Catalan press reports Florentino went down to greet referees before 'El Clasico'

Since the 'Clasico', the battle in the media to dominate the narrative that has, since the start of the season, been poisoning elite Spanish football has intensified: do the referees favour one team over the other? This morning, 'Mundo Deportivo' reports that Real Madrid president Florentino Perez went down to the tunnel before last weekend's game against Barcelona to meet the referees.

This is not to say that he influenced their decisions. In fact, the newspaper does not go beyond highlighting the presence of Madrid's advisor and former La Liga judge Carlos Megia Davila and Miguel Angel Perez Lasa, the appointed official-reporter, as it appears in the sheet provided by the Royal Spanish Football Federation a few days before the match. The newspaper also reports that this caused surprise among the 'Cules' because Joan Laporta has never done anything like this.

What he did do, and which made a real impact, was to appear in a four-minute institutional video in which he announced that he was going to request, in writing, the video and audio of Lamine Yamal's 'ghost goal' at the Santiago Bernabeu. In the footage, he stated that, should the 'Cules' authorities prove that the ball crossed Andriy Lunin's goal line, he would ask for the match to be replayed.

By way of context, it is worth bearing in mind that, since the start of the season, Real Madrid's official television has published a series of videos critical of the decisions of some referees, such as Alberola Rojas, one of the ones that has attracted the most criticism from the Madrid side. The feeling is that nobody is happy with a decision that the Technical Committee of Referees defends as having been the same for years.

 

April 24, 2024