Real Madrid are “the most rebellious team in Spain”. In Europe, says Javier Tebas, the equivalent is Nasser Al-Khelaifi’s PSG.
The La Liga president delivered that verdict on Monday at the first National Conference on Journalism and Sport in Vigo, organised by the Galician Association of Sports Journalists.
“The most rebellious team in Spain is Real Madrid because Madrid’s directors have a way of understanding football that I do not have,” Tebas said, as reported by Goal.
“In Europe, it is Al-Khelaifi.”
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The parallel is not casual. Real Madrid’s board and PSG’s Qatari ownership have at various points pushed hardest for European football to be reshaped around its biggest clubs, from the aborted breakaway Super League to the expanded Champions League format.
A Super League in slow motion
Tebas told the Vigo audience that the breakaway threat has not disappeared, it has only changed pace.
“A slow-motion Super League is already underway,” he said. “If we don’t take measures, we will have football at two speeds.”
The La Liga chief pointed to a crowded international calendar: more national-team windows, an expanded Champions League and a new-look FIFA Club World Cup, all bleeding attention and money away from the domestic leagues that sit beneath Europe’s elite.
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“That is congesting the calendar and we are generating a very complicated football,” he said, in comments carried by EFE.
Locomotives and carriages
Tebas has long argued that Spain’s two giants cannot pull away from the pack without eventually derailing the entire competition.
“We have built incredible football over 20 years and we have to defend it, so it does not slip away from us,” he said.
“On this train there are locomotives, like Madrid or Barça, but we also need the carriages.”
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The reference to the carriages lands on Spanish football’s most sensitive revenue question. A May 2015 royal decree caps the gap between the highest- and lowest-earning La Liga clubs at a ratio of 3.5 to one, a framework Real Madrid and Barcelona have periodically chafed against.
Madrid wanted him gone
The Vigo comments do not land in a vacuum. Real Madrid in September publicly called on Tebas to step down, accusing him of lacking neutrality and of repeatedly attacking the institution. Tebas rebuffed the demand in a lengthy response on X, as Managing Madrid reported.
“I fully agree with one sentence: the president of LaLiga is not the owner of the competition,” he wrote, adding that independence meant “deciding with one’s own judgment, without pressures or subordination”.
Tebas was re-elected to a fourth term as La Liga president in December 2023, with his current mandate running until 2027.
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