This weekend, as you may have heard, some shit-brained Valencia fan threw a bottle at some Barcelona players because he was mad they beat his team. As you also might’ve learned, this was apparently mostly the players’ fault, at least according to such important and powerful figures in Spanish soccer as La Liga’s president and the league’s competition committee. Like Messi before them, the Barcelona board is fed up. And they’re ready to fight.
In a statement released today on their website, Barcelona announced that they have officially petitioned the Court of Arbitration for Sport to open disciplinary proceedings against Javier Tebas, La Liga’s president, and the entire competition committee, while also basically denying the whole La Liga leadership’s legitimacy as a staff, record label, and a motherfucking crew.
Tebas, remember, made some mealy-mouthed statement about how, while the bottle-throwing aspect of events was the “most serious thing,” he nevertheless couldn’t avoid bringing up how much he didn’t like what Barcelona’s players did leading up to that, as if the fan’s ire had been legitimately provoked by the players’ celebration of their last-minute game-winner and the few harmless words Neymar shouted at the sea of fans who had been spewing vitriol of their own all game.
The members of the competition committee were the ones who investigated the incident and handed down a ruling via a written statement that was short on actual punishment (a microscopic fine for Valencia while letting the aforementioned shit-brained offender off scot-free) and long on chastisements for the “reproachable,” “unsportsmanlike,” “ridiculous” Barça players for their grievous mistake of getting too excited about winning a game. It makes sense, then, that the club would be upset by all of this.
Included in Barça’s declaration of war was this barb-heavy statement from club president Josep Bartomeu:
“The declarations made by [Javier] Tebas are irresponsible and unbecoming of a sports executive…[the Club shall present] said declarations to the TAD so it may consequently assess them and, if it finds any punishable action, take the appropriate measures…the Disciplinary Committee is not there to make assessments but rather to take disciplinary action, or not, in order to make an example of incidents that occur on the field of play, and making statements regarding the actions of the players adds even more tension to a situation that must be deescalated…[the Club] will bring these declarations before the TAD because we want it to see to it that if they produce violence they are punished accordingly.”
The statement also included this direct shot at Tebas: “At the same time, FC Barcelona publicly condemns Mr. Tebas as the President of the LFP and the Club hereby fully withdraws its confidence in him from this moment forth.”
Too bad the annual La Liga awards banquet already happened last weekend. I’d have loved to have seen Bartomeu, Messi, and Luis Suárez show up and accept their awards by recreating this: