Authorities in Gibraltar, a British enclave in southern Spain, filed a complaint with UEFA on Tuesday over chants by the Spanish football team during a victory celebration in Spain. Euro 2024.
On Monday night, on a stage in the center of Madrid, several players from Spain were singing that “Gibraltar is Spanish” in front of thousands of people, celebrating their victory in the European Football Championship.
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Spain won Euro’2024 in Berlin, on Sunday, in a a final in which they beat England 2-1.
The government of Gibraltar today lamented, in a statement, the “songs with vulgar comments” from the Spanish footballers and “discriminatory political statements which are deeply offensive” to the inhabitants of the British territory.
“Mixing a sporting victory with chants that glorify the dictatorial policies of mass murderers like [Francisco] The attempt by Franco and his fascist regime to usurp a nearby territory, which is also a UEFA nation (…), tarnishes football and victory on the field”, wrote the chief executive of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, on the social network.
Picardo considered that the behavior of the Spanish players cannot be overlooked, after the Gibraltar Football Association indicated that it had made a formal complaint to UEFA.
The association emphasized, in a statement, the “highly provocative and offensive nature of the celebration” in Madrid, referring to “unacceptable language” about Gibraltar “sung by players”.
In football “there is no place for this kind of behavior”, the association considered.
The Spanish Minister of Education and Sports, Pilar Alegria, today devalued the dialects being sung by some players and considered that they should be “framed in the context in which they were produced”.
Pilar Alegria said that “no one doubts that the Spanish foreign policy belongs and is defined by the Government of the country”.
UEFA, the body that governs European football, admitted Gibraltar as a full member in May 2013, following a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) against the position of the Royal Spanish Football Federation.