Lowest common denominator
On Monday morning, we were supposed to be able to make some sort of sense from El Caso Negreira. Yet after just over two hours of explanations, answers and hypotheses, false or otherwise, the footballing world realised that they would have to wait a lot longer for the truth to out.
Laporta went on the offensive, as is his want. ”Barcelona have never been involved in any operation to buy referees or influence matches. The public prosecutor has never been able to prove otherwise.”
He hinted strongly that Barcelona ‘could be the victim’ of crimes that may or may not benefit individuals, but tested the line of speculation, which he asked so many others not to cross when it came to his and the club’s own affairs. Laporta barreled on, claiming that Barcelona were the victim of a public lynching, a campaign to destabilise the club. Refusing to speak in the name of others, he claimed there was no ethical conflict with dealing with José María Enríquez Negreira, and put Negreira’s statements down to personal assumption rather than anything the club had asked him to do, emphasizing the role of his son, Javier Enríquez Romero.
The incumbent President was right on one count - that Barcelona, despite how it looks, do have a right to innocence before they are proven guilty. Yet it felt as if he was clinging to that argument rather than giving reasonable explanations for the seemingly exorbitant cost of these reports, nor the fact that nobody saw an issue with the entire operation.
Where he was wrong, was in pointing his two barrels at La Liga and Real Madrid. Those were the two faces of the campaign against Barcelona, according to Laporta. La Liga President Javier Tebas needs no explanation - he and Laporta disagree on just about everything. UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin avoided the shots, as Barcelona recalled where some of their money comes from.
“That Real Madrid, the team of the regime, would present themselves in the case as an injured party is an act of maximum cynicism. We all know that historically Real Madrid have been favoured,” Laporta stated. Words that might echo for years to come rather than just backwards in time, as relations are set to sour after arguably the longest period of closeness between the two ever. Laporta’s statements were out of order and based on what he would call a false hypothesis, at least under the premise of innocence until shown otherwise.
https://twitter.com/realmadrid/status/1648062510199721990?s=20
Los Blancos had every right to be furious with those statements, and could have found an infinite number of responses to defend their name. Instead they attacked Barcelona’s name. That Real Madrid would release a four-minute video, questioning whether Barcelona were in fact ‘the team of the regime’ with a series of carefully selected facts, spat in the history of Spain. Not least on the grave of assassinated Barcelona President Josep Sunyol. He did not manage to flee Spain from Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, as the rest of the Barcelona team did before his murderous troops reached Barcelona. The millions of Catalans that had their mother tongue suppressed and their books burned would have plenty to say about the matter too.
Laporta gave Barcelona fans two familiar enemies against which they could cry conspiracy in La Liga and Real Madrid, appealing to the lowest common denominator of Barcelona fans that would have stood by his statement regardless of what he had said.
Real Madrid appealed to their own section of socios that will follow the Florentino Pérez line regardless, stoking their internal ill-feeling towards Barcelona. Somehow they managed to leave reasonable Madridistas red-faced at the end of a day that was about Barcelona’s integrity. Real Madrid loaded Laporta’s gun for him again. If there was an act of cynicism and a campaign from the Santiago Bernabéu to falsely discredit Barcelona, it made its first appearance on their Twitter account on Monday night.
Barcelona remain under suspicion after two hours of Laporta defending the club, but failing to even concede, even if it was innocent in objective, that Negreira was the wrong person to be paying. What could have been a productive day improving the image of Spanish football instead confirmed that its two most powerful institutions would go about further trying to stain it in order to appease what in American politics is referred to as the base. By all appearances, there will be no clarity on El Caso Negreira until the courts can find some.