Real Madrid Demand a New LaLiga President: When Tebas Pushed the Fight Off the Pitch

On a replay shown three times on the big screen at the Metropolitano, the studs of Cristian Romero came down on Jude Bellingham's ankle. No red card. No whistle. Only the noise of a stadium where sixty thousand people understood the derby would end the way it ended. Real Madrid lost 2-1 to Atletico Madrid, and by Sunday evening, 21 September, the club's official website carried a match report with a headline unlike any match report: "Terrible refereeing decides the derby".

I watched that game at dawn in Busan time, in a cafe that still had its lights on. Four decades of watching football have taught me that a club rarely pushes raw emotion onto its official website. When it does, it has decided to turn a defeat into a campaign. Two days later, everything unfolded exactly that way.

From one tackle to a demand for new leadership

On 22 September, LaLiga president Javier Tebas spoke out on social media. He wrote that claims referees were instructed to act against Real Madrid were "living in another galaxy", and that pointing at a conspiracy is far more comfortable than explaining what is actually happening on the pitch. Tebas has long described himself as a Real Madrid fan. He has led LaLiga since 2026, was re-elected to a fourth term in December 2026 unopposed, and his current mandate runs until 2027.

Real Madrid's response came the same day, also through an official statement. The club called Tebas' remarks "intolerable", accused the LaLiga president of using his institutional position to keep discrediting and attacking Real Madrid, and went one step further: they argued Spanish professional football urgently needs a leader capable of running the competition and realising its full potential, with neutrality as a fundamental duty. Reuters has asked LaLiga for comment.

Before that, manager Jose Mourinho had aimed sharp criticism at referee Miguel Angel Ortiz Arias and at those who appointed him. He said his side could win the title "if they let us compete on a level playing field". Alongside the Romero incident, Real also complained about a challenge by Lee Kang-in on Federico Valverde. After seven rounds, Mourinho's team sit fourth, six points behind reigning champions Barcelona.

The foundations of this tension are not new. In 2026, Real Madrid filed to annul decisions made by LaLiga for infringing their participation rights, after the club was excluded from the Control Body for the management of the league's audiovisual rights. In June of the same year, Spain's Supreme Court ruled in Real's favour. Relations between the two sides were taken to judges three years ago, and the derby was merely the catalyst that pushed a dormant fight back to the surface.

The spearhead points the wrong way, and that may be deliberate

There is a technical detail few reports mention, and it matters more than anything said over those two days.

Referee appointments in Spain fall under the authority of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), through its Technical Committee of Referees, not LaLiga. Javier Tebas did not choose Miguel Angel Ortiz Arias. Nor did he assign him to this derby. Structurally, a claim of refereeing bias against Real Madrid in that specific match cannot be resolved by replacing the LaLiga president, because whoever takes that chair would not hold the power to appoint referees either.

So why did Real Madrid's statement aim straight at the LaLiga presidency?

Because an institutional spearhead sits on a different level from a technical one. It is political. Tebas is the only figure in this picture with a mandate to defend, votes to assemble, and a legal record that has already lost to Real Madrid at the Supreme Court. A statement demanding new leadership cannot change the derby result, but it puts a larger question on the scales: who speaks for Spanish football, and by what right.

From a data standpoint, the only number nobody can dispute is this: seven rounds played, Real Madrid fourth, six points behind Barcelona. Tebas chose exactly that weak spot. He did not deny the Romero tackle. He did not defend the referee. He simply shifted the axis of the debate from "did the referee get it wrong" to "why does Real Madrid need a conspiracy". That is a disciplined communications move, and I say this without much comfort: it worked.

That six-point gap deserves proper placement. Seven rounds is a stretch where any side still assembling itself is finding rhythm. Six points can be erased in a fortnight. But at Real Madrid, a fortnight is a season, and Mourinho knows that better than anyone, which is why he reached for "level playing field" rather than talking about his defence or his finishing. A manager who has won titles in three countries does not change the subject out of helplessness. He changes it because he knows which subject can change results.

Real Madrid hit back by calling the remarks intolerable. But when a club demands new leadership of a league whose electoral mechanism does not allow clubs to intervene, it is playing a different game. It is accumulating pressure. And in Spanish football, accumulated pressure may not topple a president, but it can always change a refereeing assignment, a fixture list, or a revenue split.

I write against the wind, but my heart never turns against football. What I see here is two sides each telling half a truth. Spanish refereeing has a consistency problem, as anyone who has watched LaLiga long enough knows. And Real Madrid have a problem on the pitch, one the table after seven rounds cannot hide.

Where I might be wrong

There is another reading, and I owe it to the argument before I get too confident.

First reading: the anger is real. Mourinho spoke of a "level playing field" in a press conference, and he had reason to be angry. Two incidents in one derby, one involving the youngest player in the line-up and one involving the captain, were not handled the way the footage suggests they should have been. When you sit fourth and six points back, every wrong call becomes a wound rather than a statistical error.

Second reading: perhaps I am assigning strategy to what is simply the instinct of a giant club treated unfairly. Real Madrid sued LaLiga and won at the Supreme Court. They know how to use the law. A website statement can be a plan, or it can be a reflex trained over years.

Third reading, the one that unsettles me most: Tebas may be right in his diagnosis while wrong in his position. A league president who calls himself a fan of a member club, then uses a personal account to mock that same club after a contentious defeat, pushes the idea of neutrality into a very grey zone. When Real Madrid wrote that the league needs a leader with "neutrality as a fundamental duty", that sentence was written for a file, not just for a derby.

Based on my experience following these matches, when a club and a league fight openly twice in three years, the battle left the referees long ago. It is about broadcast money, governance, and who gets to define fairness.

What to watch next

I cannot be certain what Real Madrid gained from the 22 September statement. Tebas' mandate runs to 2027, and in 2026 nobody stood against him. A club can produce a statement in ten minutes, but it cannot produce a candidate in ten months. If LaLiga holds an election and there is still only one name on the ballot, that statement has answered itself.

But the thing I want to watch is not the chair. It is the whistle. If another contentious decision falls on Real Madrid in the coming weeks, the story will write its own next chapter without anyone publishing a headline. And if it falls the other way, people will say the pressure produced the result. We can rarely verify the fairness of a referee. We can only verify the reactions of those sitting around him.

Some stars only burn brightest where they are loved, not where the lights are brightest. Spanish football is trying to find its own sense of belonging again, and it will not find it inside an argument between two oversized egos. I do not write to be agreed with. I write to wake a question that has fallen asleep: if a league cannot guarantee neutrality for its own biggest club, who exactly is it being neutral towards?