I met a Real Madrid that showed off not caring about the referees, whom they looked at in the English way. And I talk about the club in a comprehensive way, including the fans. Nobody cared about who was going to referee the upcoming match. Of course, there was anger with the decisions against or they were understood as such, with its congruent court of insults. But it was forgotten, it was not filed in the mind. The referee factor was considered one of the random elements that football proposes. And the continuous complaint of their two classic rivals, Atlético and Barça, in whose culture refereeing victimhood was imprinted, was viewed with ironic commiseration.
That’s why the radical change in Madrid’s corporate culture, which raises the flag of being persecuted in this area, still seems strange to me. And I say corporate culture because it did not seem to me that this arose spontaneously from the fans or the closest press, but from within the club itself. Maybe it started with Mourinho, maybe with Ferreras, Florentino’s court advisor. The fact is that it has gotten worse and a turbulent atmosphere is already noticeable in the Bernabéu at the slightest mishap with the referee.
The doctrine is set by RMTV, which even in children’s matches warns the viewer against refereeing. In senior matches, the artillery preparation he does in the lead-up has already become famous, issuing insistent repetitions of previous errors by the designated referee and his VAR colleague.
Real plays, real mistakes, of course. But with the same selective orientation that since time immemorial has filled the conversations between athletes and Barcelona fans: remember the mistakes against, not the favorable ones, and focus on them.
A referee who has spent, say, six years in the First Division, will have directed Madrid more than twenty times. It will not be difficult to find five to ten harmful decisions that, all together and repeated a few times, create a devastating effect. The mistakes he made, as is likely, to the benefit of Madrid, will not be shown by RMTV. And although not many people see this channel, it has greater reach through the networks and thus a run-rún has been created that has made a fortune. At the Bernabéu it is so noticeable that four yellow cards for protests end up weighing more in the fans’ minds than the evidence that Endrick and Vinicius will be able to play today at the Metropolitano thanks to the indulgence of the referee team.
Unfortunately, there is food for such persecution mania: the Negreira case. Unfortunately, something happened here. I noticed it, I spoke of villainy and I was not very understood. Innocently, I thought it was only due to the good deeds of Laporta with Villar, but it turns out that this was greased for 17 years by four Barça presidents, including the one who has now returned. Enríquez Negreira was vice president of the arbitrators at that time and the payments stopped precisely when he stopped being vice president.
The impunity of that, which covers the period in which Barça was considered exemplary and reached the highest level in its history, is irritating for Real Madrid fans. The explanations have been vague and confusing, Barça pretends that nothing has happened, the Sports Law is extremely benign with sports corruption and time is depositing its sludge on that case and on the three million (where would they go for the another four and a half?) that appeared in Mrs. Enríquez Negreira’s account. But since the CTA is directed by referees who made their careers in the shadow of this vice president, the fingers of the street Madrid fan become guests. If suspicions are fueled from the club’s main media, why else. Furthermore, the tinkering with the regulations, with changes and anti-changes, circulars and counter-circulars that rain without time for assimilation, complicates things further.
All of which serves as an explanation, not a justification.
