Barcelona facing corruption charges as referee payments remain unexplained ahead of El Clásico
Barça host Real Madrid in a huge LaLiga game on Sunday, but it's not the football dominating the headlines in Spain right now
Barcelona president Joan Laporta has had a lot to say this week. Last Sunday, the 60-year-old reacted to Real Madrid’s statement announcing their involvement in a complaint against the Catalan club, along with 14 other LaLiga teams, for payments made to a former referee. “Everybody is here now,” he wrote.
On Monday, he broke down in a public event and added that he was ready to fight the “scoundrels” he said were sullying Barça’s image. And on Friday, he spoke of a “campaign” which aimed to “destabilise” the club as he asked fans to get behind the team in Sunday night’s Clásico clash at Camp Nou.
It is now over a month since Spanish station Cadena Ser first reported the investigation into Barcelona’s payments made to José María Enríquez Negreira (a referee between 1977 and 1992, and the vice president of the Comité Técnico de Árbitros, the body in charge of officials in Spain, between 1994 and 2018), via seven different companies and identified due to irregularities in taxes declared by the former official.
Following the news, Barça released a statement in which they said the club had paid for information on players in lower leagues across Spain, as well as “technical reports related to professional refereeing”. This, they said, was “a common practice in professional football clubs”.
Barça’s statement featured a video of Laporta which was filmed on a phone. In it, he said it was no coincidence that the information had appeared during the team’s “best sporting moment of the season” and insisted FCB would “take legal action against anyone who damages the club’s image with possible insinuations contrary to the reputation of the institution that may occur as a result of these informations”.
In the meantime, Catalan media reported that Laporta was due to speak in a press conference to explain the payments in greater detail. Days before this information emerged, he had done so at great length to discuss Barça’s finances, possible summer signings, stadium improvements and more. Two hours in total.
At an event earlier this month organised by Barcelona’s Equestrian Society, he said: “We have a press conference planned to speak about the topic, [but] today I have come to have lunch with you.” There were no journalists there to ask questions, but he added: “Barça have never bought referees nor any influence in all that. We have never had that intention.”
That was on March 7th and still there has been no press conference. But three days later, prosecutors in Spain confirmed they had filed corruption charges against Barcelona and the club's former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu for the payments made to Negreira.
Laporta was not named in the charges. His involvement was too long ago, but his role remains under scrutiny: he was president of Barcelona between 2003 and 2010 and during his mandate, payments to Negreira initially ceased and were then brought back at a much higher rate.
Auditors in the tax case were alerted by the fact that they could not identify or account for any actual services provided by Negreira for three payments totalling almost €1.4m. It was then that a more in-depth investigation was launched.
Barça’s claim that such practices are habitual in professional football is true, but what makes this unusual is that the payments were not made to an external consultant or a former official (at the time), but to the active vice president of the referee’s committee. Also, the sheer size of the sums involved. If Barcelona were paying that much, they were either incredibly naïve or they thought they were getting something pretty valuable in return.
“Through presidents Rosell and Bartomeu, Barcelona reached and maintained a strictly confidential verbal agreement with the defendant Negreira, so that, in his capacity as vice president of the refereeing committee and in exchange for money, he would carry out actions aimed at favouring Barcelona in the decision making of the referees in the matches played by the club, and thus in the results of the competitions,” a statement from prosecutors read.
According to a report published by El Mundo, Bartomeu and Rosell claim to have paid Negreira out of “self-defence”, convinced that the tendency of Spain’s referees was to favour Real Madrid over the Catalan club.
Ernesto Valverde was Barcelona’s coach between 2017 and 2020. He might have to testify in the case and was asked last weekend if he thought the club had preferential treatment in the year that the Blaugrana had paid Negreira. “Let me think,” he said. “We won LaLiga by 14 points from the team in second and 17 to 19 more than the third, I don’t remember. And in the Copa [del Rey] we beat Sevilla 5-0 in the final. I don’t think there was much discussion over which was the best team that season.”
That is little discussion this season, either. Barça are nine points clear of Real Madrid ahead of Sunday’s Clásico and a win at Camp Nou will extend that advantage to 12. Xavi’s side, clearly, have been the best team in LaLiga in 2022-23 and should go on to win the title from here.
At some point, though, the club will have to address the questions over their payments to Negreira. Because even though Laporta and Xavi insist they are victims of a campaign to destabilise and damage the Catalan club, it is Barcelona that paid out more than €7m to the active vice president of the referee’s committee over a period of 17 years and that is not in dispute. What remains unclear is why they did it.
Thanks for another great article Ben. Will we get to know more when this matter goes to court? I am sure there would be some sort of anti-corruption laws in Spain or EU that cover sporting events.