La Liga President Says Real Madrid Is Moving Like Joseph Goebbels

It was clear that the relationship between Real Madrid and La Liga president Javier Tebas was heading toward disaster when the two parties started bickering in the press less than a month ago, but we’ve now reached the stage where one is earnestly comparing the behavior of the other to an infamous Nazi.

After Jose Mourinho printed out images of perceived missed calls from the Madrid derby, Tebas blasted Real Madrid for what he felt was a bit of image manipulation, calling the club out for believing itself to be bigger than La Liga itself, all while utilizing the press to drive forward its messaging. In response, Madrid called out what it felt was Tebas’s fixation on belittling the winningest club in Spanish soccer history. As I said in September, I thought cooler heads would prevail after how embarrassing that whole situation was for both sides. Boy howdy, was I wrong!

As is proving to be his custom, Tebas woke up on Friday and decided to send yet another ballista bolt at Real Madrid. Specifically, and repeatedly, Tebas attacked the media surrounding the club for what he believes are biased articles and debate segments on Real Madrid TV. His targets this time were Tomás González-Martín and Jesús Urdiola, journalists with El Debate, the same Spanish publication he attacked last time. Tebas raised two specific articles as issues: One, by González-Martín, details Real Madrid’s continued fight with the league over the Negreira referee scandal; the other, by Urdiola, is about how Real Madrid feels personally attacked by La Liga’s schedule-making.

These are issues on two different scales. The schedule stuff is silly, and Tebas spends a long time denouncing that complaint as such, while also not really touching on the bigger issue, the Negreira scandal. He instead says that Real is “top of the table” in asking for schedule changes to suit the club and the events held at the Bernabeu, and then he drops this line: “A request doesn’t become a right just because it comes from Real Madrid, nor does a refusal prove persecution. La Liga defends its competition.”

This is self-evidently true! I understand Tebas’s frustration here, but once again, he misses the mark on both his target (doubly so, as he attributes the schedule article to González-Martín, when it was written by Urdiola) and his tone. That’s because Tebas takes this opportunity to compare what he sees as the Real Madrid media environment to, of all things, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine:

Real Madrid’s management directs an orchestra of mouthpieces and Real Madrid TV leads the singing. Their score is always the same: select the plays that suit them, repeat the grievance, feed the suspicion, and point fingers at the enemies.

That method recalls propaganda mechanisms exploited by Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda: systematic repetition, construction of an enemy, and subordination of facts to the narrative. The comparison is with those propaganda techniques, not with an ideology or, of course, with the Madridista fanbase.

OK, “Real Madrid’s management directs an orchestra of mouthpieces and Real Madrid TV leads the singing” is a banger of a line, but what in the world is the rest of this? Regardless of how one might feel about Real Madrid and its use of the media to push its agenda—allow me to be impartial as a Barcelona fan: Barca also uses the media for this purpose, and is only slightly less successful—this is an outlandish comparison for the president of La Liga to make. I do enjoy him making sure to clarify that he is not calling the club or its fans Nazis, just that they have seemingly learned from the Nazis.

As one would reasonably expect, especially from a club that loves its comunicados oficial, Real Madrid fired back within the same business day. Its official statement is somehow even more aggressive than the last, but it’s hard to blame the club this time. Immediately, the club takes the aforementioned covering of ass and throws it aside:

Real Madrid C. F. considers it absolutely intolerable and extraordinarily serious that someone holding two positions of utmost responsibility in Spanish football resorts to a comparison with the propaganda methods of the Nazi regime to discredit our club, its management, and its television. The clarification that he is not referring to Nazi ideology does not mitigate the deeply offensive, morally repugnant, and institutionally unworthy nature of his statements.

The statement goes on to accuse Tebas of ignoring the Negreira case, despite also holding the position of vice president in the Royal Spanish Football Federation, which oversees the Technical Committee of Referees, where José María Enríquez Negreira served as vice president. While one could laugh off Madrid’s accusations that Tebas was fixated on the club in order to belittle it, it’s harder to do so now, and so the club does the next logical thing, calling for Tebas’s dismissal from both of his executive positions.

For all these reasons, Real Madrid C. F. considers that the repeated statements and behaviors of Javier Tebas would be unacceptable in any European sports institution governed by principles of respect, neutrality, and integrity, and that they disqualify him institutionally from continuing to hold the positions he occupies.

Consequently, Real Madrid C. F. demands his immediate resignation as president of LaLiga and vice president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation.

It’s hard to disagree. Tebas has clearly lost the plot in this crusade. When you’re accusing a soccer club of following the Goebbels playbook, maybe it’s time for an assistant to intervene. La Liga is not going to get better from having its top executive get into an online slapfight with its biggest club. While it’s all entertaining from afar, I can’t imagine a world in which it makes sense for Tebas to remain in charge. He was already on thin ice, because even if the non-Nazi part of his complaint has merit, feuding and name-calling over propaganda accusations is not a winning game. Tebas should have taken a proper gander at his statement before hitting “post,” but if he had, he wouldn’t be the executive he is, and we wouldn’t have gotten this new bizarre chapter of what is becoming an era-defining saga.