Spain has less racism than “any other country,” its football league boss said, despite the ongoing abuse by rival fans of Real Madrid’s Black superstar Vinícius Júnior.
Javier Tebas, the powerful president of La Liga, Spain’s top men’s professional football division where Real Madrid plays, said “if we compare ourselves with other countries’ behavior, I think we have a lot less racism than in any other country,” during an exclusive interview this week with POLITICO.
Vinícius, a Brazilian forward, has become a lightning rod for criticism and racist attacks around Spanish football stadiums since joining Real Madrid in 2018. Back in 2022, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez demanded a response from football club Atlético Madrid after its fans aimed “monkey” chants at the player.
“They don’t happen, you know, all the time or a lot,” Tebas said about the racist episodes, “and they are mainly focused on Vinícius. And maybe that’s because Vinícius is leading a case against racism so that’s why we have these isolated events that attack him. So what La Liga is doing is to protect Vinícius as much as we possibly can.”
Tebas, a famously fiery character who holds major influence at the top of European football, has never been someone to back down easily — and he’s not starting now.
“There’s always lots of battles going on. But I will have as many battles as I need to have, if I think something is going to be detrimental for professional football,” he said in response to a question about whether he was mellowing.
Last summer, La Liga complained to the European Commission about the ownership of French club Paris Saint-Germain by Qatar Sports Investments, in one of the first tests for the Commission’s new foreign subsidies enforcers, a team which is currently staffing up. Tebas would prefer things were moving more quickly.
“We know that the European Union administration don’t go as fast as we would like, but we have to let them work,” he said of his foreign subsidies complaint over Qatar-PSG.
While his long-running feud with Qatar continues to simmer, Tebas is less concerned about Saudi Arabia’s move into football, where the top Saudi domestic league has been signing big-name players to huge contracts. The wealthy Gulf petromonarchy has also upended professional golf and wants to move into running world tennis amid a massive sports splurge by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
“They want to be important actors or players in European or world football. And so they have set up a plan to try and do that,” Tebas said. “I don’t think they want to get into the organization level of European football as far as I know.”
While the PIF’s vast wealth has rocked the structure of other sports, Tebas — under whom La Liga has developed commercial links to Saudi Arabia — doesn’t currently see the same Riyadh-sponsored upheaval coming for European football.
“They haven’t said that they want to organize the Champions League or Europa League,” he said of Europe’s flagship club competitions. “I really don’t think they’d be able to do it either. I think they’ve got a different strategy.”
“They don’t want to come to Europe, to the European competitions to invest or organize them, at the moment anyway,” he added. “If they want to do it, well, then I would be worried about it. But I don’t think that’s their strategy.”
English football’s economic dominance has been a more pressing concern for Tebas, and — while he said he doesn’t like “government intervention with a league” — he was in a told-you-so mood over the British government’s decision this week to bring in an independent regulator for the sport as part of its Football Governance Bill.
“The problem [is] that the Premier League isn’t a financially sustainable league; I’ve been saying this for many, many years now,” Tebas said.
“The English government has considered that they haven’t done the right self-regulation related to making the competition financially sustainable, which is completely the opposite to what we did in La Liga,” he pointed out. “We’ve been doing it for 10 years now.”
“It’s difficult to know if it’s because of the clubs, or the Premier League executives — [Richard] Scudamore, who was there before [Richard] Masters, or Masters who is there now — so it’s all very complicated and I really don’t dare to say why,” he said.
FIFA’s new brainchild — a Club World Cup, but for 32 club teams — is also making Tebas sweat over the effect it will have on domestic football competitions, players and broadcasting deals; the sport’s lifeblood.
“It’s worrying,” Tebas said. “Because FIFA and in this case the ECA (the European Club Association) made a decision to have this Club World Cup, without even coming to an agreement with the different leagues. And also that’s part of the match calendar. So this is a big problem.”
And that’s not the only ongoing headache.
The Super League has dominated European football’s politics for almost three years, and while most of Europe’s top clubs have disavowed the plan, it’s still on Tebas’ radar as a potential problem.
“When you know Florentino Pérez — and I’ve known him for many years — you can’t ever consider anything’s dead. Never,” Tebas said of the Real Madrid leader, an arch-nemesis who is also the Super League impresario.
“Florentino Pérez is a man who’s got a lot of influence. He’s got great strategies. What’s the strategy now, we’ll have to see, but I would never consider it’s dead,” he warned.
“As a manager of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, I give him 10 out of 10. But as a competition manager, I give him zero out of 10,” Tebas added. “I’m worried all the damage that he can cause to football, both in Europe and in Spain.”
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