The president of the Spanish Football League has reacted to suspicions of corruption hanging over the Catalan club.
The scandal involving FC Barcelona, suspected of having paid an official of arbitration, is “doing a lot of damage to Spanish football“, LaLiga president Javier Tebas regretted on Friday, who wants the investigation”go all the way».
The newspaper El Mundo published new revelations on Friday, claiming that the Catalan club had paid more than 6 million euros since 2001 to José Maria Enriquez Negreira, ex-number two in Spanish arbitration between 1994 and 2018, to advise the club on refereeing matters.
Question d’image
«I don’t know if the match results were directly affected. But for the image of LaLiga, I don’t like it. LaLiga cannot remain passive in the face of the clues we have in the press“, estimated Javier Tebas during a press conference in Barcelona.
«The investigation must go to the end (…) because all this is doing a lot of harm to Spanish football“, declared the leader, specifying that if the facts were “sports prescribed“they weren’t”not in criminal».
Mr. Tebas claimed that he had “nonever noticed anything fishy” in the matches he had seen: “It is very complicated to cheat in the arbitration world. In addition, today, with television…But he added that he was “notthe bribery attempt does not have to have worked for it to be reprehensible».