Enríquez Negreira threatened Barça to uncover “all the irregularities” when the club dispensed with his services

BarcelonaJosé María Enríquez Negreira, former vice-president of the Technical College of Referees (CTA), threatened Barça with creating a great “scandal” and making public “all the irregularities” of the club when the club informed him that it was dispensing with its services advice This is stated in a burofax to which he had access The world and that former Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu has confirmed that he received it in 2019, shortly after his board stopped paying Enríquez Negreira’s company for its services. All of this is known after the SER revealed that the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the payments that Barça made to Enríquez Negreira’s company between 2016 and 2018 for a value of 1.4 million euros, very high amounts for to this type of work.

“My surprise was capital. After all this time together, I take it as an absolutely unjustified personal insult”, began Enríquez Negreira in the burofax he sent to Barça, where he assured that he did not want to “let the opportunity to reach a fair agreement pass by on both sides”. Otherwise, he threatened Barça: “I would publicize, without hesitation, all the irregularities that I have known and experienced first hand in relation to the club”. “I don’t think that another scandal will favor the club”, As explained by the SER, the former number two of the referees also pressured Bartomeu directly by phone on the same day that the contract with his company Dasnil 95 was terminated. He did it after Barça communicated the decision to his son , who is also called José María and is the one who actually did the counseling.

Although Barça has acknowledged that there was this contractual relationship, which dates back to at least 2001, the Barca club have denied that it was in exchange for any arbitration favors and maintain that it was simply advisory tasks. In fact, in the press release following the news, Barça threatened legal action “against anyone who damages the image of the club with possible insinuations contrary to the reputation of the entity that may arise as a result of this information”. Many clubs have collegiates hired to analyze matches, go through cards, study referees and prepare footballers to know how to behave on the pitch. Barça currently has contracted this service through Ricardo Segura, a former collegiate who joined the football area in 2018.

What is not so common, however, are the amounts that came to be paid to Enríquez Negreira. Seconds The country, in fact, the figure that Barça was able to pay to Enríquez Negreira’s company since 2001, when Joan Gaspart was the president of the club, would rise to 7 million euros. This would appear in the Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation into the payments to the ex-collegiate, many of which would not be justified because, as he himself declared to the Treasury, they were for “verbal” advice.