Barçagate: Barcelona Football Corruption 

Despite the prominence of its two biggest clubs, Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona, Spanish football has been losing its standing. The decline is attributable to external factors, including the dominance of, and UEFA support for, the Premier League.

But a more abiding cause may be sought in the relatively widespread perception within Spain that the game is rigged; a perception for which there is now clear evidence. 

Spanish football is reeling under the impact of scandal, as revelations surfaced following the national tax agency’s discovery of irregularities in the finances of a company by the name of DASNIL 95 S.L., belonging to a certain prominent ex-referee and one-time vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), Jose Maria Enríquez Negreira.

Specifically, alarms were set off by the company’s reception of €1.4 million over 2016, 2017, and 2018, years during which the avowedly pro-F.C.B. Enríquez Negreira was V.P. of the CTA. These invoices attracted the tax agency’s attention in part because they consist of irregular amounts, ranging from €30,250 to €90,750. The payments originated from F.C. Barcelona, with the final installment being made in 2018, precisely upon Negreira’s exit from the CTA. 

Open tax investigation proceedings will now oblige the football team’s former president, José María Bartomeu, its executive director, Óscar Grau, together with Enríquez Negreira himself and his son, Javier Enríquez Romero, to testify.

Attempting to wash his hands of the matter, Bartomeu has stated that he “inherited” the affair, as “Barça had been paying for this service since 2003.” The invoices that F.C. Barcelona provided to the tax agency, however, begin in 2001 (not in 2003), always referring to the same two generic services supposedly rendered by DASNIL 95: “elaboration and delivey of technical videos to the football club” and “technical video consulting” (which Negreira, for his part, denies, insisting these were only “verbal reports,” with no documentary support having surfaced). If we add the money paid out since 2001 (not just 2016-2018), then, in total, Mr. Enríquez Negreira billed F.C. Barcelona for about €7 million.

For his part, Enríquez Negreira told the tax agency that “Barcelona wanted to make sure no arbitration decisions were made against them. That is, that everything was neutral.” The tortured logic according to which paying off referees to abstain from decisions that might hurt the Barcelona squad was somehow a means to ensuring “neutrality” would appear to highlight the indefensibility of Enríquez Negreira’s position, together with that of the club.

Rather than indicating neutrality, the record concerning F.C. Barcelona’s football matches in the Spanish League over the principal period in question confirms the efficacy of its arrangement. During the three years of 2016-2018, the balance of penalties for and against the club was starkly in its favour (33 penalties benefiting F.C.B. compared to only 3 against). This included a 715-day stretch during which the team did not face a single hostile penalty, but had 21 penalties granted in its favour over this time. 

Expulsions display a similar pattern, with 23 against rival teams compared to only 4 against F.C.B. If we contrast this to the seasons that followed the end of their arrangement with Enríquez Negreira, the club received 33 penalties in favour, over two seasons, and 19 against. And in terms of send-offs, the F.C.B. went from receiving 4 red cards in three years to 20 red cards in five. 

In addition to all this, it seems that the prosecutor’s office is investigating 19 payments from the F.C.B. to a company owned by the former (now deceased) director of the team, Josep Contreras, opening a further chapter of corruption, amounting to a few million unaccounted-for euros. In this context, Bartomeu further insisted “I ended the relationship with Negreira when I became president,” adding that when Laporta previously headed the club, he had “multiplied [Negreira]’s salary by four.”

For now, F.C. Barcelona and its favourable media seem to be adopting a self-commiserative tone, imitating the Catalan separatist narrative strategy of playing the victim (this latter political cause having, for several decades, co-opted the football club).

Catalonia has long presented a pattern of far-reaching corruption, most prominently in the case of the region’s one-time and longest-serving president, Jordi Pujol, illegally charging 3% on all public works to enrich his party (Convergencia i Unio, whose present incarnation is Junts per Catalunya, of which the leader of the botched 2017 bid for independence, Carles Puidgemont, was head). 

This region has enjoyed relative impunity from Spanish law as applied in other parts of the country, given its special administrative statute, connections to foreign entities (prominently those patronised by George Soros), and accommodation by politicians in Madrid. The F.C.B.’s behaviour may, therefore, be part of this larger pattern of rampant corruption in Catalonia. 

However, the Catalan exception should not serve to obfuscate the possibility that football as such, with its high-stakes and multi-million euro branding, is rife with bribery and corruption, extending to other prominent teams.