Real Madrid TV has used the days before El Clasico to accuse Barcelona of fielding not just a team at Camp Nou on Sunday, but a second line of officials. In a segment aired this week, the club’s in-house channel claimed Real Madrid “will have to face 17 referees” in the fixture: the three on-field officials, the fourth official, the VAR and its assistant, “plus the eleven Barcelona players, who are also referees.”
“Scandalous” was how the broadcast summed it up. The channel pointed to a recent weekend in which Giovani Lo Celso’s goal for Real Betis was ruled out for handball after Ref Cam footage showed Barcelona players lobbying for a VAR review. “Now the Barcelona players decide which plays are reviewed by VAR,” the segment argued, part of a wider montage that strung together “Negreira, Tebas, VAR” and claimed the same results would not stand in the Champions League.
A feud playing out through TV channels
The attack arrived in a week in which both clubs’ presidents have been firing through intermediaries. On Friday 16 October, Real Madrid issued a statement demanding Tebas’s immediate resignation, after the La Liga president compared Real Madrid TV’s communication methods to the Nazi propaganda techniques used by Joseph Goebbels.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta weighed in on Saturday with an open defense of Tebas.
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“I want to say how lucky we are to have Javier Tebas as president of LaLiga, who has the experience that these matters require,” Laporta told reporters.
“It seems they want to tear everything apart, they want to tear LaLiga apart, they want to tear apart the Technical Committee of Referees.”
The channel is the club’s own and not independent journalism, which has been the core of Tebas’s complaint: that Real Madrid TV is used to pre-empt the officiating of games the club has not yet played. The Bernabéu has pushed in the other direction, with home supporters chanting for Tebas to resign during Real Madrid’s league win over Sevilla the previous weekend, a protest the club then amplified in a story on its own website.
Alberola Rojas gets the Sunday whistle
The real whistle, as it turns out, has been given to Javier Alberola Rojas, who takes charge of a competitive El Clasico for the first time. Alberola Rojas averages 3.6 yellow cards a match in La Liga and has refereed Real Madrid 19 times (12 wins, three draws, four defeats) and Barcelona 13 (ten wins, two draws, one defeat).
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Barcelona arrive top of La Liga with a perfect record from nine matchdays, 27 points. Real Madrid are third on 21, six points back after two league defeats. Kick-off at Camp Nou is on Sunday 25 October.
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