Real Madrid’s conflict with referees, and LaLiga’s refereeing establishment, has been a hot topic all season. But the situation reached a new low on Friday, just 24 hours before the Copa del Rey final against Barcelona, one of Spanish football’s biggest games.
The drama began at the refereeing team’s prematch news conference. It’s a relatively recent innovation — inspired by the Spanish football federation’s (RFEF) push for greater transparency — but perhaps, with hindsight, a misguided one.
In the context of Madrid’s fraught relationship with officials, there was the possibility of the wrong thing being said, of comments being taken out of context or misconstrued. Referees are relatively inexperienced when it comes to media duties — unlike players or managers — and they have never been under greater pressure, in such an unforgiving environment. Here, it showed.
Cup final referee Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea struggled to control his emotions, his voice breaking, as he described the challenges of being a referee and a parent. “When your son goes to school and people tell him his father is a ‘thief,’ it’s really messed up,” he told journalists. “We need to reflect on where we’re going.”
His VAR colleague, Pablo González Fuertes — an experienced official — went further, directly addressing Real Madrid’s targeting of referees through videos broadcast on the club’s TV channel. “We’re going to have to take measures,” he said. “We’re not going to allow this to keep happening. Soon, you might have news. We’re going to make history. We’re not going to keep putting up with this.”
In response, Madrid refused to attend their own news conference and training session, and skipped the traditional prematch photo call for coaches and captains, as well as the prematch dinner for executives. One club source told ESPN they were seriously considering boycotting the final although another, more skeptical source doubted whether they’d follow through on the threat. Madrid later dismissed such talk as “rumours,” but accused the officials of laying bare their “hostility and animosity” towards the club.
In the end, the game went ahead as planned. A cup classic of a Clásico finished 3-2 to Barcelona after extra time (stream a replay on ESPN+, U.S. only), after Madrid had fought back from 1-0 down to lead 2-1.
The performances of De Burgos and González won praise, including for a high-stakes, decision deep into stoppage time to overturn a penalty awarded to Barcelona at 2-2, with VAR helping determine that there had been no foul on forward Raphinha.
The game ended with more fireworks, though, as Madrid’s beaten players ended the match fuming at De Burgos, with three of them — Antonio Rüdiger, Lucas Vázquez and Jude Bellingham — shown red cards for their over-the-top protests. Bellingham’s was later rescinded, but Rüdiger received a six-game ban for “throwing an object” and needing “to be restrained by various members of the coaching staff, showing an aggressive attitude.”
The fallout left no doubt that Madrid’s broken relationship with Spain’s refereeing establishment is an open wound.
How did it come to this?
Referees in Spain report to the Referees’ Technical Committee (CTA), which in turn answers to the RFEF. And just like in any league, complaints about referees and VAR are frequent. All clubs, coaches and players do it. Real Madrid are not alone in voicing their unhappiness about refereeing standards, but their complaints reached a new level of intensity when details of the Negreira case first emerged in February 2023.
This is an ongoing criminal investigation into payments — totaling €8.4 million over 17 years — made by Barcelona to companies linked to José María Enríquez Negreira, who was vice-president of the CTA between 1994 and 2018. A verdict has not yet been reached in the case, or on the intention behind those payments, and what impact they had, if any, on the practicalities of Spanish refereeing. But the payments’ existence is not in dispute and has been sufficient to leave Real Madrid, and their fans, with a deep-seated mistrust of referees. That has been coupled with Madrid’s weekly, near-forensic analysis of officials, highlighting their track records and history of decision-making in games involving the team, on club channel Real Madrid TV.
Each matchday, the channel broadcasts videos dissecting the referee assigned for that weekend’s game, identifying previous decisions which went — allegedly — against them. The tone is strident, and unforgiving. Tune in to the channel’s immediate postmatch analysis and you’ll see that it’s dominated by coverage of what Real Madrid TV considers refereeing mistakes. The name “Negreira” is often thrown around as a legitimate, if convenient lens through which all refereeing issues can be viewed and discussed.
“There’s no sport, no team in the world that does this,” CTA president Luis Medina Cantalejo told COPE radio in March 2024. “What’s happening with this TV channel has never happened anywhere else. I think what they’re doing is absolutely negative. I’ve never seen it in 40 years of refereeing,” said Barcelona president Joan Laporta, himself never shy of speaking out on referees. Laporta even called the videos “shameful” and asked for the RFEF to “get involved.”
But the videos have continued. And in February a run of three back-to-back LaLiga matches — in which Madrid dropped seven points, ceding crucial ground to Barça in the title race — saw the club’s faith in referees dwindle further. First, at Espanyol on Feb. 1, referee Alejandro Muñiz Ruiz did not send off defender Carlos Romero for a bad foul on Kylian Mbappé. Romero went on to score an 85th-minute winning goal for Espanyol.
Then on Feb. 8, when Real Madrid drew 1-1 at Atlético Madrid, the VAR awarded Atlético a disputed penalty for Aurélien Tchouaméni’s challenge on Samuel Lino. A week after that, when Madrid drew 1-1 again at Osasuna, referee José Munuera Montero sent off Bellingham for swearing at him in the first half.
