediately from transparency, absolute transparency. And first, as a first condition, that there be adequate rules for this type of initiatives,” he added.

Furthermore, Real Madrid did not rule out a private protest before this Sunday’s Clásico that would have gone around the world. Their last frontal attack was initiated by Courtois and Carvajal with statements in which they questioned the figure of Tebas as president of the League and emphasized the idea of ​​the adulteration of the competition. When Tebas assured that Villarreal – Barcelona would be played in Miami, he already had the approval of the Royal Spanish Football Federation and UEFA, as required by regulations that FIFA is remodeling. UEFA did it with a nose clip. “It is an exceptional decision and should not be considered a precedent,” said its president, Aleksander Čeferin. Since then, the breeding ground against holding a league match in Miami has increased exponentially.

National associations in Spain, such as the Federation of Spanish Football Shareholders and Partners (FASFE), and international fan associations, which were decisive in stopping the first elitist and closed Super League project, have also now mobilized. Likewise, the European Commission also spoke out against it.

“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 engine of the football industry in Europe, in the face of the naivety and passivity of European rulers who do not know how to distinguish the inconsequential from the essential,” Tebas wrote this Wednesday on his social networks. The president of the association has also dedicated a broadside to Real Madrid and its president, Florentino Pérez: “The integrity of the competition is appealed to by 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.”

On the other hand, the role played by the union chaired by David Aganzo, the Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE) has been fundamental for the paralysis of the project. If the image of Tebas and LaLiga has been greatly affected by the improvisation shown, that of Aganzo, on whom the label of not having the strength to mobilize and raise awareness among the captains of the Spanish football teams, has emerged stronger from the conflict. The effect of the 15-second stops at the beginning of each match last day has been definitive. From AFE they also maintain that the censorship of the images of the break in the first match of the day, played last Friday the 17th between Oviedo and Espanyol, was a wishbone that ended up becoming a global amplifier. The Federation was also complicit in that first censorship, since the referee of the match, Busquets Ferrer, did not record the stoppage in the minutes.

The concealment of the protests outraged and united the players more, who also, since their initiative became known on Thursday, were subjected to strong pressure from the employers’ association and some clubs. AFE created a WhatsApp group with the 20 First Division captains through which the threatening letters from LaLiga were sent to them. In turn, the union received information about the pressures to which the players were being subjected, including messages alerting them that AFE was deceiving them. What weighed more, however, was the strength of the union of the footballers, as AFE claimed this Wednesday: “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. The union wants to value the unity of the players in recent months and the strength they have shown in the defense of their labor rights in the face of the strong and constant pressures they have suffered in recent days when exercising their freedom of expression.”