A very brief and happy review of events. The vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees, Enríquez Negreira, received from Barcelona between 2001 and 2018 seven million euros for “verbal advice” about the referees, advice that stopped convincing the club in 2018, coinciding with the dismissal of Negreira from his burden; Stripped of his power, Barça did without him 17 years later. After that, the former vice president of the arbitrators, who has declared that the payments to him were to guarantee the neutrality of the referees (the typical millionaire payment by one of the parties to the judge before the trial to be fair), sent a burofax to the club in which he threatened to “give publicity to all the irregularities that he knew and experienced first-hand.” And charged.
There have been problems in Barcelona to justify the excessive amount delivered, season after season, to number 2 of the Spanish referees. I suppose this is important, if any, at the judicial level; the fan does not need explanations of why money is given to the vice president of the CTA and it is stopped when he is no longer in charge. Here it must be emphasized with affection that it does not matter exactly what Negreira has done in exchange for that money. That is why perhaps the greatest success of the club was to warn that this news, right now, did not suit him very well. Here is the authentic justification not of the payments, but of the story: Barcelona has been attached to a story for so many years that, in the most embarrassing moments, it accepts the facts, but does not publicize them. In other words, the club issues a statement acknowledging having paid Enríquez Negreira for services for which they cannot provide evidence, and charging against the exclusive What you play! They do not condemn the alleged crime, they condemn the news.
It is necessary to speak, at this point, of an essential figure in vaporous plots: that of the coach (Negreira’s son), which is the ideal profession with which to conceal any payment. United Nations coach, a guru, an adviser, a counselor. Verbal advice, technical indications, psychological support. Not only does everything fit, but there is no evidence of anything. That is why it is important to return to the beginning, to the absence of details: there cannot be. Everything is in the statement. For example: Dasnil, Enríquez Negreira’s company created when he was named number 2 among Spanish referees, was only successful with one client: Fútbol Club Barcelona; He only had one source of income: the Fútbol Club Barcelona. This means that the vice president of the Spanish referees had a company whose only client was a Spanish football club.
¿What is your opinion about this? Well, nothing, what are you going to think? Once they called me on the phone to do a survey for I don’t know what survey: “Hey, what do you think of the Prestige?”. “What do I think of an oil spill on the doors of my house? I don’t know, very complex, a case with many edges, many gray areas, I need to reflect.” I would prefer, to be honest, to give my opinion on what is going to happen in the sports institutions, on what is already happening in the affected press, on that pleasant feeling of a group on the decline of so many high-ranking officials in Spanish football who know that, if there is sanctions against Barça, the League is going (even more) to hell, and that, if there are no sanctions against Barça, you will have to continue playing it without knowing if you are being refereed by a referee or someone chosen by a limited company whose only client to the rival team, and does not carry a penalty. Funny it is. The laughs unless they don’t take them away from us.
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