Barcelona face bleak future amid ‘ref bribe’ scandal.. but the weird and wonderful club will never be shown red card
OFF the field Barcelona are a mess but none of their previous scandals equal the new allegations of bribing a referee.
The city’s prosecutor alleges that between 2001-2018, two club presidents bribed the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, with £6million.
Their defence is that they asked Negreira in his words “to ensure neutral refereeing”.
An odd objective to request and it seems to suggest some referees were not neutral which is, by definition, the only reason they exist.
The allegation against former Barcelona club presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu is quite different.
The charge is that they wanted Negreira “to carry out actions aimed at favouring Barca in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club and thus in the results of the competitions”.
It will be a sensational, long lasting and costly investigation.
If guilty the club faces a bleak future.
Heavy fines, lost points, relegation are all possible, although not, I think, closure.
That would be too much dynamite.
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As Barca is the very heart of Catalan culture, enforced closure would all but start a war and might even re-charge demands for separation from Spain.
And arch-rivals Real Madrid have lit a fuse or two.
President Florentino Perez supports the investigation but as he has form with pressuring a referee, that’s rather like the pot calling the kettle black.
Both Barca and Real still favour a European Super League and the result of this wrangle could be the end of this obnoxious scheme.
Bribing refs strikes at the very heart of football.
Nothing compares with the damage it would cause.
In the Premier League cries of “you’re a cheat ref” are the crow-like squawks of frustrated fans.
Referees may make wrong decisions and sometimes appear to be half blind, but instances of corruption in our league are just fiction.
Which leaves me with two questions: Why on earth would two men running a club worth £5billion try so pathetically, not to mention expensively, to bribe a senior refereeing official who went on to acknowledge payment in his business accounts?
Why should a club featuring several of the all-time giants of football, Lionel Messi, Xavi, Carles Puyol and half-a-dozen others, even think of risking their future by paying such a dubious source?
The players are affronted at the idea of needing outside help.
As former defender Gerard Pique put it “Barca have not bought referees, I would put my hands in the fire on it.
“If you want to buy a referee, you do it on the ‘black market’, not by declaring invoices and leaving evidence of payments…
“You go with dirty money and that’s it, things are simpler than going to the vice president of the CTA and paying him. It doesn’t make sense.”
Since 2001, Barca have won the Champions League four times, the Copa del Rey seven, LaLiga ten, which almost certainly will be 11 soon.
And now they have debts of £1.3bn and lost Messi to PSG while, according to Bayern Munich head coach Julian Nagelsmann: “Barcelona are the only club that has no money — but then buy every player they want.”
They have been fined three times, so far, for breaching LaLiga’s Financial Fair Play rules.
A weird and wonderful club.
But they’ll never be shown the red card.