Javier Tebas said he could “eradicate” racism in LaLiga if “they gave him the power”.
Tebas had to come out to amend his first comments on the insults to Vinícius, where he urged the Brazilian to “inform himself” before criticizing LaLiga
Javier Tebas, president of Spain’s National Professional Football League, better known as LaLiga, assured that the institution could eliminate racism in Spanish soccer in just six months if it is given the powers “to do more things”.
After the event that occurred last Sunday where Vinícius Jr. was the target of racist insults by Valencia fans in the match against Real Madrid, Tebas had a controversial reaction by telling the player that “before insulting and insulting LaLiga, you need to inform yourself properly” through a tweet.
However, the LaLiga president apologized for his comments in a press conference held this Thursday where he assured LaLiga’s actions are conditioned by the laws, being able only to identify and report incidents. “What we want is the power to do more things. With the power we are convinced that this will be resolved in a few months,” Tebas said at the press conference.
“We are going down the legal route, and I believe that within six months this will be at zero and we will be the best league in the world. The competitions we want are for those intolerable behaviors: racism, homophobia (…) “We have been able to have economic control to prevent our clubs from going bankrupt, so if they give us the competitions we can put an end to this because it is easier to stop than financial,” Tebas added.
The head of Spain’s first division reported that “a communiqué was sent to the head of government and political parties” to request the modification of the law against racism, xenophobia and intolerance. When asked why he had not previously made this request, Tebas said that “that was also our mistake, but we thought we were moving forward in the courts when we filed the complaints directly. We have seen that it is not enough and we need greater agility and more speed to resolve these problems more quickly.”
LaLiga has enabled complaint channels via email and its website to speed up the identification of people who engage in racist behavior. However, since the creation of LaLiga’s integrity and security department in 2015, there have only been more than a dozen reported incidents linked to matches, less than two a year.
For its part, LaLiga also lists nine separate incidents related to Vinícius since December 2020, four of which have been resolved and only two have featured racism.