• News Fede Valverde punches Álex Baena after Madrid-Villarreal: "Tell me now what you said about my son"

The sequence explains part of their confrontation. In the 62nd minute of the match, Álex Baena grabs and throws Fede Valverde to the ground when he had the ball controlled. It was the first cross between the Villarreal player, a starter, and the Real Madrid midfielder, who had just entered the pitch three minutes ago. As soon as he falls to the grass, Valverde gets up and gestures his arm towards Baena, squeezing his hand. He thinks twice and lowers it again.

It was a strange action. What led a player who barely accumulates three minutes of the game to react like this for a grab? His team was winning 2-1 and there wasn't too much at stake. An hour later, with the match over, Valverde himself went to look for Baena on the Villarreal bus and punched him that left his left cheekbone red. "Tell me now what you have told me on the field about my son," the Uruguayan snapped at the Roquetas de Mar player.

That is, broadly speaking, what both parties say happened at midnight on Saturday at the Santiago Bernabeu. From there, the versions of the protagonists begin to blur between their arguments. As this newspaper has learned, Valverde says that during the Copa del Rey match on January 19 at the Estadio de la Cerámica, Baena told him "cry now that your son is not going to be born" while making "gestures of crying with his hands". The Villarreal footballer denies this fact assuring that "it is false", and has shared on his social networks a publication in which it is assured that the information about the problems in the pregnancy of Mina Bonino, Valverde's wife, was published after the match on January 19. "Either Baena is a fortune teller or they are making up a story."

However, since the final of the Spanish Super Cup in Riyadh the rumors about the difficulties that Bonino was having with the baby began to spread around Madrid. Even more so when after the defeat against Barça in Arabia Mina published a post on his social networks explaining that "this week was one of the most difficult we had to go through. We have to go through some difficult months, but we are going to get out of this one."

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This morning, Bonino herself said that "for me it is torture to relive this and question dates and news. But it was already public that something was wrong with my pregnancy."

Then came the duel against Villarreal in the Copa del Rey, on January 19, and the alleged words of Baena. "He would never mess with something like that with another footballer," they defend from his environment to the player of the yellow submarine, who has admitted throughout Sunday to ignore the family situation of Valverde.

"He has no regrets, there was justification"

From the Uruguayan side they repeat the "I am not like that" of Baena, but on his side. They maintain that the reason for the punch is that Valverde's son was mentioned and that the Madrid midfielder "is not a boy who is going to react like this without reasons." The charrúa is "affected", the same as they say from Castellón with Baena, but Valverde "does not regret the facts because there was a justification".

So there remains doubt about the facts. Who lies and who tells the truth. Villarreal, according to sources consulted by EL MUNDO, will not denounce Valverde or Madrid and will support Baena in the decision he makes. At the moment, it seems that the footballer wants to forget the issue and not denounce the punch. In addition, from the whole of La Cerámica they have no evidence that there are video images beyond those of the security cameras. Madrid, for its part, will not apply any internal regime code to Valverde and has shown support for the player.

As for the data, Valverde has played 23 league games this year and has received 2 yellows, while Baena is the most cautioned player in the First Division, with 10 yellows, tied with Jaume Costa, Zubimendi, Javi Sánchez and Óscar Gil.

On the sanctions, the Federation would need the referee's record of the match to mention the incident so that the Competition Committee could act, something that has not occurred when the aggression happened in the parking lot of the stadium. The second option would be a complaint by the player, in which case the Committee could act and the sanction could dance between 4 and 12 games for Valverde.

In the event that Baena, as it seems, does not report, the only sanction could come from Antiviolence if there is a police report. According to witnesses, the police acted after the punch, but at the moment the development of the case by the authorities is unknown. In Valverde's environment they trust that the facts "come to nothing".

  • THE WORLD
  • Real Madrid
  • Villarreal CF
  • Fede Valverde

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