"Not just a channel": how did Real Madrid's screen turn into a ticking time bomb in La Liga?
When the screen becomes a weapon...
La Liga and Real Madrid remain locked in a feud with no end in sight, and the personal duel between Javier Tebas and Florentino Perez took another turn last Friday. The La Liga president compared the working methods of Real Madrid's television channel to the mechanisms of Nazi propaganda. The club demanded his immediate resignation. Tebas hit back, accusing his opponents of trying to intimidate him.
His position requires independence, Tebas insisted, not passivity in the face of what he described as injustice, nor silence in the face of the repeated and insulting attacks launched by Real Madrid's television channel.
Madrid called the comments offensive and dangerous, damaging to the reputation of the club, its board and its channel.
RMTV has become one of the most prominent battlegrounds in the dispute. The club has used it to denounce what it sees as continuous attacks against it, from the Negreira case to refereeing decisions and La Liga's positions, match scheduling among them.
Madrid see the channel as a means of self-defence. Rival clubs and institutions see a tool for attacking and influencing referees.
Years of controversy preceded the latest escalation. Atletico Madrid were among the first clubs to attack its approach, accusing it of having a negative impact on the competition and of creating an atmosphere of pressure on referees.
Tebas also questioned the extent to which the channel's practices comply with fair play rules, asking whether it should be granted a national licence. The reports broadcast before matches, with their phrases and black-and-white footage, raise questions about the nature of the role it plays, he argued.
He stopped short of claiming certainty, however. He could not say these practices had actually influenced the competition, nor determine Madrid's intentions behind publishing that material.
Matters escalated in 2024, when moves began to confront what clubs and institutions considered to be overstepping by the channel, between calls for a review of its licence and official complaints against its content.
Sevilla were among the most prominent clubs to turn to the disciplinary committee, arguing that these practices harm Spanish football, cast doubt on the integrity of the competition and the honour of referees, and are aimed at influencing specific referees before they take charge of matches.
Their complaint led to an investigation but no sanctions. Real Madrid's channel passed its first legal test without a single disciplinary measure against it.
La Liga pressed on through the ordinary courts, outside the sporting framework.
Freedom of expression saw the case initially rejected, but Central Administrative Court No. 4 in Madrid reopened it in 2025, according to what Tebas announced later. Nothing new has been publicly announced about it since.
Anger spread to other clubs and to referees. It emerged clearly during the first major summit held by Rafael Louzan, president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, with clubs from the first and second divisions and representatives of the refereeing body.
Jose Maria del Nido Carrasco, the Sevilla president, along with Enrique Cerezo and Miguel Angel Gil Marin of Atletico Madrid, emerged during the meeting among the most prominent voices calling for the channel to be held accountable and for an end to its practices.
Tebas publicly joined those demanding that Real Madrid be punished over the channel's clips. None of it landed a sanction on the club.
Even a change in the leadership of the referees' technical committee failed to cool things down. The confrontation instead reached its peak last May, when Florentino Perez escalated his criticism of refereeing, claiming that Real Madrid had been treated unjustly over the years and indicating that the club had lost titles and points because of what he described as systematic corruption within the refereeing system.
Perez said the team had been deprived of titles in La Liga, and added that the referees themselves were still making the same mistakes, claiming that his side had lost between 16 and 18 points during the season.
Those comments prompted action from the bodies representing referees, which filed complaints against Real Madrid, its president and its television channel with the anti-violence committee and the disciplinary committee.
The anti-violence committee did not open an investigation. AS reported that the disciplinary committee was moving towards closing the file.
Sources inside the federation told the newspaper that punishing the club over statements broadcast by its television channel remains extremely difficult under the current rules, and that taking measures of this kind might require amending the regulations.
Freedom of expression provides the protection behind those difficulties, according to the same sources, which makes any move against the channel liable to stall unless clear legal grounds exist allowing sanctions to be imposed.
Tebas sparked widespread controversy on Friday morning in the latest chapter of the crisis, comparing the working methods of Real Madrid's channel to the propaganda mechanisms used by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Nazi Germany. He pointed to what he described as systematic repetition, the manufacturing of an image of the enemy, and the subjugation of facts to a particular narrative.
His comparison related to propaganda methods, Tebas explained, not to Nazi ideology nor to Real Madrid's supporters, an attempt to separate his criticism of the channel's working methods from the club and its fans.
Madrid rejected that clarification and described his comments as unacceptable and extremely dangerous, considering that the comparison with Nazi propaganda was intended to damage the reputation of the club, its board and its television channel.
So RMTV is back at the heart of the conflict between Tebas and Perez. What began as a disagreement over refereeing and the running of the competition has become an open confrontation about the limits of freedom of expression, the responsibility of sporting institutions, and the possibility of