After the Espanyol game, Real Madrid sent a letter to the RFEF and Spain’s Sports Ministry (CSD), arguing that the decision not to dismiss Romero “exceeded any margin for human error or refereeing interpretation … What happened represents the culmination of a completely discredited refereeing system, in which decisions against Real Madrid have reached a level of manipulation and adulteration of the competition which can no longer be ignored.” The club asked for, and were later granted access to, audio recordings of conversations between the on-field referee and the VAR around the Romero challenge.
But for many, that didn’t excuse the accusations in Madrid’s letter. LaLiga president Javier Tebas, a vocal opponent of Madrid club president Florentino Pérez on a host of issues, said Madrid had “lost their minds” and built “a narrative of victimhood.” Sevilla president José María del Nido Carrasco — whose club made a formal complaint themselves over Real Madrid TV’s videos, in 2024 — accused Madrid of “trying to destroy Spanish football,” calling the letter “intolerable.” Atlético, in the buildup to the derby on Feb. 8, launched a social media campaign accusing Real Madrid of seeking to influence officials. A faux IKEA-style instruction pamphlet for the derby advised undergoing “good physical preparation, a prematch massage, careful study of the opponent and using your official TV channel to, once again, put pressure on referees.”
“In our last three games, things have happened that everybody has seen,” Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti said on Feb. 15. “But I don’t want to say anything more about that, because I want to be sat on the bench for the next match … I think we have a problem.”
In late February, the RFEF launched a campaign in defence of officials, called “Respect the referee, respect football.” LaLiga teams posed for photos with the phrase out on the pitch before each game that weekend. At Real Madrid’s game with Girona at the Bernabéu, the message was met with loud, prolonged whistles from the crowd.
How will it end?
That refereeing — and the use of VAR — in Spanish football could be improved is not a controversial statement. Even the most moderate players, coaches and pundits agree that there is a need for change. “I’m so sad because I’m falling out of love with this sport,” Mallorca coach Jagoba Arrasate said in January. “I’m losing my enthusiasm. You see it in every game, they stop a frame [in a VAR check] and it goes against you … [Before a game] I’ll have to look at who the VAR is, because they’ve become the protagonists.”
Spanish referees are very well remunerated. Their basic annual salary is €168,000, rising to €265,000 with bonuses. It’s significantly more than their counterparts earn in other European leagues. But, taking international tournaments as a barometer, it’s also far from clear that Spain’s referees are viewed as being among the world’s best. For this summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, 117 match officials have been named: 35 referees, 58 assistants and 24 VAR officials, from 41 different countries. Only two of them — video assistant referees Carlos del Cerro Grande and Alejandro Hernández — are Spanish. By contrast, there are six from England, seven from France, and four from Germany.
Pérez rarely speaks in public, but he laid out part of his vision for refereeing reform in a speech to Real Madrid’s members’ AGM in 2023. “It’s essential for the wellbeing of Spanish football that things like the quality of refereeing and the use of VAR are dealt with,” he said. “I believe the Spanish Government will take steps to improve refereeing bodies in this country. This is urgent, more urgent than ever.”
Legislative action, then, is Pérez’s preference, which suggests structural change, or the creation of a new body. Behind closed doors, Pérez has proposed even more radical solutions. “[Pérez] says, in strong terms, that he feels aggrieved by referees,” RFEF president Rafael Louzán said in an interview in January. “He’s persistent on the subject. He reminds me from time to time. He says ‘sort out the Negreira case.’ And I say, ‘it’s before the courts.’
“Florentino once said to me that he would bring English referees to referee [in Spain]. And I said ‘let’s see how we do that!’ In Saudi Arabia a year ago [at the Spanish Supercopa], he said to me ‘You have to sort out the referees issue. We’ve lost a lot of trophies because of referees.'”
Even some of Pérez’s opponents, like LaLiga president Tebas, agree that reform can’t come soon enough. “Many of us advocate a radical change in the refereeing system, moving closer to the English or German model, with a completely different organization and much greater transparency,” Tebas posted on X in February. “What’s truly striking is that, at a LaLiga meeting in April 2023, we debated and voted on this change, and Real Madrid opposed it, appearing lukewarm and offering no solutions.”
Changes at the top of the CTA — such as replacements for its president Medina Cantalejo, and VAR chief Carlos Clos Gómez — have been widely trailed as a populist step which Louzán is likely to take to shore up support this summer. In another media interview ahead of the Copa del Rey final, reflecting on a chaotic day, the RFEF president revealed that he had had a 40-minute phone call with Madrid CEO José Ángel Sánchez as he tried to deal with the fallout from the referees’ news conference. He didn’t say if any commitments were made, in exchange for ensuring Madrid’s participation in the final.
As for the “measures” hinted at by VAR González Fuertes at that incendiary news conference before the Copa final, what form could they take? Could this lead to the creation of a referees’ union, independent of the CTA? Such a body would be better placed to publicly defend officials when they are attacked by clubs. It might even be in a position to take legal action on their behalf. Such a move would give referees a powerful new voice. It would also be another potential source of conflict, in an already fractious space.