The Catalan Government has entered this Tuesday in the public controversy between Real Madrid and Barcelona Football Club, as a result of the crossed accusations about alleged relations of both teams with the Franco regime. This Monday, the Barcelona president, Joan Laporta, appeared for the first time after two months since the outbreak of the Negreira case, and at a press conference he charged against the white club, which he accused of being “the team of the regime.” The culé leader thus responded to Madrid’s decision to appear in the case against Barça for the payment of 7.3 million euros to companies related to the then vice president of the Technical Arbitration Committee, José María Enríquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018. To Laporta’s accusation of links between the Franco regime and Madrid, the whites responded with a video on social networks where they exposed a list of favors that, theoretically, Barcelona received from the Franco regime. The spokesperson for the Executive, Patrícia Plaja, has assured that a red line has been crossed and has asked that the content of the video be withdrawn, which she has described as “fake news. Plaja has asked Real Madrid to apologize and recalled that Josep Suñol, president of Barça and ERC deputy, was shot in the Sierra de Guadarrama in 1936.
“For an institution like Real Madrid to create a fake news It is indecent and irresponsible”, the spokeswoman assured. The Catalan Executive, she has added, does not intend to take legal action at the moment, but does a “public denunciation” of a content that is a “lack of respect for the thousands of people who suffered the regime [franquista]”. “It would be nice if the video was removed and they apologized,” she asked. Subsequently, the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has recommended on Twitter the reading of various articles from the history magazine sapiens in which Barcelona’s relationship with the regime is addressed.
For the spokeswoman, the team chaired by Florentino Pérez has made a big mistake in “institutional communication” and has twisted the story with a “crude” manipulation. He has taken the opportunity to recall, for example, that the president of Barcelona at the beginning of the Civil War, Josep Suñol, was shot by the rebels near Madrid, without a trial, when he was visiting troops from the Republican front. “We must think that the young and not so young people who will play this video will think that what is said there is serious,” he insisted.
The Real Madrid video had been the team’s response to some statements at the first press conference offered by the Barça board on the case of alleged influence on arbitration decisions derived from the actions of former referee José María Enríquez Negreira. Laporta attacked Real Madrid for appearing as a private prosecution in the case and assured that he saw an attack against one of the bastions of Catalan identity. “A club that has been considered the team of the regime”, pointed out the culé. The audiovisual piece broadcast by Madrid precisely begins using that accusation as a throwing weapon: “Which was the regime’s team?”, it can be read, to later accuse Barcelona of receiving favors from the Francoists.
Among the data presented in the video and that the Government has described as false news is that the team “was saved three times from bankruptcy with three reclassifications by Franco” or linked the team’s record to the dictatorship: “Barcelona won eight Leagues and nine Generalissimo Cups with Franco”. The Camp Nou, indeed, was inaugurated by José Solís Ruiz, Franco’s general minister, as the NoDO of the time attests.
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