Barcelona say payment to former referees’ commission vice-president poses no conflict of interest

Barcelona said the pay­ment to the com­pa­ny asso­ci­at­ed with the for­mer vice-pres­i­dent of the ref­er­ee­ing com­mis­sion was for tech­ni­cal reports on match offi­cials and did not rep­re­sent a con­flict of interest.

Cade­na Ser has revealed doc­u­ments relat­ed to an ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion in Spain show­ing that Bar­ca paid around 1.4 mil­lion euros for the DASNIL 95 SL between 2016 and 2018.

The pay­ments were alleged to have been for “tech­ni­cal advice” and “to ensure that the arbi­tra­tion award was not against them and that [the arbi­tra­tion] remained impartial.”

The DASNIL 95 SL is part­ly owned by José María Enriquez Negreira, who has ref­er­eeed La Liga between 1977 and 1992 and sat on the Ref­er­ees Com­mis­sion until 2018.

Barça con­firmed they had worked with an out­side com­pa­ny to gath­er infor­ma­tion on ref­er­ees, but denied any wrong­do­ing was involved, say­ing it was nor­mal in football.

He added, “We will take legal action against any­one who tries to dam­age the club’s image with pos­si­ble allu­sions to the club’s good reputation.”

“Barcelona are aware of inves­ti­ga­tions into pay­ments from exter­nal com­pa­nies and would like to clar­i­fy: In the past, (the club) have asked the club’s tech­ni­cal sec­re­taries to send video reports of youth play­ers from oth­er clubs in Spain. It had con­tract­ed the ser­vices of an out­side con­sul­tan­cy firm to pro­vide it,” the state­ment said.

“Fur­ther­more, our rela­tion­ship with this provider extend­ed to tech­ni­cal reports relat­ing to pro­fes­sion­al ref­er­ees to com­ple­ment the infor­ma­tion request­ed by first and sec­ond team tech­ni­cal staff. This is the stan­dard for pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball clubs. It has become a com­mon practice.

“Such out­sourced ser­vices are now the respon­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­als work­ing in the foot­ball depart­ment. Accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained by Cade­na Sale, Barça have out­sourced this kind of infor­ma­tion since 2003. It seems

“We, of course, have always ana­lyzed ref­er­ees,” said Xavi Hernán­dez, who left the club in 2015 as a play­er and returned to the club as man­ag­er in 2021.

“We’ve been doing it for many years, so noth­ing new. [Regard­ing the press] I try to focus on foot­ball, but this club has things like this.”

“The club has issued a state­ment and I am on the same line as the club. I was not at the club at the time, but I am clear­ly defend­ing the inter­ests of the club.”

The Span­ish ref­er­ees’ com­mis­sion lat­er issued a state­ment on Negreira, promis­ing to coop­er­ate with the inves­ti­ga­tion and claim­ing that he had not been sanc­tioned on their behalf.

“The CTA would like to clar­i­fy that Mr. Enriquez Negreira does not belong to any fed­er­a­tion struc­ture since the gov­er­nance changes imple­ment­ed after the 2018 elec­tion,” the state­ment read.

“The ref­er­ee­ing com­mit­tee deplores any action that com­pro­mis­es pro­fes­sion­al ethics. No active ref­er­ee or mem­ber of the CTA’s body may per­form work that presents a poten­tial con­flict of interest.