While football managers moaning about referees to deflect from their own teams’ shortcomings is nothing new, few do performative, wounded, righteous indignation with quite the same brooding intensity and petulance as José Mourinho. It’s been more than two decades since his moaning preceded a pile-on from angry fans whose threats forced the Swedish referee Anders Frisk into early retirement and in the interim, a steady stream of red cards, touchline bans and mournful post-match monologues have rendered his rap-sheet for badgering officialdom longer than a roll of Andrex toilet paper. On Sunday, Mourinho was at it again, following his 10-man Real Madrid side’s 2-1 defeat at the hands of their bitter city rivals Atlético.
He arrived at his post-match presser armed with a sheet of A4 featuring screen-grabs of two tackles made by Atlético players that he felt should have resulted in red cards. Luckily for daily football emails tasked with providing mildly amusing #content in the bleak and desolate early days of international breaks when nothing much is happening, the story didn’t end there. On Tuesday, the serially outspoken La Liga president Javier Tebas weighed in on Social Media Disgraces in response to an article in a Spanish publication called El Debate.
In it, Tomás González-Martín suggested that, by failing to pander to the likes of Madrid, referees were damaging the league on whom they rely for a living, a league González-Martin claims has no value without Madrid. What exactly is it asking for? Refereeing based on revenue, viewership or the badge?
What a way to understand equality in the competition.” While Tebas was right to defend his officials against accusations of institutional bias when it comes to Real Madrid and to angrily rail against the notion that commercial considerations should be factored into their decision-making process, he almost certainly aimed his guns at the wrong target. By targeting an opinion piece written by a random hack rather than the comments made by Mourinho, he left himself open to accusations of partiality towards Madrid. Not that the club see it that way.
Join Daniel Harris from 8pm BST for full coverage of Chelsea 2-0 Austria Vienna in Women’s Bigger Cup. I don’t want to have to work any more after my career. I didn’t need to after City either, but now I can also set up future generations of my family well.
If this choice means my grandchildren can also live comfortably, why wouldn’t I do it?” – Tijjani Reijnders makes the rare admission that he’s a footballer moving somewhere for the money, having joined Al Qadisah in Saudi Arabia from Manchester City on a deal worth a reported €100m over four years. Get your sporting fill of all things Big Website when you’re on BlueSpace, TikBook, Instachat and Youcord. OK, I’m putting my head above the parapet here, but I disagree with the prevailing view that Thomas Tuchel’s tactics and substitutions led to England’s defeat to Argentina in the Geopolitics World Cup (yesterday’s Football Daily).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
