Joan Laporta came armed with four boxes, 633 referee reports and 43 CDs as he finally broke FC Barcelona’s silence over allegations that they tried to buy favourable decisions from officials, declaring the club victims of a “gigantic” smear campaign and accusing rivals Real Madrid of “unprecedented cynicism”. In a two-hour press conference, finally called eight weeks after the first reports appeared that payments of more than €7m were allegedly made to the former vice-president of the referee’s committee, José María Enríquez Negreira, over an 18-year period, he went on the attack, declaring he would “defend the institution until my last drop of blood”.
The Barça president denied that the club had committed any legal wrongdoing, although he did say that these days the club’s compliance department would have flagged up a potential conflict of interests. There was no explanation as to why it had taken him so long to offer an explanation.
He repeatedly referred to an alternative hypothesis that he says is being worked upon by investigators, in which the club would be victims, but said he trusted that no one had “their hand in the till”. That would relate to a now deceased member of the sporting commission who had acted as a middle man between Negreira and the club during a period when he was not president, but Laporta offered no detail.
Laporta also renewed his furious criticisms of his counterpart at La Liga, Javier Tebas, and said he did not expect Uefa to ban the club from European competition. He said it was “not coincidence” that Barcelona had found themselves in this situation at a time when they are challenging some of the powers within the game, claimed that there are forces at work that cannot accept that the club are a symbol of Catalan identity and insisted that there are those that wish to “take control of Barcelona” – but did not say who.
The Què t’hi jugues programme on SER radio in Barcelona uncovered the story in February, initially revealing that between 2014 and 2016 Barcelona had paid €1.4m to a company owned by Negreira, who had been the vice-president of the referee’s committee, the CTA. A tax investigation had led to the case being handed on to state investigators, the total amount paid reaching over €7m across an 18-year period. A judge formally allowed the case to go ahead, with the public prosecutor putting forward the hypothesis that Barcelona had paid in order to gain favourable refereeing.
When the story first broke Laporta said that Barcelona had employed Negreira as a “consultant” – something he claimed all clubs do – and said that the club had been provided with reports. The initial investigation concluded that it had been unable to find any reports that justified the payments and thus accredited his professional relationship with Barcelona. Here, Laporta turned up with reports from the period between 2014 and 2018. Presented as an exhibit in his defence, there were, he said, 629 scouting reports, four “other reports” and 43 CDs. The reports, which he described as “high quality”, had been written not by Negreira but his son, Javier Enríquez Romero.
“The Negreira case is not a case of sporting corruption,” Laporta insisted, describing the accusations that Barcelona tried to influence referees as based on a “false hypothesis”. He said public prosecutors had not identified any illegal behaviour and that there was no evidence of refereeing decisions that had been affected. “There is no evidence because it is impossible,” he said.
The Barcelona president said that the existence of the reports justified the payments made, and that the club were sent invoices for the work throughout the period, which were then presented to the tax authorities with no attempt to hide them. He added that Negreira did not have the authority to designate referees. Asked to justify the size of the payments, Laporta said that it should be contextualised: Barcelona had paid more than €7m but across an 18-year period.
When Negreira’s relationship with Barcelona was ended in 2018, the same year he ceased to be president of the CTA, he had sent a burofax to Barcelona threatening to reveal “the irregularities” if he was not reinstated. Asked about that, Laporta said that he was not president at the time and did not want to speak for “third parties”. Confronted with Negreira’s suggestion to investigators that in employing him Barcelona had sought “neutrality” among referees, he noted that the former official had admitted that was a “personal” hypothesis and that no one at the club had directly told him that was the aim.
Laporta said he had inherited the relationship with Negreira when he took over as president for his first stint in 2003 and had decided to continue on the grounds that the technical-scouting work was useful. He said he had increased the payments based on the fact that the number of competitions being scouted on their behalf had been increased.
Laporta described Barcelona as suffering a “public lynching”. He said it was not coincidence that this case had come up after they had refused to take part in the finance package put together by La Liga in collaboration with the investment fund CVC. And he sought to turn the spotlight on to Real Madrid, describing their formal request to take part in the trial as an injured party as an act of “unprecedented cynicism”, admitting that relationships between the two had been hurt.
“Everyone knows they have been favoured historically and are now,” he said. “They were considered the regime club because of their closeness to political, economic and sporting power. Over various decades the presidents of the CTA were ex-players, ex-directors or members at Real Madrid – sometimes all three. For that club to consider itself a victim during the best period in Barcelona’s history seems to me to be an act of unprecedented cynicism. I hope that in the trial, the mask can slip.”
