The EC takes on Barcelona (yet again), this time with Real Madrid. Is there no end to their criminal behaviour?

By Tony Attwood

Seven Spanish clubs including (of course) Real Madrid and FC Barcelona have been ordered to repay tens of millions of euros in illegal state subsidies.   While the amount having to be paid in fines will hardly be noticed by either club, and while the world’s media will continue its eternal love affair with the clubs, the fines are just one more sign that corruption runs deep in some parts of football.

With Barcelona having been banned from transfers for a year for child trafficking offences, and with court appearances by players seemingly a constant backdrop to the club’s activities, and with Real Madrid currently under investigation for similar offences regarding children, it takes a very large blindfold indeed these days, to pretend that everything is ok with Spanish football.

But the UK’s media, bending the knee as ever to the great god of live TV, somehow manage to pretend that everything is ok, and that we should all carry on watching the teams as if everything was straight and above board.

Maybe one day someone will ask why it is that Real Madrid, the world’s top-earning football club, should actually get involved in the sort of scams that it has been found guilty of.  Instead of pointing out that the fine €18.4m will mean nothing to them, perhaps it would be better to ponder what mind set allows them to get involved in a land exchange with their local authority that was so obviously bent that one most certainly didn’t need to be able to speak Spanish to see it must be wrong.

Margrethe Vestager delivering the verdict as EU competition commissioner, said that, “Using taxpayers’ money to finance professional football clubs can create unfair competition.  Professional football is a commercial activity with significant money involved and public money must comply with fair competition rules. The subsidies we investigated in these cases did not.”

In the way that it always seems to go in Spain, it is not the big boys that get the biggest fine.  Valencia have that honour, being handed down a €20.4m repayment bill to the Spanish government for having benefited from state loan on favourable terms.    They, and two other clubs, were given loans on preferential terms by the Valencia Institute of Finance.

Four teams (of course including Real Madrid and Barcelona this time with Athletic Bilbao and Atlético Osasuna in tow) will also have to pay fines for favourable tax treatment not available to other clubs.   Spain has since changed its tax law to stop it all happening again.  (You might remember the farcical piece the Independent newspaper ran in the UK in which the president of Barcelona claimed that they paid a higher percentage of tax than any other club in Europe.  Untold was, I think, the only publisher that called that piece out as the most insane piece of nonsense ever.  Now the EC has agreed – Barcelona has been operating on favourable tax terms for years).

These findings, along with a series of not guilty verdicts in the case of a group of Dutch clubs, bring the current round of investigations to a close – and this has happened without any mention of some seemingly strange issues concerning the transfer of Bale to Real Mad.