While football managers moaning about referees to deflect from their own teams’ shortcomings is nothing new, few do performative, wounded, righteous indignation with quite the same brooding intensity and petulance as José Mourinho. It’s been more than two decades since his moaning preceded a pile-on from angry fans whose threats forced the Swedish referee Anders Frisk into early retirement and in the interim, a steady stream of red cards, touchline bans and mournful post-match monologues have rendered his rap-sheet for badgering officialdom longer than a roll of Andrex toilet paper. On Sunday, Mourinho was at it again, following his 10-man Real Madrid side’s 2-1 defeat at the hands of their bitter city rivals Atlético. He arrived at his post-match presser armed with a sheet of A4 featuring screen-grabs of two tackles made by Atlético players that he felt should have resulted in red cards. “We can save ourselves the bother of the press conference because the story is right here,” he harrumphed, waving his piece of paper in front of assembled hacks before embarking on a paranoid tirade about Spanish match officials continuing to have it in for the put-upon, plucky underdogs of Real Madrid.
Luckily for daily football emails tasked with providing mildly amusing #content in the bleak and desolate early days of international breaks when nothing much is happening, the story didn’t end there. On Tuesday, the serially outspoken La Liga president Javier Tebas weighed in on Social Media Disgraces in response to an article in a Spanish publication called El Debate. In it, Tomás González-Martín suggested that, by failing to pander to the likes of Madrid, referees were damaging the league on whom they rely for a living, a league González-Martin claims has no value without Madrid. “Here they go again, the mouthpieces and the regime’s television, building the same old narrative: the permanent conspiracy,” thundered Tebas. “But this article goes further: it claims that referees harm ‘the business that feeds them’. What exactly is it asking for? Refereeing based on revenue, viewership or the badge? What a way to understand equality in the competition.”
While Tebas was right to defend his officials against accusations of institutional bias when it comes to Real Madrid and to angrily rail against the notion that commercial considerations should be factored into their decision-making process, he almost certainly aimed his guns at the wrong target. By targeting an opinion piece written by a random hack rather than the comments made by Mourinho, he left himself open to accusations of partiality towards Madrid. Not that the club see it that way. “Our club considers it intolerable that the president of La Liga uses his institutional position to continue discrediting and attacking Real Madrid,” they moaned in an official statement. “Given this inappropriate and persistent behaviour, we believe that the professional football competition in Spain urgently needs a leader capable of managing it and realising its full potential with the fundamental duty of neutrality.” More specifically, a leader whose fundamental duty of neutrality is tilted in favour of Mourinho’s Madrid.
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Tijjani Reijnders, seen here presumably after being offered €100m over four years. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images