Barcelona call for La Liga president Javier Tebas to resign over Negreira case allegations

Barcelona have called on La Liga president Javier Tebas to resign following allegations made on Monday over his handling of the “Negreira case”.

Barcelona have been charged over allegedly improper payments made to the former vice-president of Spanish football’s refereeing committee, by the Spanish state prosecutor’s office.

Spanish outlet La Vanguardia has published a story accusing Tebas of sending false evidence to the Public Prosecutor’s office regarding former Barcelona presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell.

The report claims that Tebas sent a document handwritten by ex-Barcelona Josep Contreras, who died at the end of 2022, but the veracity of the document is disputed.

In reaction to the story, Barcelona issued a statement on their official website which is translated below.

“For this reason, we urgently request the president of LaLiga to appear publicly to offer explanations, beyond the tweet sent at dawn by Mr. Tebas, fleeing from the studio and with a threatening patina.

“FC Barcelona, ​​​​as the president Joan Laporta has been saying in recent weeks, feels like the victim of a media lynching due to events that have never happened: Barça has never bought referees.

“A handful of media and opinion-makers have participated in this harassment with more or less bad intentions, and with LaLiga behind the scenes fanning the fire against our Club, with contributions from its president that have only gone in one direction: trying to condemn us before public opinion before for the facts to be judged.

“It is not the first time that the president of LaLiga has used all his media machinery to blow up FC Barcelona but, apart from his usual nonsense, we could never have imagined that he would have tried to incriminate our Club with false evidence.

“The news published today by La Vanguardia is so serious that it should alert all LaLiga clubs, due to practices that do not fit in with the functions attributed to the president of LaLiga.

“Only for this fact, that of attributing functions that do not correspond to him, although also out of dignity and respect for the presidency of LaLiga, Mr. Tebas should resign from his function. However, aware of his obsession with persecuting FC Barcelona and constantly showing his aversion and manifest antipathy towards our Club, we understand that the current president of LaLiga will persist in his behaviour of continuing to harm our Club.”