"You won't be able to walk down the street": Tebas responds to Perez without mercy and blows open Real Madrid's most explosive files
The clash heats up
Javier Tebas has escalated his attack on Real Madrid after the club demanded his immediate resignation. The La Liga president revealed threats he said had been directed at him during his long-running disputes with the Madrid board, and renewed his criticism of their stance on the Negreira case and Spanish refereeing. The row has now widened to take in the future of the domestic competition and the European Super League project.
Tebas replied in a lengthy message published on his account on the platform "X", following a statement issued by Real Madrid on Friday in which the club called for him to leave the presidency of La Liga and his position as vice-president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation.
Anger inside the club had been building since Tebas compared one of their statements to the words of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Nazi Germany, reigniting the public confrontation between the two sides.
He began his reply by stressing that Real Madrid's calls for him to go are nothing new. Over 13 years, he said, he had lost the ability to count the number of times the club's board had sought to remove him, whether through complaints to the Higher Sports Council, directly or through third parties, or through criminal accusations.
This latest escalation, he argued, was merely another episode in a long series of disputes, and he questioned the answers the club's board is still required to provide.
The La Liga president did not stop at responding to the demand for his resignation. He went on to accuse Real Madrid of confusing neutrality with independence, stressing that his independence in his post does not mean remaining silent in the face of what he described as the continuous, excessive and insulting attacks waged by the club's channel and those he called its media mouthpieces against its rivals.
His responsibility, Tebas insisted, obliges him to defend La Liga and its constituent parts, even when the other party is Real Madrid. He rejected what he considered an attempt to impose the will of the club's board on football's institutions in line with its own interests, its sporting circumstances or the nature of its relationship with Barcelona.
The Negreira file
In one of the sharpest passages of his message, Tebas defended La Liga's position on the Negreira case, stressing that the organisation had acted from the start of the affair, and that repeated talk of neutrality does not change the reality of the measures it has taken.
He then turned his questions straight back at Real Madrid's board about its stance towards Barcelona during the earlier stages of the case, citing what the website "Relevo" reported about Florentino Perez's resignation from the interim board of the Spanish Football Federation, coinciding with the resignation of Joan Laporta, the Barcelona president, on 30 October 2023.
There was also the delegates' meeting of 24 November 2024. Tebas pointed out that Perez had called during it for cooperation between Barcelona and Real Madrid, and questioned the reasons for the change in the Madrid club's position and its current escalating attack on La Liga.
One question, he reckoned, explains the timing of the whole confrontation: "What has changed? Why does this escalation coincide with Barcelona's separation from the European Super League? Has the seriousness of the events changed, or the interests?"
Where, he asked, was the media outrage of Real Madrid's channel in the earlier stages? The current escalation, in his view, cannot be separated from the disputes surrounding the future of European football and the Super League project.
Where is the evidence?
Tebas widened his attack to the refereeing file, questioning the evidence on which Real Madrid's board bases its belief that referees are still influenced by the Negreira case, despite the passage of 8 years since the payments linked to the case stopped, according to what he stated in his message.
Produce it, he told the club. He asked about the individual complaints it had submitted to national bodies, UEFA or FIFA, instead of confining itself to general accusations.
Demanding Barcelona be held accountable in the Negreira case does not mean automatically levelling accusations at every single referee, Tebas said. He warned of the danger of targeting individuals without sufficient evidence, and argued that the video clips broadcast by the media cannot take the place of the evidence needed to prove the accusations.
Reform of the refereeing system had made progress, the La Liga president acknowledged, but he felt there was still a long way to go and expressed his hope for faster and deeper development.
What he rejected was the idea that football's institutions should act according to what Real Madrid's board alone wants. Reform, he stressed, does not mean responding to the demands of one particular club or ignoring the rest of the clubs and their positions.
Destroying the competition
Then came a sharper accusation. Tebas argued that the Madrid club's board is seeking to undermine the domestic competition after it had been unable, in his words, to achieve its objectives relating to the European Super League.
He also called on Real Madrid's board to clarify the truth of what had been attributed to sources inside the club regarding his comparison with Negreira, and regarding claims that La Liga is deliberately damaging the team's interests through the fixture schedule.
Was the journalist who conveyed this information genuinely reflecting the positions of the club's officials? Tebas called on them to deny what they see as untrue and clarify what they consider accurate, rather than letting mutual accusations escalate without clear answers.
It did not end there. Tebas called for the publication of detailed data on Real Madrid's requests, changes to match times, the number of requests the league had approved, as well as the requests he said were aimed at accommodating other events held at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium.
Those approved requests must be included in the data, he stressed, even if it had an impact on the club's general image or on the nature of the handling of its requests, in a sign of his desire to shift the dispute from the exchange of accusations to presenting the facts and figures before the public.
You won't be able to walk down the street
The most controversial passage of Tebas's message was his recollection of a threat he said he had received during his disputes with Real Madrid's board, noting that he remembers a phrase that involved hinting at inciting the club's fans against him.
The league president wrote: "I have lost count of how many times they have demanded my resignation or tried to remove me. I already know the procedure, and I also remember that phrase which says: 'I will turn all Real Madrid fans against you and you won't be able to walk down the street'."
Who said it, he never revealed. Nor did the published text offer any additional details about the timing of the threat or the circumstances in which it was said to have been made.
All of this, he argued, goes beyond the bounds of an administrative and sporting dispute. He described it as an attempt at intimidation, and stressed that issuing an official statement calling for his departure does not, in his view, change the nature of this behaviour.
Concluding his message, Tebas called for an end to the targeting of individuals, and for a distinction to be drawn between criticising officials and attacking the club and its fans, stressing that institutional disputes should not turn into campaigns targeting individuals.
