The once proud Spanish league, in whose stadiums Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi dueled for the status of the best footballer on the planet over the past decade, is suffering.
The two world stars have left “La Liga” as have legendary defender Sergio Ramos and Brazilian Neymar.
Age, the pandemic, the growing superiority of the investor clubs from England and France - there are many reasons for the loss of radiance.
And it is possible that some of the decisions made by Javier Tebas, who has been president of the “Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional” (LFP) since 2013, are among the reasons for the downturn.
At the instigation of the 59-year-old lawyer, the rule was created that made Messi's tearful farewell from Barcelona inevitable.
Each club is only allowed to put 70 percent of its income into the team.
The financial gaps that the pandemic tore at FC Barcelona were too big to pay Messi's salary.
This is not the only reason why Tebas is currently exposed to criticism.
Behind the back of Real Madrid, he negotiated a deal with the private equity investor CVC, which wants to take over ten percent of the league's shares for 2.7 billion euros.
This money could help the clubs to compensate for the losses of the past few months, but should mainly flow into sustainability and infrastructure.
All first and second division clubs agreed, except for one unnamed club, Athletic Bilbao and the two giants: Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
Real Madrid are preparing a lawsuit
While Tebas' colleagues - like Christian Seifert in the Bundesliga - are usually anxious to know that the biggest clubs are behind them when it comes to important decisions, the Spaniard does not fear a conflict. Real President Florentino Pérez wants to sue against the deal with CVC, reports even surfaced that Madrid wanted to relocate to the Premier League, which was quickly denied. In return, Tebas accused Pérez of using “methods of intimidation” and claimed that “clubs and institutions have endured his threats for years”.
Joan Laporta, the president of FC Barcelona, accused Tebas of sticking to the Super League plans, which had actually long since failed, instead of agreeing to the CVC deal, which could have made Messi possible.
A stylistic device of this functionary is confrontation, and he has astonishingly much success with it.
Effects of the euro crisis
When the Spanish clubs were forced to operate more sustainably ten years ago as a result of the euro crisis, he introduced central marketing and installed the upper salary limit, which Messi had moved to Paris and now became the model for a reformed financial fair play of the Uefa for fairer competition shall be. Against the will of the noble clubs from Madrid and Barcelona. Nevertheless, Real's former sports director Jorge Valdano said of Tebas in the summer of 2020: "Since its arrival, La Liga has become richer, more democratic in the distribution of money, more rigorous in its contracts, more professional in the implementation of games and more respectful of its own identity."
Great praise, although Valdano preferred to point out that he had “ideologically” completely different ideas than Tebas, who is an avowed sympathizer of the right-wing populist Vox party. In his youth he belonged to the neo-French party Fuerza Nueva, and in 2019 he said that “sometimes” he misses “a Spanish Le Pen”. Nevertheless, in April, when the Super League plans of some big clubs sparked an international storm of protest, officials kept hearing that they were also hoping for Tebas' resilience. When dealing with the big separatist clubs, he lets his words follow suit - in contrast to colleagues from other leagues.
Nevertheless, Spain's football, where FC Barcelona groans under an absurdly high mountain of debt and where the world's best players appear less and less, threatens to play a role as a daunting example. Towards the end of the pandemic, most professional clubs are doing comparatively well thanks to the reforms initiated by Tebas, but the show of the superstars is increasing in England and Paris.