• Case: Mediapro denounces the RFEF and Velasco Carballo for material appropriation of VAR

Not a day without his controversy. Spanish football, two days after the ball starts rolling, continues to the fight, with schedules provisionally set by a judge, with television contracts on the air, with allegedly sanctioned players who do not know if they can play this end of week, with clubs doing financial engineering to register players ... And now, with a double conflict with the VAR as the protagonist. The RFEF guarantees that it will work correctly with its new provider, Hawk-Eye, but LaLiga has many doubts and is worried about what might happen. And as a climax, the Mediapro production company has denounced the Federation for «misappropriation» of material: seven tables, cables and hard drives. There are plenty of adjectives.

But beyond the judicial conflict, the maximum concern with video arbitration has to do with its proper functioning, with that change of provider as the source of the doubts. Mediapro was the one who was in charge - without any problem - of the technical work of the first season with videoarbitration of the history of Spanish football, by direct commission of LaLiga. On this occasion, however, the company responsible will be Hawk-Eye, also in Second. The RFEF put out the tender for this service for the next four seasons and the English company was victorious. Mediapro, the other company that submitted an offer, challenged the contest, but Justice gave the reason to the institution chaired by Luis Rubiales .

The change of supplier has caused that during the summer the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) and Hawk-Eye - with experience in the Champions, the World Cup and several European leagues - have had to work piecework so that everything is ready to face at the beginning of the competition. «The RFEF will make history, there is no federation in the world that has been able to do two competitions at once with VAR in the same season in record time. I have no doubt: there will be VAR, ”said Carlos Velasco Carballo , president of the CTA, yesterday.

Along these lines, the secretary general of the RFEF, Andreu Camps , guaranteed yesterday that "whatever happens, the VAR will work" from the first day of LaLiga. A phrase that came up with the statements of the president of Mediapro, Jaume Roures , on Onda Cero on Tuesday night, in which he questioned the correct functioning of the VAR. «We know the facilities made in some stadiums and leave much to be desired. This weekend we will hear that if they have any problem, the fault will be ours and not yours, ”said the Catalan businessman.

Neither Velasco Carballo nor Camps wanted to give more echo to these statements yesterday, just stressing that the VAR will work as it should and without frights. «All the tests we have done so far have been fully satisfactory. In other competitions they take place six hours before and we have done it a week before so that we have more than enough time in case there is an incident, ”said the head of the referees.

From LaLiga, however, they recognize their concern about this matter. Employers' sources affirm that the technical equipment that Hawk-Eye has disposed in the stadiums and in the mobile units that will be placed in its exteriors is less reliable and of worse quality than the one used by Mediapro last season, both at food level electrical as of connectivity with the VOR room by means of optical fiber. «They are precarious facilities. If you connect to the stadium, you can run out of power. We were carrying our own supplementary equipment and we asked them to do it also so that there are no operational problems, ”said Roures.

Last season, being Mediapro who produced the games and who served the signal to the VEF room of the RFEF, this last service was exercised without intermediaries. From now on, Mediapro has to send the signal to Hawk-Eye and is at the headquarters of the RFEF. Steve Carter , general director of the English company, downplayed this issue yesterday, highlighting that they have already worked with Mediapro in this way in Champions matches "professionally" and without any problem of that kind.

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