With their season-capping win on Saturday, soccer club Esportiu Llançà won promotion from Catalonia’s third division (Spain’s seventh tier overall) to its second. To celebrate the team going up, one of the club’s board members arranged for a stripper to enter the locker room after the game and drop it low.
Here’s video of the strip tease, in which a woman seemingly dressed as Catwoman slinks into the room and proceeds to prance around while slowly disrobing, playing more to the camera than the sheepish players in the audience, most of whom seem more embarrassed than titillated:
The event seemed to have gone off quietly and without much consternation until local paper Diari de Girona acquired and published the video this week. That set off a good bit of local controversy.
After the video had gotten around, the club released a statement on Facebook apologizing if anyone was offended by the scenes. The statement explained that the club itself took no part in the planning of the strip tease, as it was “a gift” provided by one individual.
The individual behind it has since been identified as Francesc Romero, the club’s secretary. Romero told Diari de Girona that he was surprised by the “excessive noise” the incident has caused, but he takes sole responsibility because no one else at the club knew of his plan.
Romero was in charge of organizing the team’s victory festivities, including getting a bus to drive the team around town to celebrate with fans after the game, as well as picking the afterparty spot. He said he believed starting the celebration with a locker room strip tease would be an “original” way to kickstart things. Though family members, including some of the players’ mothers, were in the locker room during the strip tease, Romero said he made sure no minors were present.
Describing the performance itself, Romero said:
The atmosphere was very festive, nobody went too far. There was cava, laughter and joy, but [the stripper] made her spectacle calmly and when she finished, she dressed and left. Everything is normal.
Romero told Diari de Girona that his “single mistake” was not having first asked permission from the city council, as the stadium is a municipal facility. He has since apologized to the town mayor and to the captains of the team. Romero has been the club’s secretary for four years, but had already planned to step down from the post at the end of this season.