La Liga boss Tebas calls on Laporta to resign as Barcelona president over referee chief pay scandal

La Liga president Javier Tebas is publicly calling on Barcelona president Joan Laporta to resign in the wake of the payments scandal surrounding the former referees’ boss.

Barcelona are finally experiencing success from a sporting perspective after years of misery within the Spanish league. It already leads the La Liga table ahead of Real Madrid by a solid eight points.

However, the whole of Spanish football is being rocked by a scandal that is certainly putting wrinkles on the foreheads of the Catalan big club’s officials. The scandal concerns 33 payments made to a company owned by former vice-president of the referees’ commission José María Enríquez Negreiro.

Barcelona should have made payments to the aforementioned company, which should have totalled more than €1.5 million, between 2016 and 2018.

As such, La Liga cannot get involved in the club’s investigation into the matter due to football rules in Spain. Nevertheless, league boss Javier Tebas has spoken publicly on the matter and offered his opinion.

“If Laporta doesn’t adequately explain the reason for the payments, I think he should resign as president,” Tebas said , according to Catalan daily Sport. If the incident is not explained, he compared the scandal to the one that befell Italy’s Juventus.

“Juventus has been proven guilty, but with Barcelona I see the situation (if proven guilty) as even more serious,” he compared the case with that of the Italian club.

In Spain, the case is being taken very seriously and FC Sevilla, for example, has called on league bosses to help the prosecutor’s office investigate the case properly. But the dispute is expected to drag on for some time.

Source: Sport.es, La Liga